2022
Christmas Edition 2022
25/12/22 07:07
Here we go again, folks. Round and round, we go, and where we stop, nobody knows. Is this the best thing since sliced bread, or what? One thing is for sure. The year 2022 is soon to be in the history books. Since the leftists will be writing the history books, expect nothing short of rainbows and unicorns. Joe Biden will go down in the history books as one of the most successful presidents in the history of America. It's all hogwash, of course, but those of us who know better will be consigned to the trash heap of history. We'll be buried in the avalanche of illegal aliens who are waiting in the tens of thousands just across our southern border waiting for the official lifting of Title 42 by the Biden Administration this coming Tuesday.
By some estimates, we can expect to see some eight thousand illegal aliens crossing into our country each and every day once Title 42 is lifted. As Joe Biden so eloquently puts it, "their voices should be heard." Who else agrees with that sentiment besides no one? Well, the Democrat party may be an exception, since padding the voter rolls by the millions in states like Texas will most certainly turn that state's electorate from red to blue. If they can turn Texas blue, Republicans will never again have the electoral votes they need to win the presidency. You can count the number of republicans pushing back against Biden's "immigration" policies on one hand, so that doesn't bode well for the future of our republic.
I heard one guy talking about illegal aliens going into our inner cities and pulling white people out of their homes in order to house their own families. Now, it's all starting to make sense. This is why George Soros has spent so much money on getting leftist district attorneys elected into positions of power in our largest cities coast to coast. The lot of them have one thing in common: they are decriminalizing everything under the sun. That essentially paves the way for a lawless society where mob rule is the standard by which its citizens operate. When you put that kind of power in the hands of people who don't speak our language, don't share our cultural values, likely have criminal histories, and have neither the means nor the opportunity to feed themselves or their families without resorting to violence, it just never ends well for the citizenry.
I'm reading this morning about the newly elected mayor of Los Angeles, a leftist in her own right, taking the homeless off the streets and putting them up in hotels and motels. Taking people off the streets is a good thing, but I don't think commandeering the city's hotels and motels to house them is a good idea. When a government steps in and essentially nationalizes private businesses to support its leftist goals, is anyone safe anymore from the reaches of government? The decriminalization of laws on the books has created a tsunami of theft-related crimes in blue cities such that businesses can no longer afford to keep their stores open. Those stores that remain behind now have the very basics like toothpaste and deodorant placed behind locked mesh doors and out of the reach of those who would pilfer the items given half a chance.
Keep in mind that the very same politicians who want to flood your cities and towns with illegal aliens also want to take away your right to own firearms. They don't want you to be able to defend yourself when the illegal aliens come knocking in the middle of the night. Are we about to suffer the same fate as South Africa, where the people of color, marginalized as they were by so-called racist policies of white politicians, rose up against the elite and confiscated everything of value that they could lay their hands on including their homes, their farms, and their means of production? I don't know enough about other shitholes across our planet and how they might compare to the nightmare that Joe Biden and his minions are implementing, but they are likely just as bad, if not worse. Tell me again, who these eighty million people are who voted for this fool, Biden?
I turned on this show last night entitled, "Died Suddenly." I figured it was a show detailing the multitudes of people who have died after getting their Covid jabs. Who doesn't want to know more about the stories that we're reading every day about young people keeling over in the middle of some innocuous activity? This all started after the Covid vaccinations began back in 2021. Pfizer and other vaccine producers admitted nothing, yet the relationship between the vaccine and the sudden deaths seemed painfully obvious to anyone paying attention. The show told the story from the point of view of the professionals doing the autopsies. More specifically, the people conducting the embalming procedure. They were pulling blood clots out of the bodies of these dead people that resembled a scaled-down version of a branch of ginger root. I was watching with the missus, and she was transfixed. She only agreed to change the channel when I assured her that we'd watch the rest of the show the following night.
I told the missus while we were watching that she would thank me someday for not pushing the Ev man to get this vaccine. I wish that we hadn't gotten the vaccine, but I couldn't get the missus to leave the house back in the day, so I held her hand, and off we went to the local injection site together, where we waited in the queue until it was our turn. Remember how they had you drive off to the side, where they asked that you wait five minutes before driving off the lot? There was also some stuff in the show about population control and how they needed to cull the population due to a scarcity of resources worldwide. Wait one darn minute. I thought Covid came out of a lab in Wuhan where they were experimenting with bio-weapons. Was this show we were watching an effort by someone to redirect our attention away from the Chinese Communist Party's nefarious undertakings? One thing is for certain. After watching this show, I think I speak for both the missus and myself when I say that we're not getting any more injections. No siree fucking Bob. You can take that to the bank.
I'll be darned. Mrs. G called with the good news. Mr. Willy is welcome to visit Mrs. G and her extended family at her facility for the Christmas holiday despite the fact that he is not vaccinated. This was precisely the case that we were making with Mrs. G just last week. That is to say, he is probably better protected than the rest of us since he had Covid recently and now presumably has a robust lot of antibodies with which to fight further infections. And, of course, he can't transmit the virus if he's not prone to getting infected. I'm not sure if Mrs. G made that precise case since I wasn't there to hear the arguments but whatever she said worked, so that's great. Mr. Willy is part of the extended family, so he should be there to celebrate, and he shouldn't be consigned to the sidelines based on his vaccination status. They agreed to Mrs. G's request on one condition. That is that Mr. Willy should not go outside Mrs. G's unit at any time during his visitation. Fine.
I stopped by a bagel joint the other day in a nearby town when I was in Exeter to visit the Ev man. I ordered six bagels and two donuts. The bill came to $30.40. I couldn't believe my ears. I looked at the sale on the register and noticed that they charged me $3.50 per bagel. I've never paid $3.50 for a bagel in my life. What kind of bagel fetches such an exorbitant price? Were they lathered up with cream cheese? No. Were they toasted and filled with melted cheese and eggs? Certainly not. Were they any different from the bagels that I might buy by the dozen at a local supermarket for half the price? Not on your life. I looked at the register in shock and then told the clerk that I couldn't bring myself to pay $3.50 a bagel. I may have said something about never paying that much for a bagel in my entire life, but I can't be sure as I sit here thinking about what I may have said or not said a day or two ago. Maybe this is that inflation thing everyone has been talking about. I honestly don't know how these guys stay in business. Maybe they don't.
That grifter in a tracksuit, Zelensky, is coming to Washington tomorrow. He and Bumbles will be sitting down to croissants and coffee before Zelensky goes on to give a speech to Congress about needing more money to fight the Russians. Congress has already given Ukraine north of $100 billion, and there's another $44 billion in the budget for 2023. He's getting hard-earned tax dollars from hard-working Americans who can barely afford to feed their families while Mrs. Zelensky goes shopping on the fashionable and hoity-toity Fifth Avenue in New York City for the latest designer dresses. Can you imagine a more bizarre juxtaposition? She's shopping and spending money like she's a member of the Biden Crime Family, while Ukraine's citizens go without electricity, heat, and food amidst the erratic and destructive bombing campaigns launched by the Russians. To have that whore of a dictator in our nation's capital, and he is a dictator if you know anything about how he rules Ukraine, is a national disgrace. Yet, he will be endlessly lauded and given a hero's welcome by our spineless politicians in the cesspool that is Washington. Our damn Founders must be turning over in their graves.
How is what we're doing in Ukraine not fighting a proxy war against Russia? What has Russia ever done that warrants dragging our country into the morass that is the Ukraine war? Ukraine isn't a member of NATO, so we ought not to be paying for their defense or anything of the kind. As it is, we're paying to fund their governmental expenses as well, and that's a fucking joke. What was really sad was watching this clown Zelensky in Washington last night telling members of both of our political parties, and to a person, they were wearing Ukraine flags on their lapels, that we weren't giving Ukraine enough money. I couldn't bear to watch the clown and his clapping seals in the stands as he berated them for their selfishness, and they just laughed like the fools that they were. Honestly, it was the sickest thing I've seen in a long time. The whole of Europe must be singing Joe Biden's praises since he's funding their war against Russia while they have very little if any, skin left in the game. It's regime change or bust for the Bidenistas in Russia if Zelensky and his Oligarchs have their way.
I think I mentioned recently that my neighbor broke her hip. This is the same neighbor whose driveway I clear every winter whenever a storm passes through. She's no spring chicken, so I do what I can. She also lives alone, so she has no one to lend a hand here and there in a pinch. She'll be coming home from rehab later this week, so that's good. She'll be happy to get back home and on familiar turf. She seems to have something of a support system based on the number of cars I see coming and going, but at the end of the day, she's on her own after friends and caregivers depart. She and I have been exchanging phone calls and e-mails about various things, and she informed me yesterday that she has an old friend coming to stay with her for a month or so while she gets back on her feet. The friend I'm referring to is no spring chicken either, but he'll do. We're here for them should any additional muscle be needed, so she can take that for what it's worth. And then, of course, there's the issue with her Jack Russell terrier. That's a story for another day.
I'm catching this Kari Lake trial in Arizona now and then, and I like the fact that her case against her opponent (Katie Hobbs) in the gubernatorial race in that state is still alive and well in the courts. Anyone with half a brain knows that Hobbs and her leftist buddies manning the voting stations in Maricopa County rigged the election. More to the point, they stole the election for Ms. Hobbs. The evidence seems overwhelming, and it involves machine tampering and something of a premeditated plan to discourage voters from casting their votes. Since it is a county-wide issue, the judge could decide to have another election if he decides that the evidence is both overwhelming and proof-positive that there were plans afoot by Ms. Lake's opponent to thwart the will of the people in Maricopa County. Did I mention that Katie Hobbs was in charge of the election she is now being charged with stealing? Maybe Ms. Lake's attorneys will succeed where Trump's attorney could not when it came to proving that the election was not on the up and up. Someone has to send a message to these election thieves that there will be a price to pay if and when they do these kinds of things. Our Democracy demands it.
I'm hearing that the January 6th Committee is releasing its report today. What a bunch of bloody fools. They already made their referrals to the Justice Department, which included four criminal referrals for Donald J Trump. They are so desperate to put Trump behind bars that they can't help but create things out of whole cloth when they don't otherwise have the goods on the man they'd love to see indicted. Trump will be indicted, but it will be for his failure to turn over documents that he took with him when he left the White House. Or, maybe more to the point, documents that his staff packed up as they departed the White House before Bumbles and his extended family of grifters moved in. That's all they've got. That's all they've ever had. But to listen to these fools on the left, you'd think they had enough to put Trump in jail for 20 years or more. The salivating is non-stop. It's wishful thinking, but it's always been wishful thinking. God forbid they allow a populist like Trump to take back the White House in 2024. Their wet dreams of a democrat presidency in perpetuity would go down in flames.
What's the deal with this Sam Bankman-Fried character? He was extradited to the United States recently after spending about two days in jail in the Bahamas. My guess is that he didn't care for his accommodations. This was after bribing the Bahamian officials to keep him out of the general population, or so I understand. Now that he's back in the states, a judge agreed to accept a bond secured by his parent's home in exchange for allowing him to remain free until trial. What you're not hearing is that his parent's home was purchased with funds stolen by Sam and his band of crypto thieves. How does that even come close to qualifying as an asset that he can use as collateral to stay out of jail? And don't believe this bullshit about his being confined to his parent's home. He'll be doing the talk show circuit soon enough to raise money to pay his lawyer. Why he needs a lawyer when you know he won't spend a day in jail when all is said and done is a question you'll not hear anyone asking, so I'm asking it.
Something else I'm not understanding is what the hell is going on with Tesla stock. It's not something I own, so my interest is casual at best, but when a stock goes from $437 dollars per share to $123 per share in the space of months, it makes you wonder. Does it have anything to do with the fact that Elon Musk bought Twitter? Elon was a darling of the left when he was fighting climate change. He could do no wrong when he was putting satellites in the lower atmosphere at his own expense so Ukrainians could better wage a defense against their Russian invaders. If you were a hard-core leftist driving a Prius around town with a "Bernie" sticker on your bumper, that no longer cut the mustard after Elon delivered his line of Teslas to showrooms around the country. Tesla stock went to the moon, and understandably so. Is Tesla stock now suffering the same fate as every other stock thanks to this inflationary bear market in which we find ourselves? Or, have the leftists decided to stop buying Teslas in an effort to impose their own version of cancel culture on the man who would be king? You know, the man who recently announced that his preferred pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci. Yeah, that guy. You decide.
The Republicans will be deciding who will be their Speaker of the House for the upcoming term on January 3rd, 2023. The current Minority Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, leads the pack, but I'm hearing that he doesn't have the required 218 votes to get over the finish line. I've never much cared for the guy myself. He's a bit too slick and a bit too milquetoast-ish for my tastes. My desire to see him get the boot hardened considerably the other day when I saw a photo of him at the gala in our nation's capital when Zelensky came to town. He was wearing Ukraine's colors on his lapel. I'm thinking to myself, here's this asshole bending over like the rest of the clapping seals in Washington proper for the grifter from Ukraine when he should be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with those of us who want to see our country disengage from the border dispute between Russia and Ukraine. I could never trust a guy like McCarthy to do the right thing by we conservatives. He's a rat politician like the rest of the rats in Washington so let's show him the door on the third of January. Just say fucking NO!
It's Christmas Eve here in the Northeast. The storm battering the west with extreme cold, wind, rain, and snow earlier in the week rolled through here yesterday, leaving nothing more than a bit of a dusting of snow and temperatures this morning in the teens. To think that it was fifty-four degrees, give or take, just yesterday afternoon. The missus and I drove down to Massachusetts yesterday to pick up the Ev man's car. We were turned around any number of times due to closed roads and impassable routes due to surging tidal waters. Cars on the highway and people, in general, seemed anxious and rushed based on the number of cars on the road and the speeds at which they were traveling. Everyone seemed desperate to get to wherever it was that they were going before the cold air moved in, turning the landscape into a skating rink. We know the drill. We've all been here before. We decided that taking Ev's car back to our place, and not his, would keep him off the roads just long enough for all of this weather-related stuff to pass. He was on board with that decision being the sensible lad that he is.
We finally got an inspection sticker on his car. It's been a three-month journey and a hellish one at that. If one more person had asked that I drive the car around another day or two until it was "ready" I think I would have lost my mind. This is what you're dealing with when you have catalytic converter problems. I probably would have saved myself considerable time and expense had I had the converters replaced straight away when the dealership correctly assessed the problem. All of this nonsense had me trying to figure out if the expense of replacing the converters was justified knowing that I might be able to pick up another car, used or new, using dollars that I was now having to expend on replacing the converters. The missus and I jointly decided that just replacing the converters was the best course of action, knowing that he would more than likely have this particular car for some years to come, given the relatively low mileage on the vehicle. I'm just happy not to have to deal with it anymore. That's got to be worth something.
On my way back from Massachusetts yesterday, I stopped by Common Roots on Ocean Boulevard to pick up the vegetable lasagna that we ordered for our Christmas dinner. I bought a nice loaf of Italian bread earlier in the week, and I'll likely make some nice garlic bread with it to have with our lasagna. I wasn't sure that Common Roots was even going to be open with roads in and around the store rendered impassable by the storm, but they were indeed open, so that was great. I didn't relish having to wait another day to pick up our meal and fighting the crowds who had their deliveries delayed by a day as well. I even ordered a nice latte while I was in the store picking up my order, and it was surprisingly good. I don't trust many people to make my lattes the way I like them, but I may have to now add Common Roots to my list of approved latte vendors. I also picked out a couple of muffins, a poppy seed muffin and a blueberry muffin, and a ripened banana while there. Who doesn't like having a banana with their latte?
My brother from another mother shipped me a dozen bagels from a renowned bagel shop in New York City. I think I mentioned that I walked into a local bagel store hereabouts the other day, and they wanted to charge me $3.50 for a half dozen bagels. I thought that was preposterous and shared that very same sentiment with my peeps from the Falls. My brother from another mother said something about buying me bagels for Christmas, making light of my comments as I thought he was. Let me just say that I wasn't expecting a delivery of bagels from NYC, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw the delivery. I might have preferred getting a nice cross-selection of various bagels, but they were all the same. All multi-colored and resembling a candy cane or maybe a wreath with a Christmas-colored theme. The missus's immediate reaction had something to do with not wanting to eat them due to what she perceived to be an infusion of food coloring, which gave the bagels their holiday-ish tint. Nonsense, I told her. I toasted one up and lathered it with butter and jam. Is there any other way to have your bagels? Maybe with cream cheese? Thanks, bro!
It's cold as a witch's tit out there this morning. This might be the coldest day of the year thus far, with temperatures in the teens. I added a couple of cakes of suet to my suet feeder for my woodpeckers and topped off my thistle feeder for good measure. I cracked the layer of ice that had formed on my bird bath overnight, and the birds are now busily availing themselves of everything that I put out. I have a good mind to go over and sweep my neighbor's deck of the light snow that fell overnight. She's coming home later today after being in rehab for a week to mend after breaking her hip a couple of weeks back. I can't in good conscience have her slipping and sliding her way to her front door. She might never forgive me were something bad to happen. Is it my responsibility to ensure that she makes her way without fear of harm or foul? Surely, it is not. Would I be held accountable should something bad happen to her? Who knows.
Holy cow! Today is Christmas! All I want to do is to go back to bed. I started my day by finding a hair in my blueberry muffin. I don't usually eat anything in the early morning, but I thought I might have a bit of a muffin this morning just because I can. I didn't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so I threw caution to the wind and polished off my muffin. It was a reasonably good muffin. I might have liked to have had more blueberries in the darn thing, but, that aside, it wasn't half bad. I think it was made with whole wheat or maybe bran since the muffin itself was dark-ish in color. I've had blueberry muffins from this place before, and I don't remember them tasting like this one. That's why I bought another one, truth be told. I was expecting more of the same. Have I somehow changed the trajectory of my day by doing something out of the ordinary, like consuming a muffin? I might be going back to bed soon, so that should tell you something. It's barely past the hour of seven in the morning, so if I'm going to do it, I should do it soon. At least I won't be going to bed hungry. Not on Christmas morning, for chrissakes.
I'm reading this morning that that we lost a couple more people overnight to what appear to be vaccine-related sudden deaths. One was a middle-aged ex-MMA star and the other was a 45-year old guy who worked in the media. When is the world going to wake up and start calling these deaths what they really are - Death by vaccine. There is literally no other reason that young people should be toppling over and falling dead in the prime of their life. I can only pray that I'm far enough out from getting the vaccine that I don't have to worry about dying a sudden death. I'm thinking, perhaps wrongly, that thesse deaths are happening after the recipient gets his or her seccond or third, or more, booster shots. Am I wrong about that? Where are the studies? Why are governments across the planet still insisting that their citizens get these lethal injections? Did you know that the illegal aliens crossing our borders unmolested are not required to get vaccinated? Let me see if I have this right. Our brothers and sisters, all Americans by birth, are dying after getting their shots but the illegal aliens being invited into our country by the Democrat party and their demented leader, Joe Biden, are not required to get the same deadly injections. Say what?
Just a quick update on the Kari Lake trial in Arizona, the judge in the case ruled against her. She plans to appeal, of course, but you have to wonder. How much Cartel cash did he take before rendering his decision? How many calls did he get from the White House or our Intelligence Agencies warning him that were he to find for Ms. Lake that he might live to regret his decision? I get it that judges are not wanting to interfere with the will of the people when it comes to overturning elections but it seemed to me that Kari Lake and her people had the receipts. Maybe that doesn't matter anymore. Maybe they didn't have what they thought was the proverbial smoking gun when push came to shove. Maybe the attorney's Ms. Lake hired didn't make enough of a compelling case to the judge. They'll get a chance to do it all over again when they plead their case to the Appeals Court. How successful they'll be is anyone's guess. Speaking of sudden deaths, maybe we don't need a crystal ball to see where this case is going. Unfortuanely, it's just going to embolden the election thieves that much more the next time around. The good guys, and gals, really need to figure this one out. Longer term, losing is not an option.
By some estimates, we can expect to see some eight thousand illegal aliens crossing into our country each and every day once Title 42 is lifted. As Joe Biden so eloquently puts it, "their voices should be heard." Who else agrees with that sentiment besides no one? Well, the Democrat party may be an exception, since padding the voter rolls by the millions in states like Texas will most certainly turn that state's electorate from red to blue. If they can turn Texas blue, Republicans will never again have the electoral votes they need to win the presidency. You can count the number of republicans pushing back against Biden's "immigration" policies on one hand, so that doesn't bode well for the future of our republic.
I heard one guy talking about illegal aliens going into our inner cities and pulling white people out of their homes in order to house their own families. Now, it's all starting to make sense. This is why George Soros has spent so much money on getting leftist district attorneys elected into positions of power in our largest cities coast to coast. The lot of them have one thing in common: they are decriminalizing everything under the sun. That essentially paves the way for a lawless society where mob rule is the standard by which its citizens operate. When you put that kind of power in the hands of people who don't speak our language, don't share our cultural values, likely have criminal histories, and have neither the means nor the opportunity to feed themselves or their families without resorting to violence, it just never ends well for the citizenry.
I'm reading this morning about the newly elected mayor of Los Angeles, a leftist in her own right, taking the homeless off the streets and putting them up in hotels and motels. Taking people off the streets is a good thing, but I don't think commandeering the city's hotels and motels to house them is a good idea. When a government steps in and essentially nationalizes private businesses to support its leftist goals, is anyone safe anymore from the reaches of government? The decriminalization of laws on the books has created a tsunami of theft-related crimes in blue cities such that businesses can no longer afford to keep their stores open. Those stores that remain behind now have the very basics like toothpaste and deodorant placed behind locked mesh doors and out of the reach of those who would pilfer the items given half a chance.
Keep in mind that the very same politicians who want to flood your cities and towns with illegal aliens also want to take away your right to own firearms. They don't want you to be able to defend yourself when the illegal aliens come knocking in the middle of the night. Are we about to suffer the same fate as South Africa, where the people of color, marginalized as they were by so-called racist policies of white politicians, rose up against the elite and confiscated everything of value that they could lay their hands on including their homes, their farms, and their means of production? I don't know enough about other shitholes across our planet and how they might compare to the nightmare that Joe Biden and his minions are implementing, but they are likely just as bad, if not worse. Tell me again, who these eighty million people are who voted for this fool, Biden?
I turned on this show last night entitled, "Died Suddenly." I figured it was a show detailing the multitudes of people who have died after getting their Covid jabs. Who doesn't want to know more about the stories that we're reading every day about young people keeling over in the middle of some innocuous activity? This all started after the Covid vaccinations began back in 2021. Pfizer and other vaccine producers admitted nothing, yet the relationship between the vaccine and the sudden deaths seemed painfully obvious to anyone paying attention. The show told the story from the point of view of the professionals doing the autopsies. More specifically, the people conducting the embalming procedure. They were pulling blood clots out of the bodies of these dead people that resembled a scaled-down version of a branch of ginger root. I was watching with the missus, and she was transfixed. She only agreed to change the channel when I assured her that we'd watch the rest of the show the following night.
I told the missus while we were watching that she would thank me someday for not pushing the Ev man to get this vaccine. I wish that we hadn't gotten the vaccine, but I couldn't get the missus to leave the house back in the day, so I held her hand, and off we went to the local injection site together, where we waited in the queue until it was our turn. Remember how they had you drive off to the side, where they asked that you wait five minutes before driving off the lot? There was also some stuff in the show about population control and how they needed to cull the population due to a scarcity of resources worldwide. Wait one darn minute. I thought Covid came out of a lab in Wuhan where they were experimenting with bio-weapons. Was this show we were watching an effort by someone to redirect our attention away from the Chinese Communist Party's nefarious undertakings? One thing is for certain. After watching this show, I think I speak for both the missus and myself when I say that we're not getting any more injections. No siree fucking Bob. You can take that to the bank.
I'll be darned. Mrs. G called with the good news. Mr. Willy is welcome to visit Mrs. G and her extended family at her facility for the Christmas holiday despite the fact that he is not vaccinated. This was precisely the case that we were making with Mrs. G just last week. That is to say, he is probably better protected than the rest of us since he had Covid recently and now presumably has a robust lot of antibodies with which to fight further infections. And, of course, he can't transmit the virus if he's not prone to getting infected. I'm not sure if Mrs. G made that precise case since I wasn't there to hear the arguments but whatever she said worked, so that's great. Mr. Willy is part of the extended family, so he should be there to celebrate, and he shouldn't be consigned to the sidelines based on his vaccination status. They agreed to Mrs. G's request on one condition. That is that Mr. Willy should not go outside Mrs. G's unit at any time during his visitation. Fine.
I stopped by a bagel joint the other day in a nearby town when I was in Exeter to visit the Ev man. I ordered six bagels and two donuts. The bill came to $30.40. I couldn't believe my ears. I looked at the sale on the register and noticed that they charged me $3.50 per bagel. I've never paid $3.50 for a bagel in my life. What kind of bagel fetches such an exorbitant price? Were they lathered up with cream cheese? No. Were they toasted and filled with melted cheese and eggs? Certainly not. Were they any different from the bagels that I might buy by the dozen at a local supermarket for half the price? Not on your life. I looked at the register in shock and then told the clerk that I couldn't bring myself to pay $3.50 a bagel. I may have said something about never paying that much for a bagel in my entire life, but I can't be sure as I sit here thinking about what I may have said or not said a day or two ago. Maybe this is that inflation thing everyone has been talking about. I honestly don't know how these guys stay in business. Maybe they don't.
That grifter in a tracksuit, Zelensky, is coming to Washington tomorrow. He and Bumbles will be sitting down to croissants and coffee before Zelensky goes on to give a speech to Congress about needing more money to fight the Russians. Congress has already given Ukraine north of $100 billion, and there's another $44 billion in the budget for 2023. He's getting hard-earned tax dollars from hard-working Americans who can barely afford to feed their families while Mrs. Zelensky goes shopping on the fashionable and hoity-toity Fifth Avenue in New York City for the latest designer dresses. Can you imagine a more bizarre juxtaposition? She's shopping and spending money like she's a member of the Biden Crime Family, while Ukraine's citizens go without electricity, heat, and food amidst the erratic and destructive bombing campaigns launched by the Russians. To have that whore of a dictator in our nation's capital, and he is a dictator if you know anything about how he rules Ukraine, is a national disgrace. Yet, he will be endlessly lauded and given a hero's welcome by our spineless politicians in the cesspool that is Washington. Our damn Founders must be turning over in their graves.
How is what we're doing in Ukraine not fighting a proxy war against Russia? What has Russia ever done that warrants dragging our country into the morass that is the Ukraine war? Ukraine isn't a member of NATO, so we ought not to be paying for their defense or anything of the kind. As it is, we're paying to fund their governmental expenses as well, and that's a fucking joke. What was really sad was watching this clown Zelensky in Washington last night telling members of both of our political parties, and to a person, they were wearing Ukraine flags on their lapels, that we weren't giving Ukraine enough money. I couldn't bear to watch the clown and his clapping seals in the stands as he berated them for their selfishness, and they just laughed like the fools that they were. Honestly, it was the sickest thing I've seen in a long time. The whole of Europe must be singing Joe Biden's praises since he's funding their war against Russia while they have very little if any, skin left in the game. It's regime change or bust for the Bidenistas in Russia if Zelensky and his Oligarchs have their way.
I think I mentioned recently that my neighbor broke her hip. This is the same neighbor whose driveway I clear every winter whenever a storm passes through. She's no spring chicken, so I do what I can. She also lives alone, so she has no one to lend a hand here and there in a pinch. She'll be coming home from rehab later this week, so that's good. She'll be happy to get back home and on familiar turf. She seems to have something of a support system based on the number of cars I see coming and going, but at the end of the day, she's on her own after friends and caregivers depart. She and I have been exchanging phone calls and e-mails about various things, and she informed me yesterday that she has an old friend coming to stay with her for a month or so while she gets back on her feet. The friend I'm referring to is no spring chicken either, but he'll do. We're here for them should any additional muscle be needed, so she can take that for what it's worth. And then, of course, there's the issue with her Jack Russell terrier. That's a story for another day.
I'm catching this Kari Lake trial in Arizona now and then, and I like the fact that her case against her opponent (Katie Hobbs) in the gubernatorial race in that state is still alive and well in the courts. Anyone with half a brain knows that Hobbs and her leftist buddies manning the voting stations in Maricopa County rigged the election. More to the point, they stole the election for Ms. Hobbs. The evidence seems overwhelming, and it involves machine tampering and something of a premeditated plan to discourage voters from casting their votes. Since it is a county-wide issue, the judge could decide to have another election if he decides that the evidence is both overwhelming and proof-positive that there were plans afoot by Ms. Lake's opponent to thwart the will of the people in Maricopa County. Did I mention that Katie Hobbs was in charge of the election she is now being charged with stealing? Maybe Ms. Lake's attorneys will succeed where Trump's attorney could not when it came to proving that the election was not on the up and up. Someone has to send a message to these election thieves that there will be a price to pay if and when they do these kinds of things. Our Democracy demands it.
I'm hearing that the January 6th Committee is releasing its report today. What a bunch of bloody fools. They already made their referrals to the Justice Department, which included four criminal referrals for Donald J Trump. They are so desperate to put Trump behind bars that they can't help but create things out of whole cloth when they don't otherwise have the goods on the man they'd love to see indicted. Trump will be indicted, but it will be for his failure to turn over documents that he took with him when he left the White House. Or, maybe more to the point, documents that his staff packed up as they departed the White House before Bumbles and his extended family of grifters moved in. That's all they've got. That's all they've ever had. But to listen to these fools on the left, you'd think they had enough to put Trump in jail for 20 years or more. The salivating is non-stop. It's wishful thinking, but it's always been wishful thinking. God forbid they allow a populist like Trump to take back the White House in 2024. Their wet dreams of a democrat presidency in perpetuity would go down in flames.
What's the deal with this Sam Bankman-Fried character? He was extradited to the United States recently after spending about two days in jail in the Bahamas. My guess is that he didn't care for his accommodations. This was after bribing the Bahamian officials to keep him out of the general population, or so I understand. Now that he's back in the states, a judge agreed to accept a bond secured by his parent's home in exchange for allowing him to remain free until trial. What you're not hearing is that his parent's home was purchased with funds stolen by Sam and his band of crypto thieves. How does that even come close to qualifying as an asset that he can use as collateral to stay out of jail? And don't believe this bullshit about his being confined to his parent's home. He'll be doing the talk show circuit soon enough to raise money to pay his lawyer. Why he needs a lawyer when you know he won't spend a day in jail when all is said and done is a question you'll not hear anyone asking, so I'm asking it.
Something else I'm not understanding is what the hell is going on with Tesla stock. It's not something I own, so my interest is casual at best, but when a stock goes from $437 dollars per share to $123 per share in the space of months, it makes you wonder. Does it have anything to do with the fact that Elon Musk bought Twitter? Elon was a darling of the left when he was fighting climate change. He could do no wrong when he was putting satellites in the lower atmosphere at his own expense so Ukrainians could better wage a defense against their Russian invaders. If you were a hard-core leftist driving a Prius around town with a "Bernie" sticker on your bumper, that no longer cut the mustard after Elon delivered his line of Teslas to showrooms around the country. Tesla stock went to the moon, and understandably so. Is Tesla stock now suffering the same fate as every other stock thanks to this inflationary bear market in which we find ourselves? Or, have the leftists decided to stop buying Teslas in an effort to impose their own version of cancel culture on the man who would be king? You know, the man who recently announced that his preferred pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci. Yeah, that guy. You decide.
The Republicans will be deciding who will be their Speaker of the House for the upcoming term on January 3rd, 2023. The current Minority Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, leads the pack, but I'm hearing that he doesn't have the required 218 votes to get over the finish line. I've never much cared for the guy myself. He's a bit too slick and a bit too milquetoast-ish for my tastes. My desire to see him get the boot hardened considerably the other day when I saw a photo of him at the gala in our nation's capital when Zelensky came to town. He was wearing Ukraine's colors on his lapel. I'm thinking to myself, here's this asshole bending over like the rest of the clapping seals in Washington proper for the grifter from Ukraine when he should be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with those of us who want to see our country disengage from the border dispute between Russia and Ukraine. I could never trust a guy like McCarthy to do the right thing by we conservatives. He's a rat politician like the rest of the rats in Washington so let's show him the door on the third of January. Just say fucking NO!
It's Christmas Eve here in the Northeast. The storm battering the west with extreme cold, wind, rain, and snow earlier in the week rolled through here yesterday, leaving nothing more than a bit of a dusting of snow and temperatures this morning in the teens. To think that it was fifty-four degrees, give or take, just yesterday afternoon. The missus and I drove down to Massachusetts yesterday to pick up the Ev man's car. We were turned around any number of times due to closed roads and impassable routes due to surging tidal waters. Cars on the highway and people, in general, seemed anxious and rushed based on the number of cars on the road and the speeds at which they were traveling. Everyone seemed desperate to get to wherever it was that they were going before the cold air moved in, turning the landscape into a skating rink. We know the drill. We've all been here before. We decided that taking Ev's car back to our place, and not his, would keep him off the roads just long enough for all of this weather-related stuff to pass. He was on board with that decision being the sensible lad that he is.
We finally got an inspection sticker on his car. It's been a three-month journey and a hellish one at that. If one more person had asked that I drive the car around another day or two until it was "ready" I think I would have lost my mind. This is what you're dealing with when you have catalytic converter problems. I probably would have saved myself considerable time and expense had I had the converters replaced straight away when the dealership correctly assessed the problem. All of this nonsense had me trying to figure out if the expense of replacing the converters was justified knowing that I might be able to pick up another car, used or new, using dollars that I was now having to expend on replacing the converters. The missus and I jointly decided that just replacing the converters was the best course of action, knowing that he would more than likely have this particular car for some years to come, given the relatively low mileage on the vehicle. I'm just happy not to have to deal with it anymore. That's got to be worth something.
On my way back from Massachusetts yesterday, I stopped by Common Roots on Ocean Boulevard to pick up the vegetable lasagna that we ordered for our Christmas dinner. I bought a nice loaf of Italian bread earlier in the week, and I'll likely make some nice garlic bread with it to have with our lasagna. I wasn't sure that Common Roots was even going to be open with roads in and around the store rendered impassable by the storm, but they were indeed open, so that was great. I didn't relish having to wait another day to pick up our meal and fighting the crowds who had their deliveries delayed by a day as well. I even ordered a nice latte while I was in the store picking up my order, and it was surprisingly good. I don't trust many people to make my lattes the way I like them, but I may have to now add Common Roots to my list of approved latte vendors. I also picked out a couple of muffins, a poppy seed muffin and a blueberry muffin, and a ripened banana while there. Who doesn't like having a banana with their latte?
My brother from another mother shipped me a dozen bagels from a renowned bagel shop in New York City. I think I mentioned that I walked into a local bagel store hereabouts the other day, and they wanted to charge me $3.50 for a half dozen bagels. I thought that was preposterous and shared that very same sentiment with my peeps from the Falls. My brother from another mother said something about buying me bagels for Christmas, making light of my comments as I thought he was. Let me just say that I wasn't expecting a delivery of bagels from NYC, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw the delivery. I might have preferred getting a nice cross-selection of various bagels, but they were all the same. All multi-colored and resembling a candy cane or maybe a wreath with a Christmas-colored theme. The missus's immediate reaction had something to do with not wanting to eat them due to what she perceived to be an infusion of food coloring, which gave the bagels their holiday-ish tint. Nonsense, I told her. I toasted one up and lathered it with butter and jam. Is there any other way to have your bagels? Maybe with cream cheese? Thanks, bro!
It's cold as a witch's tit out there this morning. This might be the coldest day of the year thus far, with temperatures in the teens. I added a couple of cakes of suet to my suet feeder for my woodpeckers and topped off my thistle feeder for good measure. I cracked the layer of ice that had formed on my bird bath overnight, and the birds are now busily availing themselves of everything that I put out. I have a good mind to go over and sweep my neighbor's deck of the light snow that fell overnight. She's coming home later today after being in rehab for a week to mend after breaking her hip a couple of weeks back. I can't in good conscience have her slipping and sliding her way to her front door. She might never forgive me were something bad to happen. Is it my responsibility to ensure that she makes her way without fear of harm or foul? Surely, it is not. Would I be held accountable should something bad happen to her? Who knows.
Holy cow! Today is Christmas! All I want to do is to go back to bed. I started my day by finding a hair in my blueberry muffin. I don't usually eat anything in the early morning, but I thought I might have a bit of a muffin this morning just because I can. I didn't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so I threw caution to the wind and polished off my muffin. It was a reasonably good muffin. I might have liked to have had more blueberries in the darn thing, but, that aside, it wasn't half bad. I think it was made with whole wheat or maybe bran since the muffin itself was dark-ish in color. I've had blueberry muffins from this place before, and I don't remember them tasting like this one. That's why I bought another one, truth be told. I was expecting more of the same. Have I somehow changed the trajectory of my day by doing something out of the ordinary, like consuming a muffin? I might be going back to bed soon, so that should tell you something. It's barely past the hour of seven in the morning, so if I'm going to do it, I should do it soon. At least I won't be going to bed hungry. Not on Christmas morning, for chrissakes.
I'm reading this morning that that we lost a couple more people overnight to what appear to be vaccine-related sudden deaths. One was a middle-aged ex-MMA star and the other was a 45-year old guy who worked in the media. When is the world going to wake up and start calling these deaths what they really are - Death by vaccine. There is literally no other reason that young people should be toppling over and falling dead in the prime of their life. I can only pray that I'm far enough out from getting the vaccine that I don't have to worry about dying a sudden death. I'm thinking, perhaps wrongly, that thesse deaths are happening after the recipient gets his or her seccond or third, or more, booster shots. Am I wrong about that? Where are the studies? Why are governments across the planet still insisting that their citizens get these lethal injections? Did you know that the illegal aliens crossing our borders unmolested are not required to get vaccinated? Let me see if I have this right. Our brothers and sisters, all Americans by birth, are dying after getting their shots but the illegal aliens being invited into our country by the Democrat party and their demented leader, Joe Biden, are not required to get the same deadly injections. Say what?
Just a quick update on the Kari Lake trial in Arizona, the judge in the case ruled against her. She plans to appeal, of course, but you have to wonder. How much Cartel cash did he take before rendering his decision? How many calls did he get from the White House or our Intelligence Agencies warning him that were he to find for Ms. Lake that he might live to regret his decision? I get it that judges are not wanting to interfere with the will of the people when it comes to overturning elections but it seemed to me that Kari Lake and her people had the receipts. Maybe that doesn't matter anymore. Maybe they didn't have what they thought was the proverbial smoking gun when push came to shove. Maybe the attorney's Ms. Lake hired didn't make enough of a compelling case to the judge. They'll get a chance to do it all over again when they plead their case to the Appeals Court. How successful they'll be is anyone's guess. Speaking of sudden deaths, maybe we don't need a crystal ball to see where this case is going. Unfortuanely, it's just going to embolden the election thieves that much more the next time around. The good guys, and gals, really need to figure this one out. Longer term, losing is not an option.
The Case for Mr. Willy
18/12/22 07:07
We're coming down the final stretch here, boys and girls. I'm talking about year-end, 2022. It will be another year gone by the boards, as they say in the movies. On a less hospitable note, the missus was not a happy camper yesterday. She got caught up in a bit of bad weather coming back from her schtick in Massachusetts. The first day of snowy weather came a little early than forecasted, and it was something that she had hoped to avoid, but that was not the way it turned out. "Never again," she said. "If snow is in the forecast," I'll not be making the trip. I think that's reasonable. She made it home okay, but there was plenty of slow going, more than a handful of accidents along the highway, and all in all, it could have been avoided. Sometimes, when you least expect it, things turn to shite, and there's not a lot you can do about it. Grin and bear it.
I put our Christmas tree up while the missus was away. I threw some lights on it, which usually falls in her wheelhouse, but the tree looked so barren that I couldn't bear not putting something on it, truth be told. Besides, I wanted my missus to come home to a beautiful tree all lit up with nothing left to do but throw our ornaments on it. That's her favorite activity when it comes to decorating the tree. It was the least I could do since she was out of town for the day. I didn't get around to everything that I'd hoped to do while she was away, but I feel pretty good about putting up the tree. I might have thrown a little tinsel on the branches if I'd had some. Do they even sell tinsel anymore? Or, is that just another relic from a bygone era when boys were boys and girls were girls?
We got maybe an inch of snow overnight. I can barely see the creases in the wood slats on our back deck, so an "inch" might be a bit of an exaggeration. Is it, or is it not, enough such that I should be out clearing the snow from our driveway and back deck before the next storm comes along? Will it warm up sufficiently over the next few days so that going out to clear the snow now may not be the best use of my time? I usually clear my neighbor's driveway after we get a snowfall of a few inches or more. Will she expect me to stop by this morning? I should probably step outside at some point and further assess the need to clear or not clear the snow that we have on the ground. Do I have enough gas in our snowblower to get the thing up and running? As usual, I'm feeling a little flat-footed after our first snowfall. It's just par for the fucking course.
This Twitter thing is really something, isn't it? Elon Musk recently tweeted, "My pronouns are prosecute/Fauci." This comes just days after he fired Twitter's Chief Legal Counsel, James Baker, for suppressing data that Elon had instructed his staff to release to the public. The data that Baker, an ex-FBI hatchet man, was suppressing had everything to do with the FBI's involvement with Twitter and their collective and insidious efforts to take Trump off the platform prior to the 2020 presidential election and to conceal any and all criticism of Biden and his administration. Now, it looks and sounds like Elon has the goods, or the receipts if you will, on Fauci and his lies that caused the deaths of millions of Americans. What is that all about? I don't know how else to say this so I'll just say it. Elon Musk is a hero. He's doing precisely what he said he'd do when he purchased Twitter. And, at great personal and professional risk, I might add.
Elon Musk is proving to everyone that what everyone has been saying all along about these leftist big-tech behemoths is true. They are nothing more than organizations that live and breathe to serve their leftist democrat paymasters. Their primary goal is to create an echo chamber for the messaging of the democrats and to excoriate and/or suppress any and all political opposition. These are the very tactics employed by the Nazi party in the 30s and 40s during and after Hitler's rise to power. Goebbels would be proud of the propaganda machine co-opted and perfected by the modern-day democrat party. The democrat's near-complete infiltration of America's institutions, from classrooms to boardrooms and courtrooms, ensures that they will continue their takeover of the levers of power in America without any real resistance. Maybe exposing them as the criminal organizations that they are will be the light of day that finally has the rats scurrying for cover. Hope springs eternal.
Speaking of rats, officials in the Bahamas finally put the cuffs on that Sam Bankman-Fried guy. He was the CEO and founder of FTX which was based in the Bahamas. I hear that it was done at the request of officials in the United States. He is being charged with a raft of criminal violations as a result of running what was an alleged Ponzi scheme involving crypto and other worthless currency tokens. Worthless is a relative term when it comes to these so-called coins that numbered somewhere north of twenty thousand as of the end of 2021. There may be a place for digital currencies in our future, but, thus far, most of them have been made up out of thin air. They are only worth what someone is willing to pay for them. Right? Now that they have Sam in custody, can we also expect that they will collar his accomplice? What's her name again? Yeah, the mousy one with the advanced degree in mathematics from Stanford. That one.
I don't much care for the idea of digital currencies. I don't like the idea of someone being able to track my spending and all that entails. It's none of their fucking business. It would certainly provide the government with a cornucopia of avenues to further tax us, and that is never a good thing. Get your hands out of my fucking pockets. That's me thinking out loud. Funny thing is, these so-called tokens or crypto coins were put out there with the promise that one could conduct business, and none of it would be trackable or traceable. I guess it's one thing to stash your portfolio away in the form of a digital currency, and it's quite another to have that very same portfolio managed and tracked by your government. The fact that most of these coins are now turning to shite should be a lesson to us all. Unfortunately, for people who had their life's savings in digital wallets managed by FTX, they are now shit-out-of-luck. Maybe there's a lesson somewhere in there for the government.
We got just enough snow that I went out and cleared my driveway using a shovel. There wasn't enough snow on the ground to justify using my snowblower. I'm always of the mind that if I don't clear the snow, only bad things can come of it. That is to say, if we were to get more snow on top of what we already have, I'll end up regretting not clearing the pittance that fell the first time around. Besides, exposing the blacktop beneath the surface of the snow to the midday sun should go a long way toward melting any ice that lies just below the surface of the snow. I can't have my missus worrying about slipping and falling every time she steps out of doors and onto our snow-covered driveway. There are enough weather-related things for her to worry about this time of year, so I don't need to add to her concerns when I have the wherewithal to do something about it. Come to think of it, I think that's my job. Do your job, Johnny.
I didn't see my neighbor out and about clearing any snow from her property, so I'm wondering what, if any, plans she has to clear her driveway. I did tell her earlier this year that I would be lending a hand with clearing the snow from her driveway this winter, so I'm wondering if she was expecting me to show up. I can't imagine that she thinks that what came down overnight qualifies as a snowfall requiring my involvement. Is she sitting over at her house stewing in her juices while watching me clear my driveway? Did watching me put my shovel away after a half hour of working to clear my own driveway put her over the top? I certainly don't want to be on the hook for having to remove every bit of precipitation from her driveway that falls out of the sky no matter the amount. I should have been clearer about that when I made the offer. Well, maybe now she knows. Even the best offers have parameters.
Fast forward 12 hours and I get a call from my neighbor. She's laid up in the hospital with a broken hip. I had seen flashing lights the previous night, but I thought it was just a sander or a plow truck coming down our street to clear what little snow had fallen. It turns out that it was an ambulance that had come to take my neighbor to the hospital. She had fallen inside her home, so I didn't need to waste a lot of time feeling bad about not clearing her driveway. I'll say it again because it bears repeating, there wasn't much of anything to clear. Was there just enough snow to give her something to slip and fall on had that been the case? Without a doubt. I think the real culprit here is her Jack Terrior or whatever the hell you call those little furry fucks. She would never admit to that, of course, so we'll let the proverbial chips fall where they may.
It was an interesting day in the financial markets yesterday. There was a flurry of activity in the put/call activity prior to the opening of the market that suggested that someone had leaked the CPI numbers. In fact, the market rallied the day prior, and I saw a tweet that asked that very question. I mean, who throws all of their chips on the table in the casino, not knowing which way the markets were going to go once the announcement came down? I may have seen a tweet or two talking about the fact that no one should be surprised at anything coming out of the Biden White House. No one believes for a minute that Bumbles and his minions wouldn't enrich themselves and their lot by taking advantage of having prior knowledge of good CPI numbers. Futures were up pretty sharply before the market opened and just sold off during the day. The markets had the last laugh and that, I suppose, is as it should be. The casino always has the advantage. Live and learn.
I got my seasonal flu shot the other day. I'll admit, I was hesitant to do so. If I'm not mistaken, my flu vaccine is manufactured by the same people who make the Covid vaccine. I trust them with my health about as far as I can throw them. Maybe I got the flu shot because I've always gotten the flu shot. I know, I know. It's a shite reason, to be sure. The missus got after me to get the shot as well, so that helped to move things along. For better or worse, I guess it's too early to say. I do wonder sometimes about the necessity of getting all of these shots as we get along in life. Are the shots really designed to cull the herd at the end of the day? If I got no shots, would that increase my odds of living longer? There is just something about putting unnatural and potentially poisonous substances in our bodies that has me pushing back against the orthodoxy. Does that make any sense?
Raise your hand if you think our putting Patriot Missile Systems in Ukraine is a bad idea. To do what precisely? To protect the Donbas? It's a shithole of a country, and we're sending our most sophisticated weapons systems to them so they can shoot down Russian drones and Russian pilots? Every country in Europe would give their left testicle to have the protection that a Patriot Missile System provides, and that was before the shit hit the fan when Russia invaded Ukraine. Yet, we've not provided the systems to any of them. You have to ask yourself, what does this clown Zelensky have on Bumbles Biden that Bumbles would agree to send these weapons systems to Ukraine? We all know that Biden is compromised by the various and sundry schemes that the Biden Crime Family has pulled off over the years in countries like Ukraine, but they must really have the goods on Bumbles if he's now willing to give them these systems.
The placement of these systems in Ukraine represents an abrupt escalation in the war against Russia and our country's involvement in the proxy war that we've been waging since the war began. Putin has said that Russia will target our missile systems should they be put into Ukraine. More than likely, that means that Americans operating those missile systems will also be targeted. We're not about to let some hayseed from the cornfields and backwaters of Ukraine get behind the wheel of one of the most sophisticated, expensive, and deadly weapons systems that the world has ever seen. I'm a little surprised that Putin hasn't offered more than what appears to be a lukewarm response to Biden's deployment of this weapon system. It's no different, really, than Putin's standing threat to kill any and all foreigners fighting on behalf of Ukraine in Ukraine. Am I wrong about that?
Come to think of it, Zelensky may well have the silver bullet that could bring down Bumbles, and his minions, should Bumbles not agree to his demands. This involves the alleged laundering of money by FTX and that scumbag, Sam Bankman-Fried, who has donated tens of millions of dollars to the democrats in the months leading up to the 2022 mid-term elections. As I understand it, FTX sent millions to Ukraine, and Ukraine, in turn, purchased digital assets from FTX, which were then distributed back to both Ukraine and the democrats. Oh, and then there was ten percent for the big guy. We all know who the big guy is. In other words, Zelensky has the receipts. This is bigger than Watergate. This is bigger than the stolen 2020 election. This could put the democrat party on ice for decades should Zelensky spill the beans. Don't think for a minute that the arrest and detainment of Sam Bankman-Fried by the Bahamian authorities the day before he was scheduled to appear before Congress was a coincidence.
I'm trying to think of a good way to tell my neighbor that I may not be up to taking on the task of clearing snow from her property this coming winter. I'm good with doing what I've always done, which is doing her driveway, but she has other paths around her home that I know she clears for various reasons that I'm not sure I'm up to doing. I offered to help her with her snow removal earlier this year when she was planning to have her knee replaced, but I thought that might be short-lived since she got back on her feet so quickly. Now that she's broken her hip, she's not going to be doing any snow removal anytime soon, so therein lies the predicament as to what my involvement may or may not look like. As of this morning, she's lying in a hospital bed awaiting transportation to a local rehab joint, so now is not the time to have that conversation. She had a lad do some yard work for her over the summer, so having him come back on board might be an option.
Both the missus and I have been exchanging e-mails with her during her time in the hospital. Her main concern seems to be her dog, Joey, who was put up in a local kennel while all of this plays out. It looks to be a foregone conclusion that her dog will not be able to return to her home for a yet-to-be-determined period of time. Joey is a small dog, a Terrier type, if I'm not mistaken. She's not said, but I suspect, that she may have tripped over Joey one way or another, and now he's a liability of sorts, at least in the interim. I think what I'm hearing in her e-mails to us is a plea for the missus and me to take her dog while she recuperates. She's not come out and asked the question directly, but she's made it very clear as to what she doesn't want to happen as it relates to Joey's final destination. I'm referring to one option that has Joey going off to spend the winter with a friend of hers who spends his winters in a mobile home park in Florida. I don't want to read too much into her comments about the Florida thing, so we'll leave that alone for the time being.
The missus and I like dogs, but we're not amenable to having one stay with us for any period of time. As such, I've not said anything in response to my neighbor's e-mails that might have her thinking for even a moment that we'd be open to taking Joey in. The missus and I are very much on the same page here, so that's a good thing. I should also mention that this little Terrier is the apple of my neighbor's eye, so we'd likely be under the microscope day in and day out were we to take him in. Nobody likes that level of scrutiny. We'd always have to worry about whether or not she thought we were walking him enough, whether we were giving him the kind of attention that he's accustomed to receiving, etc. We like her as a neighbor, but most of our interactions, for better or worse, have been transactional at best. In other words, we're not buddy-buddy in any real sense of the word. We don't exchange presents at Christmas, we don't acknowledge birthdays, you get the idea.
Trump commented on social media earlier this week that he had a big announcement to make. He is the only candidate on the Republican side of the aisle to announce his campaign for the presidency in 2024 thus far, so I thought we might be in for something of a treat. He's not said much of anything in terms of fleshing out possible policies, so having him come out with a platform of sorts, no matter the significance, would be welcome for those of us who can't wait to see the sleazy and corrupt Biden Crime Family ousted from our beloved White House. To my great disappointment, he announced something having to do with a digital something that he was hawking for $99 or something. I'm thinking to myself, what the fuck is this? It's clownish! It's unbecoming of a man who is asking we Americans to take him as a serious contender for the presidency in 2024. Has he completely lost his mind? Who on his staff thought this was a good idea? Somebody needs to fire that mother fucker. Oh, and Trump did have something to say about his policies later in the day. Here's the problem: He'd lost half his audience with the rollout of some stupid meme and a plan to sell some stupid tokens. I'm done.
It was so funny. The Ev man and I visited a car dealership in a nearby town yesterday. Our goal was to see what they had for used cars in stock, and, secondarily, I wanted to get some sense of the trade-in value of the Ev man's car. We still haven't solved this so-called check-engine issue with his car, and I'm feeling both aggravated and desperate to get out from under the problem. We ended up test-driving a used car that looked like it might be a good fit for the Ev man. Here's the funny part: We took the wrong car out for a test drive. The two cars we were interested in were identical, but the two models were two years apart in age. It didn't really matter since we didn't like the car we took for a test drive anyway. The suspension was way too stiff, and the side windows didn't seem to seal properly. You could hear the wind whistling at speeds between thirty and forty-five once we got out on the highway. Compared to the ride of the Ev man's Volvo, it was a real piece of crap. Their offer for Ev's car was also not up to snuff, so that was that. Stay tuned.
It just so happens that Mrs. G has a car that she plans to give up in a few months, so I thought there might be a chance that we could purchase it from her maybe sooner rather than later. It would be a good replacement for the Ev man's car. We mentioned it to Mrs. G, but she wasn't biting. This will be the last time she gets behind the wheel of a car for the rest of her life, so she probably wants to savor those moments, at least for the next few months. That's fine, we respect her decision. She didn't come right out and say no, but she intimated as much, and we moved on to talk about other things. We also talked to Mrs. G about whose responsibility it is to clear the snow off of the cars at her facility. We were under the impression that the facility took on that responsibility, so you can imagine our surprise when Mrs. G told us that it was the responsibility of the tenants. What does that even look like? If Mrs. G has forgotten how all of that works, that may not bode well for an extension of her driving privileges one way or another. We need to sort this out.
The missus and I took a ride over to the local Lowes store yesterday late yesterday afternoon. It was a rainy and miserable night and probably not the best of nights to be out and about. I was happy to get to our destination in one piece, truth be told. The roads were shimmering with wetness, and under the darkness of night, our headlights were hardly up to the task of illuminating the path ahead of us on the roadway. I knew the road well enough, so we were never in any real danger, but it felt mildly perilous nonetheless. It was one of those nights where there were more store employees than customers. I wasn't sure if what we were seeing, here just a week out from Christmas, was due to the weather, or maybe, and perhaps more to the point, the ongoing malaise of the economy. I wondered aloud for the benefit of the missus if half of the employees of this well-staffed establishment, sleepwalking through their shifts as they were, wouldn't be standing in the unemployment line after the holidays, or, God forbid, sooner.
It was another in a long line of shitty weeks in the financial markets this week. The Feds keep hiking interest rates into what appears to be a recession coming down the pike, and that is never a good thing. I did a quick tally of where the S&P 500 was as of the end of the day yesterday, and it's down nearly twenty percent year-to-date. There hasn't been much in the way of panic in terms of the day-to-day activity, but, then again, we're not yet in stage three of this what many are calling an inflationary bear market. Capitulation only comes around in stage four, so we have a ways to go before we reach a buyable bottom. That is to say if you have any money left to invest once we get there. Shorter term, people are taking it on the chin, financially speaking, and they can't feel good about spending the few sheckles they have left on discretionary items like Christmas presents. As a last resort, you max out the credit cards and hope that you don't join the ranks of the unemployed in the new year before you have a chance to pay off the debt you've incurred. The market always goes back up. No?
Should I be thinking more globally about this shit-fest of a world we find ourselves in? By comparison, think about the clusterfuck that is Ukraine. Do you think their major concern is making sure that the kiddies have presents under the tree on Christmas morning? They'd be happy to have heat, a hot bowl of soup, and a roof over their heads on any given day. We lose electricity for an hour or so, and we're going Defcon-5 trying to figure out how we salvage the pork chops we bought for dinner earlier in the day. It's like you can't even put yourselves in their shoes long enough to appreciate what the hell they're up against. Maybe that's a good thing. I'd hate to be so rattled that I'd want to go hunting Russians here in my little hamlet thousands of miles away from the actual conflict in Ukraine. I just can't get my arms around any of it, if I'm honest about it. Would I even know a Russian if I saw one?
I turned on the telly (CNN) for a few minutes last night. It was for shits and giggles, but that's fine. I always wonder what governmental spin (propaganda) they're working on any given day or night. They were going full bore with the Deep State's version of Ukraine being good and Russia being bad. They had their usual paid contributors from the Army or Navy giving their version of what was going on on the ground in Ukraine and the anticipated next steps of the Ruskies. They played a video of what appeared to be a Russian advertisement for soldiers willing and wanting to go to the front lines and the benefits that might accrue to young men willing to enlist. Would it surprise me to find out that the video I was watching came out of the bowels of some left-leaning think tank in the bowels of Washington? It would not. The talking head on CNN, and her feckless guests, mocked the film as evidence of Russia on the ropes while going full grievance politics on behalf of the poor, embattled people on the ground in Ukraine. It's what they do. It's who they are.
We tried talking Mrs. G into paving the way for Debbie Rah-Rah's paramour, Mr. Willy, to join the family Christmas party at her facility this year. She would have to take it up with the management at her place since they make the rules about who can and who can't visit the facility as long as we're in the "crosshairs" of the Covid pandemic. The rules all along have been that if you're unvaccinated, you're not welcome. As I sit here today, there are a couple of problems with that position. One, the missus and I are out some three years now after getting the two shots, so we, at least in theory, no longer have any residual protection from anything since we never agreed to get boosters. Yet, we are free to come and go as we please. Secondly, Mr. Willy had Covid recently, so he, at least in theory, has more natural protection than anybody since he has the antibodies. Yet, he's not welcome at her facility. The ball is in Mrs. G's court now. She needs to make the case for Mr. Willy with the management of her facility.
It gets even more bizarre when you consider the fact that her facility has these little machines set up in their lobby that spit out name tags for visitors after the visitors answer a series of questions about their vaccination status, etc. We never go through the main lobby when we visit Mrs. G, so it doesn't apply to us. It should, but we enter her unit from the ground floor, so nobody is the wiser. Can one or more of her neighbors drop a dime on us should they so desire? Of course, said the horse. Anyway, you've got all of these visitors admitting to having been vaccinated when the fact of the matter is that many or most probably never got a booster after the original injections some three years ago. The standard for being vaccinated has never been updated to include boosters, so what good is asking people who got shots in early 2020 about their vaccination status in December 2022? Its sheer lunacy is what it is. It's theater and not especially good theater. Did I mention that the FDA just admitted that the Covid vaccines are known to cause blood clots? I rest my case.
I put our Christmas tree up while the missus was away. I threw some lights on it, which usually falls in her wheelhouse, but the tree looked so barren that I couldn't bear not putting something on it, truth be told. Besides, I wanted my missus to come home to a beautiful tree all lit up with nothing left to do but throw our ornaments on it. That's her favorite activity when it comes to decorating the tree. It was the least I could do since she was out of town for the day. I didn't get around to everything that I'd hoped to do while she was away, but I feel pretty good about putting up the tree. I might have thrown a little tinsel on the branches if I'd had some. Do they even sell tinsel anymore? Or, is that just another relic from a bygone era when boys were boys and girls were girls?
We got maybe an inch of snow overnight. I can barely see the creases in the wood slats on our back deck, so an "inch" might be a bit of an exaggeration. Is it, or is it not, enough such that I should be out clearing the snow from our driveway and back deck before the next storm comes along? Will it warm up sufficiently over the next few days so that going out to clear the snow now may not be the best use of my time? I usually clear my neighbor's driveway after we get a snowfall of a few inches or more. Will she expect me to stop by this morning? I should probably step outside at some point and further assess the need to clear or not clear the snow that we have on the ground. Do I have enough gas in our snowblower to get the thing up and running? As usual, I'm feeling a little flat-footed after our first snowfall. It's just par for the fucking course.
This Twitter thing is really something, isn't it? Elon Musk recently tweeted, "My pronouns are prosecute/Fauci." This comes just days after he fired Twitter's Chief Legal Counsel, James Baker, for suppressing data that Elon had instructed his staff to release to the public. The data that Baker, an ex-FBI hatchet man, was suppressing had everything to do with the FBI's involvement with Twitter and their collective and insidious efforts to take Trump off the platform prior to the 2020 presidential election and to conceal any and all criticism of Biden and his administration. Now, it looks and sounds like Elon has the goods, or the receipts if you will, on Fauci and his lies that caused the deaths of millions of Americans. What is that all about? I don't know how else to say this so I'll just say it. Elon Musk is a hero. He's doing precisely what he said he'd do when he purchased Twitter. And, at great personal and professional risk, I might add.
Elon Musk is proving to everyone that what everyone has been saying all along about these leftist big-tech behemoths is true. They are nothing more than organizations that live and breathe to serve their leftist democrat paymasters. Their primary goal is to create an echo chamber for the messaging of the democrats and to excoriate and/or suppress any and all political opposition. These are the very tactics employed by the Nazi party in the 30s and 40s during and after Hitler's rise to power. Goebbels would be proud of the propaganda machine co-opted and perfected by the modern-day democrat party. The democrat's near-complete infiltration of America's institutions, from classrooms to boardrooms and courtrooms, ensures that they will continue their takeover of the levers of power in America without any real resistance. Maybe exposing them as the criminal organizations that they are will be the light of day that finally has the rats scurrying for cover. Hope springs eternal.
Speaking of rats, officials in the Bahamas finally put the cuffs on that Sam Bankman-Fried guy. He was the CEO and founder of FTX which was based in the Bahamas. I hear that it was done at the request of officials in the United States. He is being charged with a raft of criminal violations as a result of running what was an alleged Ponzi scheme involving crypto and other worthless currency tokens. Worthless is a relative term when it comes to these so-called coins that numbered somewhere north of twenty thousand as of the end of 2021. There may be a place for digital currencies in our future, but, thus far, most of them have been made up out of thin air. They are only worth what someone is willing to pay for them. Right? Now that they have Sam in custody, can we also expect that they will collar his accomplice? What's her name again? Yeah, the mousy one with the advanced degree in mathematics from Stanford. That one.
I don't much care for the idea of digital currencies. I don't like the idea of someone being able to track my spending and all that entails. It's none of their fucking business. It would certainly provide the government with a cornucopia of avenues to further tax us, and that is never a good thing. Get your hands out of my fucking pockets. That's me thinking out loud. Funny thing is, these so-called tokens or crypto coins were put out there with the promise that one could conduct business, and none of it would be trackable or traceable. I guess it's one thing to stash your portfolio away in the form of a digital currency, and it's quite another to have that very same portfolio managed and tracked by your government. The fact that most of these coins are now turning to shite should be a lesson to us all. Unfortunately, for people who had their life's savings in digital wallets managed by FTX, they are now shit-out-of-luck. Maybe there's a lesson somewhere in there for the government.
We got just enough snow that I went out and cleared my driveway using a shovel. There wasn't enough snow on the ground to justify using my snowblower. I'm always of the mind that if I don't clear the snow, only bad things can come of it. That is to say, if we were to get more snow on top of what we already have, I'll end up regretting not clearing the pittance that fell the first time around. Besides, exposing the blacktop beneath the surface of the snow to the midday sun should go a long way toward melting any ice that lies just below the surface of the snow. I can't have my missus worrying about slipping and falling every time she steps out of doors and onto our snow-covered driveway. There are enough weather-related things for her to worry about this time of year, so I don't need to add to her concerns when I have the wherewithal to do something about it. Come to think of it, I think that's my job. Do your job, Johnny.
I didn't see my neighbor out and about clearing any snow from her property, so I'm wondering what, if any, plans she has to clear her driveway. I did tell her earlier this year that I would be lending a hand with clearing the snow from her driveway this winter, so I'm wondering if she was expecting me to show up. I can't imagine that she thinks that what came down overnight qualifies as a snowfall requiring my involvement. Is she sitting over at her house stewing in her juices while watching me clear my driveway? Did watching me put my shovel away after a half hour of working to clear my own driveway put her over the top? I certainly don't want to be on the hook for having to remove every bit of precipitation from her driveway that falls out of the sky no matter the amount. I should have been clearer about that when I made the offer. Well, maybe now she knows. Even the best offers have parameters.
Fast forward 12 hours and I get a call from my neighbor. She's laid up in the hospital with a broken hip. I had seen flashing lights the previous night, but I thought it was just a sander or a plow truck coming down our street to clear what little snow had fallen. It turns out that it was an ambulance that had come to take my neighbor to the hospital. She had fallen inside her home, so I didn't need to waste a lot of time feeling bad about not clearing her driveway. I'll say it again because it bears repeating, there wasn't much of anything to clear. Was there just enough snow to give her something to slip and fall on had that been the case? Without a doubt. I think the real culprit here is her Jack Terrior or whatever the hell you call those little furry fucks. She would never admit to that, of course, so we'll let the proverbial chips fall where they may.
It was an interesting day in the financial markets yesterday. There was a flurry of activity in the put/call activity prior to the opening of the market that suggested that someone had leaked the CPI numbers. In fact, the market rallied the day prior, and I saw a tweet that asked that very question. I mean, who throws all of their chips on the table in the casino, not knowing which way the markets were going to go once the announcement came down? I may have seen a tweet or two talking about the fact that no one should be surprised at anything coming out of the Biden White House. No one believes for a minute that Bumbles and his minions wouldn't enrich themselves and their lot by taking advantage of having prior knowledge of good CPI numbers. Futures were up pretty sharply before the market opened and just sold off during the day. The markets had the last laugh and that, I suppose, is as it should be. The casino always has the advantage. Live and learn.
I got my seasonal flu shot the other day. I'll admit, I was hesitant to do so. If I'm not mistaken, my flu vaccine is manufactured by the same people who make the Covid vaccine. I trust them with my health about as far as I can throw them. Maybe I got the flu shot because I've always gotten the flu shot. I know, I know. It's a shite reason, to be sure. The missus got after me to get the shot as well, so that helped to move things along. For better or worse, I guess it's too early to say. I do wonder sometimes about the necessity of getting all of these shots as we get along in life. Are the shots really designed to cull the herd at the end of the day? If I got no shots, would that increase my odds of living longer? There is just something about putting unnatural and potentially poisonous substances in our bodies that has me pushing back against the orthodoxy. Does that make any sense?
Raise your hand if you think our putting Patriot Missile Systems in Ukraine is a bad idea. To do what precisely? To protect the Donbas? It's a shithole of a country, and we're sending our most sophisticated weapons systems to them so they can shoot down Russian drones and Russian pilots? Every country in Europe would give their left testicle to have the protection that a Patriot Missile System provides, and that was before the shit hit the fan when Russia invaded Ukraine. Yet, we've not provided the systems to any of them. You have to ask yourself, what does this clown Zelensky have on Bumbles Biden that Bumbles would agree to send these weapons systems to Ukraine? We all know that Biden is compromised by the various and sundry schemes that the Biden Crime Family has pulled off over the years in countries like Ukraine, but they must really have the goods on Bumbles if he's now willing to give them these systems.
The placement of these systems in Ukraine represents an abrupt escalation in the war against Russia and our country's involvement in the proxy war that we've been waging since the war began. Putin has said that Russia will target our missile systems should they be put into Ukraine. More than likely, that means that Americans operating those missile systems will also be targeted. We're not about to let some hayseed from the cornfields and backwaters of Ukraine get behind the wheel of one of the most sophisticated, expensive, and deadly weapons systems that the world has ever seen. I'm a little surprised that Putin hasn't offered more than what appears to be a lukewarm response to Biden's deployment of this weapon system. It's no different, really, than Putin's standing threat to kill any and all foreigners fighting on behalf of Ukraine in Ukraine. Am I wrong about that?
Come to think of it, Zelensky may well have the silver bullet that could bring down Bumbles, and his minions, should Bumbles not agree to his demands. This involves the alleged laundering of money by FTX and that scumbag, Sam Bankman-Fried, who has donated tens of millions of dollars to the democrats in the months leading up to the 2022 mid-term elections. As I understand it, FTX sent millions to Ukraine, and Ukraine, in turn, purchased digital assets from FTX, which were then distributed back to both Ukraine and the democrats. Oh, and then there was ten percent for the big guy. We all know who the big guy is. In other words, Zelensky has the receipts. This is bigger than Watergate. This is bigger than the stolen 2020 election. This could put the democrat party on ice for decades should Zelensky spill the beans. Don't think for a minute that the arrest and detainment of Sam Bankman-Fried by the Bahamian authorities the day before he was scheduled to appear before Congress was a coincidence.
I'm trying to think of a good way to tell my neighbor that I may not be up to taking on the task of clearing snow from her property this coming winter. I'm good with doing what I've always done, which is doing her driveway, but she has other paths around her home that I know she clears for various reasons that I'm not sure I'm up to doing. I offered to help her with her snow removal earlier this year when she was planning to have her knee replaced, but I thought that might be short-lived since she got back on her feet so quickly. Now that she's broken her hip, she's not going to be doing any snow removal anytime soon, so therein lies the predicament as to what my involvement may or may not look like. As of this morning, she's lying in a hospital bed awaiting transportation to a local rehab joint, so now is not the time to have that conversation. She had a lad do some yard work for her over the summer, so having him come back on board might be an option.
Both the missus and I have been exchanging e-mails with her during her time in the hospital. Her main concern seems to be her dog, Joey, who was put up in a local kennel while all of this plays out. It looks to be a foregone conclusion that her dog will not be able to return to her home for a yet-to-be-determined period of time. Joey is a small dog, a Terrier type, if I'm not mistaken. She's not said, but I suspect, that she may have tripped over Joey one way or another, and now he's a liability of sorts, at least in the interim. I think what I'm hearing in her e-mails to us is a plea for the missus and me to take her dog while she recuperates. She's not come out and asked the question directly, but she's made it very clear as to what she doesn't want to happen as it relates to Joey's final destination. I'm referring to one option that has Joey going off to spend the winter with a friend of hers who spends his winters in a mobile home park in Florida. I don't want to read too much into her comments about the Florida thing, so we'll leave that alone for the time being.
The missus and I like dogs, but we're not amenable to having one stay with us for any period of time. As such, I've not said anything in response to my neighbor's e-mails that might have her thinking for even a moment that we'd be open to taking Joey in. The missus and I are very much on the same page here, so that's a good thing. I should also mention that this little Terrier is the apple of my neighbor's eye, so we'd likely be under the microscope day in and day out were we to take him in. Nobody likes that level of scrutiny. We'd always have to worry about whether or not she thought we were walking him enough, whether we were giving him the kind of attention that he's accustomed to receiving, etc. We like her as a neighbor, but most of our interactions, for better or worse, have been transactional at best. In other words, we're not buddy-buddy in any real sense of the word. We don't exchange presents at Christmas, we don't acknowledge birthdays, you get the idea.
Trump commented on social media earlier this week that he had a big announcement to make. He is the only candidate on the Republican side of the aisle to announce his campaign for the presidency in 2024 thus far, so I thought we might be in for something of a treat. He's not said much of anything in terms of fleshing out possible policies, so having him come out with a platform of sorts, no matter the significance, would be welcome for those of us who can't wait to see the sleazy and corrupt Biden Crime Family ousted from our beloved White House. To my great disappointment, he announced something having to do with a digital something that he was hawking for $99 or something. I'm thinking to myself, what the fuck is this? It's clownish! It's unbecoming of a man who is asking we Americans to take him as a serious contender for the presidency in 2024. Has he completely lost his mind? Who on his staff thought this was a good idea? Somebody needs to fire that mother fucker. Oh, and Trump did have something to say about his policies later in the day. Here's the problem: He'd lost half his audience with the rollout of some stupid meme and a plan to sell some stupid tokens. I'm done.
It was so funny. The Ev man and I visited a car dealership in a nearby town yesterday. Our goal was to see what they had for used cars in stock, and, secondarily, I wanted to get some sense of the trade-in value of the Ev man's car. We still haven't solved this so-called check-engine issue with his car, and I'm feeling both aggravated and desperate to get out from under the problem. We ended up test-driving a used car that looked like it might be a good fit for the Ev man. Here's the funny part: We took the wrong car out for a test drive. The two cars we were interested in were identical, but the two models were two years apart in age. It didn't really matter since we didn't like the car we took for a test drive anyway. The suspension was way too stiff, and the side windows didn't seem to seal properly. You could hear the wind whistling at speeds between thirty and forty-five once we got out on the highway. Compared to the ride of the Ev man's Volvo, it was a real piece of crap. Their offer for Ev's car was also not up to snuff, so that was that. Stay tuned.
It just so happens that Mrs. G has a car that she plans to give up in a few months, so I thought there might be a chance that we could purchase it from her maybe sooner rather than later. It would be a good replacement for the Ev man's car. We mentioned it to Mrs. G, but she wasn't biting. This will be the last time she gets behind the wheel of a car for the rest of her life, so she probably wants to savor those moments, at least for the next few months. That's fine, we respect her decision. She didn't come right out and say no, but she intimated as much, and we moved on to talk about other things. We also talked to Mrs. G about whose responsibility it is to clear the snow off of the cars at her facility. We were under the impression that the facility took on that responsibility, so you can imagine our surprise when Mrs. G told us that it was the responsibility of the tenants. What does that even look like? If Mrs. G has forgotten how all of that works, that may not bode well for an extension of her driving privileges one way or another. We need to sort this out.
The missus and I took a ride over to the local Lowes store yesterday late yesterday afternoon. It was a rainy and miserable night and probably not the best of nights to be out and about. I was happy to get to our destination in one piece, truth be told. The roads were shimmering with wetness, and under the darkness of night, our headlights were hardly up to the task of illuminating the path ahead of us on the roadway. I knew the road well enough, so we were never in any real danger, but it felt mildly perilous nonetheless. It was one of those nights where there were more store employees than customers. I wasn't sure if what we were seeing, here just a week out from Christmas, was due to the weather, or maybe, and perhaps more to the point, the ongoing malaise of the economy. I wondered aloud for the benefit of the missus if half of the employees of this well-staffed establishment, sleepwalking through their shifts as they were, wouldn't be standing in the unemployment line after the holidays, or, God forbid, sooner.
It was another in a long line of shitty weeks in the financial markets this week. The Feds keep hiking interest rates into what appears to be a recession coming down the pike, and that is never a good thing. I did a quick tally of where the S&P 500 was as of the end of the day yesterday, and it's down nearly twenty percent year-to-date. There hasn't been much in the way of panic in terms of the day-to-day activity, but, then again, we're not yet in stage three of this what many are calling an inflationary bear market. Capitulation only comes around in stage four, so we have a ways to go before we reach a buyable bottom. That is to say if you have any money left to invest once we get there. Shorter term, people are taking it on the chin, financially speaking, and they can't feel good about spending the few sheckles they have left on discretionary items like Christmas presents. As a last resort, you max out the credit cards and hope that you don't join the ranks of the unemployed in the new year before you have a chance to pay off the debt you've incurred. The market always goes back up. No?
Should I be thinking more globally about this shit-fest of a world we find ourselves in? By comparison, think about the clusterfuck that is Ukraine. Do you think their major concern is making sure that the kiddies have presents under the tree on Christmas morning? They'd be happy to have heat, a hot bowl of soup, and a roof over their heads on any given day. We lose electricity for an hour or so, and we're going Defcon-5 trying to figure out how we salvage the pork chops we bought for dinner earlier in the day. It's like you can't even put yourselves in their shoes long enough to appreciate what the hell they're up against. Maybe that's a good thing. I'd hate to be so rattled that I'd want to go hunting Russians here in my little hamlet thousands of miles away from the actual conflict in Ukraine. I just can't get my arms around any of it, if I'm honest about it. Would I even know a Russian if I saw one?
I turned on the telly (CNN) for a few minutes last night. It was for shits and giggles, but that's fine. I always wonder what governmental spin (propaganda) they're working on any given day or night. They were going full bore with the Deep State's version of Ukraine being good and Russia being bad. They had their usual paid contributors from the Army or Navy giving their version of what was going on on the ground in Ukraine and the anticipated next steps of the Ruskies. They played a video of what appeared to be a Russian advertisement for soldiers willing and wanting to go to the front lines and the benefits that might accrue to young men willing to enlist. Would it surprise me to find out that the video I was watching came out of the bowels of some left-leaning think tank in the bowels of Washington? It would not. The talking head on CNN, and her feckless guests, mocked the film as evidence of Russia on the ropes while going full grievance politics on behalf of the poor, embattled people on the ground in Ukraine. It's what they do. It's who they are.
We tried talking Mrs. G into paving the way for Debbie Rah-Rah's paramour, Mr. Willy, to join the family Christmas party at her facility this year. She would have to take it up with the management at her place since they make the rules about who can and who can't visit the facility as long as we're in the "crosshairs" of the Covid pandemic. The rules all along have been that if you're unvaccinated, you're not welcome. As I sit here today, there are a couple of problems with that position. One, the missus and I are out some three years now after getting the two shots, so we, at least in theory, no longer have any residual protection from anything since we never agreed to get boosters. Yet, we are free to come and go as we please. Secondly, Mr. Willy had Covid recently, so he, at least in theory, has more natural protection than anybody since he has the antibodies. Yet, he's not welcome at her facility. The ball is in Mrs. G's court now. She needs to make the case for Mr. Willy with the management of her facility.
It gets even more bizarre when you consider the fact that her facility has these little machines set up in their lobby that spit out name tags for visitors after the visitors answer a series of questions about their vaccination status, etc. We never go through the main lobby when we visit Mrs. G, so it doesn't apply to us. It should, but we enter her unit from the ground floor, so nobody is the wiser. Can one or more of her neighbors drop a dime on us should they so desire? Of course, said the horse. Anyway, you've got all of these visitors admitting to having been vaccinated when the fact of the matter is that many or most probably never got a booster after the original injections some three years ago. The standard for being vaccinated has never been updated to include boosters, so what good is asking people who got shots in early 2020 about their vaccination status in December 2022? Its sheer lunacy is what it is. It's theater and not especially good theater. Did I mention that the FDA just admitted that the Covid vaccines are known to cause blood clots? I rest my case.
Happy Holly Daze
11/12/22 07:04
Well, well, hombres and hombrettes. What have we here? Another week? What, pray tell, treasures will we find this week when we're bumping around in the ether? And, by the way, where is our bloody Christmas tree? Why don't we have a tree yet? Are we so busy that we don't have the time to go get one? By the time we get around to going out to get one, we may find that the only ones left are the scrubbiest of the scrubby, and where will that leave us? Up the friggin crick without a paddle, as my daddy was wont to say when we was in a similar predicament back in the day. Just so you don't think I've gone full Joe Biden here, my grammar is intentionally messed up. That's the way it was back in the day before I got me some schoolin'. Are you catchin' my drift?
I was on Twitter yesterday when I came across a video posted by Tucker Carlson. It was a roughly eight-minute video of an on-air conversation that Tucker had with James Woods, the actor. I've seen a lot of posts (Tweets) on Twitter over time from James Woods that were critical of the establishment, and more often than not, he was taking the Biden Administration to task for this or that alleged malfeasance. Politically speaking, Mr. Woods has always struck me as a hardcore conservative in terms of the tweets that he posted. In fact, I was in agreement with the sum and substance of most of the tweets that he posted, so I wasn't surprised in the least when the fascistic whores of the old Twitter silenced his voice by banning him from the platform.
God forbid that someone like James Woods, with maybe millions of followers, should have a voice that was free to criticize and excoriate the likes of Joe and Hunter Biden for their alleged crimes and misdeeds while in office. His was one of many voices banned and silenced by the leftists at Twitter prior to Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter and in collaboration with governmental officials from every agency within our government. Elon Musk has now laid bare this poisonous conspiracy by releasing a tranche of e-mails and tweets between the parties involved. What I hadn't known, until I listened to the video posted by Tucker, was the extent of the efforts by the left to silence James Woods. The leftists in Hollywood, and now the leftists at Twitter, saw to it that James Woods would never work another day in his beloved craft that he had perfected over the course of some forty years. I could hear the tears welling up in his eyes as he recounted events. It was just so sad. Sad and powerful at the same time.
It's no fucking wonder that Hollywood is putting out so much schlock these days. If they are nothing more than a cauldron of communists, or a den of leftists if you will, what chance do we conservative types have of seeing something that isn't pure unadulterated propaganda from the left that pushes their filthy and perverted values on those of us who have the stomach to sit through one or more of their productions. Hope springs eternal, as they say, so you keep watching until you can't watch anymore. Maybe you start listening to podcasts or, if you have a good satellite radio service to listen to, you start listening to some conservative talk show hosts like Dennis Prager and others like him. In a pinch, you can listen to Sean Hannity or some of the other dolts that profess to be carrying water for the conservatives, when in fact, they are establishment shills and ratings whores at the end of the day. Where the hell is Rush Limbaugh when we need him?
I don't usually wake up with a hair across my tuckus like this, but I guess I wasn't wrong about the impact that the James Woods interview had on me. Does any of this have anything to do with our visit to see the Ev man yesterday? I'm talking about the tone of my writing. It has a certain down-for-the-count feel to it to me. You know, throwing in the towel and all the rest. It's what you see is what you get. I'm looking for a little light at the end of the tunnel, but I ain't seeing it. The missus and I paid the Ev man a visit, and we lent him a hand in sprucing up his joint. I told him to tell Brittany that this is how he wanted her to remember him. She's moving on to other things, and she would probably like nothing better than to remember the Ev man sitting pretty in his place, all tidied up and ready for whatever inspection might come his way. That's not how we found his place when we arrived, but it is certainly how we left his place by the time we closed the door behind us some two hours after we arrived. Mission accomplished.
I'm getting out of bed later than usual this morning. It's a very different vibe. I don't know that it lends itself to writing in this here blog so let me just put that out there. The day feels "underway," if you know what I mean. Like maybe I ought to be getting on to other things instead of sitting here trying to fill in the blanks in my blog. The missus is going off to her thing in Portsmouth soon, so maybe that will help. What about breakfast? Should I eat and then sit back down here and finish whatever it is that I'm trying to cook up? I'm listening to "My Girl" by the Temptations, and it's helping, but I'm not sure how much. Did I mention that Kirstie Alley died yesterday? You know, Kirstie Alley of "Cheers" fame. She died of complications from cancer. Who knew? She was another brave soul in Hollywood speaking truth to power when it came to her politics. A died-in-the-wool conservative, for what it was worth. Godspeed, Kirstie!
It is true, isn't it? If it had been Donald Trump Jr. who had dropped off his laptop and forgotten about it only to see it turn up in the news as a laptop filled with compromising materials involving drug deals, pay-to-play arrangements with the Communist Chinese Party, and pornographic pictures of underage girls, the media wouldn't be pushing the Russian disinformation card. They would be calling for the indictments and arrests of Don Jr and his father for collaborating with America's enemies to enrich themselves and their families. It would be non-stop. It would be "let's get the cuffs on them" 24/7. The Never-Trumpers would be wetting themselves with anticipation of a televised morning raid at Mar-a-Lago with CNN camera crews not far behind. It would be the mother of all clusterfucks. But, when it comes to the Biden Crime Family and our equally corrupt Intelligence agencies, it's fucking crickets. Or, it's Russian disinformation. It's "nothing to see here, folks." "Move along."
Whoa. Where did the rain come from? I always feel like I'm getting a day off when I wake up to a day when rain is in the forecast. Well, a day off from exercising anyway. Then again, I have a nice raincoat now, so can I really still take the day off from taking my usual bike ride? I'm going to play this one by ear. The Ev man is coming over today, so he and I may have a few things to take care of before we call it a day. I hope he's up for doing what I think we need to do. He is not always in the proper frame of mind to get things done, so, yes, that's a thing. Speaking of weather, I see that snow is in the forecast for next Monday. Forecasts can be a little tricky, but this one, if it comes to fruition, will deliver some 2-7 inches of snow. I'd better check my snowblowers.
The 2022 senatorial run-off election in Georgia has come and gone. Not to steal my own thunder but, wait for it, the Democrats stole another one. If you think I'm making this stuff up, answer this question: Why is it that the heavily democratic areas are always the last to report their vote counts on election night? I'll tell you why. It's because they have perfected the steal. All they ever need to do is to manufacture just enough votes to put their candidate over the top. They wait until the rest of the state's results are in, and, then, voila, they "find" the votes they need for their candidate. I'm not sure which area in Georgia pulled this off to put the wife-beating Marxist, Warnock, over the top because I could see it coming, and I just went to bed rather than stay up waiting to hear about his so-called "win." When will the Republicans wake up?
There are a lot of democratic senate seats coming up for re-election in 2024. So many, in fact that the Republicans are expecting to take back a few and regain a majority in the Senate. It already feels to me like a rehash of what just happened in the mid-terms when the Republicans were expecting to win way more seats than they actually did. The opposing party in the House and Senate always wins big in the mid-terms. Right? This time around, not so much. The problem for the Republicans, come 2024, is that they have failed to call out the democrats for the cheating thieves that they are, and they have effectively lost the moral ground to challenge any thievery, no matter how blatant and in your face, in 2024. I don't know how they catch any of these cheating mother fuckers red-handed so they can put them behind bars where they belong. Were you to ask a democrat why they steal so many elections, they might well tell you with a straight face that it's a small price to pay for saving our democracy.
The missus did a nice job shopping for her anonymous recipient this year. The recipient of her munificence this holiday season is a fifteen-year-old boy. That's all she knows about the lad. Oh, aside from some general information she needed before placing her orders online, that is. All I can say is, he was lucky to get my missus as his holiday benefactor. His mom will probably pass it all off as her gift to her son, and that's fine too. Or, maybe he still believes in Santa. His preferences, as provided by the people managing the secret Santa gig this year, seemed to suggest to me that the young man had a hankering for things that a young person half his age might ask for. That's okay too. It's not for us to judge. His mom requested a winter coat for the lad, but the missus could only muster up a warmish hoodie when all was said and done. It should suffice for all but the coldest of days. He may not even notice since he'll be knee-deep in unwrapping everything else my missus purchased on his behalf. File this under, "The Lord works in mysterious ways."
What's the deal with this FTX guy, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF)? Can someone tell me why this guy isn't in jail already? He ran what was effectively a Ponzi scheme if we're to believe what we see in the media. And then there was something about his co-mingling of customer funds which is a huge no-no in the world of finance. What about the countless people who lost their entire life's fortune investing and trading on Bankman-Fried's FTX platform? Do they not have a voice? As it turns out, SBF contributed to a lot of politicians over the past few years who would now be responsible for dragging his sorry ass before Congress. At a minimum, you might think that Congress has some responsibility to find out what happened to FTX under the mismanagement of Sam Bankman-Fried so they can pass reforms or whatever to protect investors going forward.
So, that's just how the system works. You grease enough palms in and around Washington, and you render yourself essentially untouchable. There is no question that SBF ingratiated himself with the Washington politicians to the tune of billions of dollars. We're not talking chump change here, folks. Bernie Madoff would more than likely be the toast of the town these days had he contributed to more politicians back in the day when he was stealing money left and right from unsuspecting family and friends. Just sayin'. Maxine Waters, that dimwit of a Congresswoman and Chairman of the Banking Committee from California, announced yesterday that she would not be subpoenaing Bankman-Fried for any hearings. Wut? She is also on video blowing kisses to this Wunderkind during one of his more recent trips to Washington. You can't make this stuff up.
Are we going to have a damn Santa Claus Rally in the stock market this year, or not? I mean, what the fuck. And now, we're starting to see even more evidence of financial ruination beneath the surface. Ordinarily, when Treasury yields come down, that's good for the stock market. The ten-year yield went from 3.6% to 3.4% yesterday, and that's a pretty good move as moves go for Treasuries. Yet, the NASDAQ continued dropping. There was a massive number of new lows and nary a new high in the NASDAQ yesterday. None of it portends good things for the stock market. Oh, and oil prices are coming down nicely, so that should help the stock market. People have more money to spend, and that's good for retailers. Right? I mean, who wants to buy stocks in this environment? The proverbial bottom is about to fall out of the market, or at least that's the prevailing sentiment. Isn't that the best time to buy stocks?
I'm hitting a wall this morning. What else can I write about? Man, was yesterday the very definition of dreary or what? It was non-stop rain and fog the entire day. I had a few errands to run, so I was going here and there throughout it all. I had Christmas presents to drop off for the missus, so I took care of that by the dropoff cutoff at three in the afternoon. I brought the Ev man back to his place at Exeter but not before taking him grocery shopping. I wasn't about to have him sitting around at home without the means to go out and get himself some food if that was what he wanted to do. His car was going into the shop, so Ev was probably better off sitting around at his house than ours while waiting to hear back from the shop. The missus informed me when I got back home that Ev had forgotten his backpack in my car when I dropped him off. He had stuff in there that I knew he didn't want to be without, so back to his house, I went. While en route, the missus texted me that her mom needed a few things, so I stopped off in Exeter to do her bidding. I was a busy little bee!
Bumbles worked his magic behind the scenes and got the lesbian WNBA basketball player, Griner, out of the hoosgow in Russia just in time for Christmas. You know, that cunt who took a knee every time they played our national anthem. Never mind that Russia was holding a marine of ours and another person who might have qualified for an exit from that shithole of a country if only someone had asked. Bumbles never asked. No one in the Democrat party asked. Not one of the people working to secure the release of our Americans on Biden's team asked. It was so important that America, the greatest country on the face of God's green earth, work overtime to release a prisoner being held by the Russians that we were willing to hand over an arms dealer of significant ill repute. Let me be clear: He's a fucking killer. And we're trading this monster for a lesbian basketball player? This makes the Bo Bergdahl trade look like the best deal since, well, ever. It makes me sick and sad at the same time. It's just more bullshit coming out of our beloved White House with that fucking dolt, Biden, sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office.
I'm shocked, I'll tell you. Shocked! Just shocked. I went to pick up the Ev man's car from the shop last night, and the bill was just shy of $2k. Wut? I was so stunned that I didn't even ask why it was so expensive. I suppose I'll get around to looking at it someday but not now. Curiosity might finally get the best of me, and I'll be interested to know how much of the $2k bill went to parts and how much went to labor. Don't get me wrong; I trust the guy I'm dealing with, so that's not the issue. Yes, it's that damn check-engine light problem again. The car won't pass inspection unless I fix whatever it is that is triggering the light. He doesn't think the check-engine light has anything to do with my catalytic converters, so I thought he was going to fix the less costly of the two problems, and he'd send me on my way with a lovely new inspection sticker. Little did I know that the less costly option would be so expensive. The bad news is, I now have to drive the car around until the light comes back on, or doesn't come back on, to see if what he fixed needed to be fixed or was that just an uber-expensive way of narrowing down the things that really need to be fixed.
The backdrop to this story is that I had the dealership look at the car. They gave me an estimate of $11k to replace the catalytic converters. When I told my guy about that estimate, he told me that he didn't think it had anything to do with the converters and that I should bring it in and have him replace the oxygen sensors. He never told me how much that was going to cost me, and maybe he should have. It would have lessened the shock of getting a $2k bill just before Christmas. Is it possible that he charged me an arm and a leg and just disconnected the check-engine lights behind closed doors? I guess anything is possible. Maybe he knows that the lights are never going to come back on but can't tell me that because he'd be tipping his hand. That's me thinking happy thoughts because paying $2k to fix the problem without having to pay even more to fix the real problem, that is to say, the problem that he didn't maybe properly diagnose, would be just fine with me.
The missus told me that someone will be asking for my financial advice. I think the question will be about what to do with a sum of money. The person asking the question, as I understand it, typically chases stocks that are currently in an uptrend. She sees something going up, and it's all about wanting to get on that train before it leaves the station. Never mind that the stock she wants to buy is in a sector that is typically quite volatile and not for the faint of heart when all is said and done. The bigger picture these days, of course, is not a pretty one when it comes to the stock market and making investment decisions in general. Where do you put your money when most indices have lost 20-30% YTD, and the Fed is still trying to sort out how many more interest rate hikes are in the future? One piece of advice that she might not be expecting to hear me give is that gifting monies to her children and grandchildren might be the way to go. If she doesn't need the money, and if these monies will ultimately be left to her children someday, why not gift them the money and let them choose how they want to invest it?
I hate these mornings when I get up way too early. I'm constantly feeling the need to go back to bed, and maybe that doesn't go away until I either go back to bed or have a nap somewhere along the way. I also don't know what, if anything, this is going to do to help me get on with my blogging business this morning. Will I have the oomph to stay the course? Is there enough muddle between my ears to make sense one way or another of anything that I think I might like to put down on paper? Let's say that I'm just putting my best foot forward. Maybe having something to eat would help. And maybe it's just another distraction. Something to keep me from doing what I'm trying to do. I'm not sure that I have anything in the refrigerator that I want to snack on, so there's that. There's a reason that people don't typically eat things like turkey meatloaf for breakfast. I've got some of that, which was surprisingly good, by the way, but I'll not have it for breakfast. Not on your life.
The missus and I watched season one of the series "The White Lotus," and we're now in the middle of watching season two. It's the kind of show that reminds you how good it feels to have a good belly laugh. This show could have easily gone with ten episodes, but alas, there are only six. Six or fewer episodes work well when you're taking in a European murder mystery, but it works less well when you have a robust comedy on your hands that has viewers wanting more of the same with each passing episode. We're on episode five with one episode to go, and I have no idea how they are going to wrap it up in a nice little package. I hear that they are starting work on season three, so maybe wrapping it up ain't all that necessary. You do need to leave enough breadcrumbs on the forest floor, metaphorically speaking, so your audience can find their bearings when they sit down to a new season. For example, the guest list at the Villa in Palermo doesn't have to be the same, but it would be nice to see some of the same personalities return for another season. Binge, baby, binge!
The missus will be paying her friend in Massachusetts a visit tomorrow. This is the same individual whose home we visited recently, where the missus and I helped to set up his new iMac. I'll not be going along for the ride this time around, so I asked that she show him how to do a few things that should go a long way toward helping him to get up to speed in using his new device. Little things like knowing how to restart your computer somewhat regularly will help keep things up to snuff. If I've told the missus once, I've told her a thousand times, when things don't do what they are supposed to do on your computer, restarting your device usually fixes the problem. I also suggested that she revisit with him the issue of how to resize his windows when he has multiple windows open on his desktop. I added the application "Mission Control" to his list of applications in the dock that basically does the same thing, but I'm less than convinced that he's going to remember how to use that app. There are other things that I'm sure she can show him but not without running headlong into what is more commonly referred to as "The law of diminishing returns."
Oh, yes. The tree. We bought our Christmas tree yesterday. The lot in North Hampton had maybe four trees left when we drove by so that came as a bit of a surprise. It's only December 10th for chrissakes. What's the rush? The calculation we should be making is, how many weekends do we have left between now and Chrsitmas? We had no business going out on a weekend to buy our tree but there we were along with everyone else looking for that last minute beauty of a six-foot Blue Spruce or Balsam to bring home and put up in our living room. We were a little surprised to see so many trees still for sale in the lot in front of Planet Fitness when we had just came from the lot in North Hampton where they were sold out in short order. It wasn't long before we realized why. The trees in the lot in front of Planet Fitness were about the scrubbiest trees I've ever seen. The tallest tree we could find was barely over 5-feet tall and they looked to be very young if not immature. You could pick up any one of the trees with one hand without breaking a sweat. Truth be told, it was a little weird. Thankfully, we found one to our liking.
I've got my eye on the weather this morning. We've had maybe a flurry thus far in the last few weeks but we might get a coating to an inch or so today if the forecast holds true. Ordinarily, I don't get terribly excited about a bit of snow but the missus is driving into Massachusetts today so it's all hands on deck. It looks like she'll avoid it all if she can get out of town and back on the road by late afternoon or so. It's all wishful thinking at this point. If the forecast called for anything more than a flurry or so she would not be making this trip. My missus is a white-knuckle driver when it comes to driving in the snow. The route she drives is hellacious enough with adding snow to the mix. Here's hoping that there is sufficiently little snow such that it doesn't stick to the roadway due to the constant flow of traffic even if it does start to come down as forecasted.
We got a voicemail yesterday informing us that we''d won the lottery. All we needed to do now is to arrange to pay the taxes in advance of collecting our windfall. There was some additional messaging about providing our bank account information. Do you suppose some people think that this sort of offer is on the up and up? How many people found this sort of thing in their inbox? Is it simply a game of averages? You send it to a million people and a handful of those recipients end up giving away their information? I can see the elderly, the infirm, and the demented, you know, the Joe Biden's of the world, giving it a second look. Even then, it seemed a little brazen. Being the life-long grifter that he is, Bumbles would have recognized the scam even through the haze of his advanced dementia. It is sad, though, when you think of it. These scam arists preying on the weakest and frailest amongst us during the holiday season. Do they have no fucking shame? And don't give me any bullshit about robbing Peter to pay Paul. This ain't no Robinhood fantasy. It's criminal and they know it.
I was on Twitter yesterday when I came across a video posted by Tucker Carlson. It was a roughly eight-minute video of an on-air conversation that Tucker had with James Woods, the actor. I've seen a lot of posts (Tweets) on Twitter over time from James Woods that were critical of the establishment, and more often than not, he was taking the Biden Administration to task for this or that alleged malfeasance. Politically speaking, Mr. Woods has always struck me as a hardcore conservative in terms of the tweets that he posted. In fact, I was in agreement with the sum and substance of most of the tweets that he posted, so I wasn't surprised in the least when the fascistic whores of the old Twitter silenced his voice by banning him from the platform.
God forbid that someone like James Woods, with maybe millions of followers, should have a voice that was free to criticize and excoriate the likes of Joe and Hunter Biden for their alleged crimes and misdeeds while in office. His was one of many voices banned and silenced by the leftists at Twitter prior to Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter and in collaboration with governmental officials from every agency within our government. Elon Musk has now laid bare this poisonous conspiracy by releasing a tranche of e-mails and tweets between the parties involved. What I hadn't known, until I listened to the video posted by Tucker, was the extent of the efforts by the left to silence James Woods. The leftists in Hollywood, and now the leftists at Twitter, saw to it that James Woods would never work another day in his beloved craft that he had perfected over the course of some forty years. I could hear the tears welling up in his eyes as he recounted events. It was just so sad. Sad and powerful at the same time.
It's no fucking wonder that Hollywood is putting out so much schlock these days. If they are nothing more than a cauldron of communists, or a den of leftists if you will, what chance do we conservative types have of seeing something that isn't pure unadulterated propaganda from the left that pushes their filthy and perverted values on those of us who have the stomach to sit through one or more of their productions. Hope springs eternal, as they say, so you keep watching until you can't watch anymore. Maybe you start listening to podcasts or, if you have a good satellite radio service to listen to, you start listening to some conservative talk show hosts like Dennis Prager and others like him. In a pinch, you can listen to Sean Hannity or some of the other dolts that profess to be carrying water for the conservatives, when in fact, they are establishment shills and ratings whores at the end of the day. Where the hell is Rush Limbaugh when we need him?
I don't usually wake up with a hair across my tuckus like this, but I guess I wasn't wrong about the impact that the James Woods interview had on me. Does any of this have anything to do with our visit to see the Ev man yesterday? I'm talking about the tone of my writing. It has a certain down-for-the-count feel to it to me. You know, throwing in the towel and all the rest. It's what you see is what you get. I'm looking for a little light at the end of the tunnel, but I ain't seeing it. The missus and I paid the Ev man a visit, and we lent him a hand in sprucing up his joint. I told him to tell Brittany that this is how he wanted her to remember him. She's moving on to other things, and she would probably like nothing better than to remember the Ev man sitting pretty in his place, all tidied up and ready for whatever inspection might come his way. That's not how we found his place when we arrived, but it is certainly how we left his place by the time we closed the door behind us some two hours after we arrived. Mission accomplished.
I'm getting out of bed later than usual this morning. It's a very different vibe. I don't know that it lends itself to writing in this here blog so let me just put that out there. The day feels "underway," if you know what I mean. Like maybe I ought to be getting on to other things instead of sitting here trying to fill in the blanks in my blog. The missus is going off to her thing in Portsmouth soon, so maybe that will help. What about breakfast? Should I eat and then sit back down here and finish whatever it is that I'm trying to cook up? I'm listening to "My Girl" by the Temptations, and it's helping, but I'm not sure how much. Did I mention that Kirstie Alley died yesterday? You know, Kirstie Alley of "Cheers" fame. She died of complications from cancer. Who knew? She was another brave soul in Hollywood speaking truth to power when it came to her politics. A died-in-the-wool conservative, for what it was worth. Godspeed, Kirstie!
It is true, isn't it? If it had been Donald Trump Jr. who had dropped off his laptop and forgotten about it only to see it turn up in the news as a laptop filled with compromising materials involving drug deals, pay-to-play arrangements with the Communist Chinese Party, and pornographic pictures of underage girls, the media wouldn't be pushing the Russian disinformation card. They would be calling for the indictments and arrests of Don Jr and his father for collaborating with America's enemies to enrich themselves and their families. It would be non-stop. It would be "let's get the cuffs on them" 24/7. The Never-Trumpers would be wetting themselves with anticipation of a televised morning raid at Mar-a-Lago with CNN camera crews not far behind. It would be the mother of all clusterfucks. But, when it comes to the Biden Crime Family and our equally corrupt Intelligence agencies, it's fucking crickets. Or, it's Russian disinformation. It's "nothing to see here, folks." "Move along."
Whoa. Where did the rain come from? I always feel like I'm getting a day off when I wake up to a day when rain is in the forecast. Well, a day off from exercising anyway. Then again, I have a nice raincoat now, so can I really still take the day off from taking my usual bike ride? I'm going to play this one by ear. The Ev man is coming over today, so he and I may have a few things to take care of before we call it a day. I hope he's up for doing what I think we need to do. He is not always in the proper frame of mind to get things done, so, yes, that's a thing. Speaking of weather, I see that snow is in the forecast for next Monday. Forecasts can be a little tricky, but this one, if it comes to fruition, will deliver some 2-7 inches of snow. I'd better check my snowblowers.
The 2022 senatorial run-off election in Georgia has come and gone. Not to steal my own thunder but, wait for it, the Democrats stole another one. If you think I'm making this stuff up, answer this question: Why is it that the heavily democratic areas are always the last to report their vote counts on election night? I'll tell you why. It's because they have perfected the steal. All they ever need to do is to manufacture just enough votes to put their candidate over the top. They wait until the rest of the state's results are in, and, then, voila, they "find" the votes they need for their candidate. I'm not sure which area in Georgia pulled this off to put the wife-beating Marxist, Warnock, over the top because I could see it coming, and I just went to bed rather than stay up waiting to hear about his so-called "win." When will the Republicans wake up?
There are a lot of democratic senate seats coming up for re-election in 2024. So many, in fact that the Republicans are expecting to take back a few and regain a majority in the Senate. It already feels to me like a rehash of what just happened in the mid-terms when the Republicans were expecting to win way more seats than they actually did. The opposing party in the House and Senate always wins big in the mid-terms. Right? This time around, not so much. The problem for the Republicans, come 2024, is that they have failed to call out the democrats for the cheating thieves that they are, and they have effectively lost the moral ground to challenge any thievery, no matter how blatant and in your face, in 2024. I don't know how they catch any of these cheating mother fuckers red-handed so they can put them behind bars where they belong. Were you to ask a democrat why they steal so many elections, they might well tell you with a straight face that it's a small price to pay for saving our democracy.
The missus did a nice job shopping for her anonymous recipient this year. The recipient of her munificence this holiday season is a fifteen-year-old boy. That's all she knows about the lad. Oh, aside from some general information she needed before placing her orders online, that is. All I can say is, he was lucky to get my missus as his holiday benefactor. His mom will probably pass it all off as her gift to her son, and that's fine too. Or, maybe he still believes in Santa. His preferences, as provided by the people managing the secret Santa gig this year, seemed to suggest to me that the young man had a hankering for things that a young person half his age might ask for. That's okay too. It's not for us to judge. His mom requested a winter coat for the lad, but the missus could only muster up a warmish hoodie when all was said and done. It should suffice for all but the coldest of days. He may not even notice since he'll be knee-deep in unwrapping everything else my missus purchased on his behalf. File this under, "The Lord works in mysterious ways."
What's the deal with this FTX guy, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF)? Can someone tell me why this guy isn't in jail already? He ran what was effectively a Ponzi scheme if we're to believe what we see in the media. And then there was something about his co-mingling of customer funds which is a huge no-no in the world of finance. What about the countless people who lost their entire life's fortune investing and trading on Bankman-Fried's FTX platform? Do they not have a voice? As it turns out, SBF contributed to a lot of politicians over the past few years who would now be responsible for dragging his sorry ass before Congress. At a minimum, you might think that Congress has some responsibility to find out what happened to FTX under the mismanagement of Sam Bankman-Fried so they can pass reforms or whatever to protect investors going forward.
So, that's just how the system works. You grease enough palms in and around Washington, and you render yourself essentially untouchable. There is no question that SBF ingratiated himself with the Washington politicians to the tune of billions of dollars. We're not talking chump change here, folks. Bernie Madoff would more than likely be the toast of the town these days had he contributed to more politicians back in the day when he was stealing money left and right from unsuspecting family and friends. Just sayin'. Maxine Waters, that dimwit of a Congresswoman and Chairman of the Banking Committee from California, announced yesterday that she would not be subpoenaing Bankman-Fried for any hearings. Wut? She is also on video blowing kisses to this Wunderkind during one of his more recent trips to Washington. You can't make this stuff up.
Are we going to have a damn Santa Claus Rally in the stock market this year, or not? I mean, what the fuck. And now, we're starting to see even more evidence of financial ruination beneath the surface. Ordinarily, when Treasury yields come down, that's good for the stock market. The ten-year yield went from 3.6% to 3.4% yesterday, and that's a pretty good move as moves go for Treasuries. Yet, the NASDAQ continued dropping. There was a massive number of new lows and nary a new high in the NASDAQ yesterday. None of it portends good things for the stock market. Oh, and oil prices are coming down nicely, so that should help the stock market. People have more money to spend, and that's good for retailers. Right? I mean, who wants to buy stocks in this environment? The proverbial bottom is about to fall out of the market, or at least that's the prevailing sentiment. Isn't that the best time to buy stocks?
I'm hitting a wall this morning. What else can I write about? Man, was yesterday the very definition of dreary or what? It was non-stop rain and fog the entire day. I had a few errands to run, so I was going here and there throughout it all. I had Christmas presents to drop off for the missus, so I took care of that by the dropoff cutoff at three in the afternoon. I brought the Ev man back to his place at Exeter but not before taking him grocery shopping. I wasn't about to have him sitting around at home without the means to go out and get himself some food if that was what he wanted to do. His car was going into the shop, so Ev was probably better off sitting around at his house than ours while waiting to hear back from the shop. The missus informed me when I got back home that Ev had forgotten his backpack in my car when I dropped him off. He had stuff in there that I knew he didn't want to be without, so back to his house, I went. While en route, the missus texted me that her mom needed a few things, so I stopped off in Exeter to do her bidding. I was a busy little bee!
Bumbles worked his magic behind the scenes and got the lesbian WNBA basketball player, Griner, out of the hoosgow in Russia just in time for Christmas. You know, that cunt who took a knee every time they played our national anthem. Never mind that Russia was holding a marine of ours and another person who might have qualified for an exit from that shithole of a country if only someone had asked. Bumbles never asked. No one in the Democrat party asked. Not one of the people working to secure the release of our Americans on Biden's team asked. It was so important that America, the greatest country on the face of God's green earth, work overtime to release a prisoner being held by the Russians that we were willing to hand over an arms dealer of significant ill repute. Let me be clear: He's a fucking killer. And we're trading this monster for a lesbian basketball player? This makes the Bo Bergdahl trade look like the best deal since, well, ever. It makes me sick and sad at the same time. It's just more bullshit coming out of our beloved White House with that fucking dolt, Biden, sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office.
I'm shocked, I'll tell you. Shocked! Just shocked. I went to pick up the Ev man's car from the shop last night, and the bill was just shy of $2k. Wut? I was so stunned that I didn't even ask why it was so expensive. I suppose I'll get around to looking at it someday but not now. Curiosity might finally get the best of me, and I'll be interested to know how much of the $2k bill went to parts and how much went to labor. Don't get me wrong; I trust the guy I'm dealing with, so that's not the issue. Yes, it's that damn check-engine light problem again. The car won't pass inspection unless I fix whatever it is that is triggering the light. He doesn't think the check-engine light has anything to do with my catalytic converters, so I thought he was going to fix the less costly of the two problems, and he'd send me on my way with a lovely new inspection sticker. Little did I know that the less costly option would be so expensive. The bad news is, I now have to drive the car around until the light comes back on, or doesn't come back on, to see if what he fixed needed to be fixed or was that just an uber-expensive way of narrowing down the things that really need to be fixed.
The backdrop to this story is that I had the dealership look at the car. They gave me an estimate of $11k to replace the catalytic converters. When I told my guy about that estimate, he told me that he didn't think it had anything to do with the converters and that I should bring it in and have him replace the oxygen sensors. He never told me how much that was going to cost me, and maybe he should have. It would have lessened the shock of getting a $2k bill just before Christmas. Is it possible that he charged me an arm and a leg and just disconnected the check-engine lights behind closed doors? I guess anything is possible. Maybe he knows that the lights are never going to come back on but can't tell me that because he'd be tipping his hand. That's me thinking happy thoughts because paying $2k to fix the problem without having to pay even more to fix the real problem, that is to say, the problem that he didn't maybe properly diagnose, would be just fine with me.
The missus told me that someone will be asking for my financial advice. I think the question will be about what to do with a sum of money. The person asking the question, as I understand it, typically chases stocks that are currently in an uptrend. She sees something going up, and it's all about wanting to get on that train before it leaves the station. Never mind that the stock she wants to buy is in a sector that is typically quite volatile and not for the faint of heart when all is said and done. The bigger picture these days, of course, is not a pretty one when it comes to the stock market and making investment decisions in general. Where do you put your money when most indices have lost 20-30% YTD, and the Fed is still trying to sort out how many more interest rate hikes are in the future? One piece of advice that she might not be expecting to hear me give is that gifting monies to her children and grandchildren might be the way to go. If she doesn't need the money, and if these monies will ultimately be left to her children someday, why not gift them the money and let them choose how they want to invest it?
I hate these mornings when I get up way too early. I'm constantly feeling the need to go back to bed, and maybe that doesn't go away until I either go back to bed or have a nap somewhere along the way. I also don't know what, if anything, this is going to do to help me get on with my blogging business this morning. Will I have the oomph to stay the course? Is there enough muddle between my ears to make sense one way or another of anything that I think I might like to put down on paper? Let's say that I'm just putting my best foot forward. Maybe having something to eat would help. And maybe it's just another distraction. Something to keep me from doing what I'm trying to do. I'm not sure that I have anything in the refrigerator that I want to snack on, so there's that. There's a reason that people don't typically eat things like turkey meatloaf for breakfast. I've got some of that, which was surprisingly good, by the way, but I'll not have it for breakfast. Not on your life.
The missus and I watched season one of the series "The White Lotus," and we're now in the middle of watching season two. It's the kind of show that reminds you how good it feels to have a good belly laugh. This show could have easily gone with ten episodes, but alas, there are only six. Six or fewer episodes work well when you're taking in a European murder mystery, but it works less well when you have a robust comedy on your hands that has viewers wanting more of the same with each passing episode. We're on episode five with one episode to go, and I have no idea how they are going to wrap it up in a nice little package. I hear that they are starting work on season three, so maybe wrapping it up ain't all that necessary. You do need to leave enough breadcrumbs on the forest floor, metaphorically speaking, so your audience can find their bearings when they sit down to a new season. For example, the guest list at the Villa in Palermo doesn't have to be the same, but it would be nice to see some of the same personalities return for another season. Binge, baby, binge!
The missus will be paying her friend in Massachusetts a visit tomorrow. This is the same individual whose home we visited recently, where the missus and I helped to set up his new iMac. I'll not be going along for the ride this time around, so I asked that she show him how to do a few things that should go a long way toward helping him to get up to speed in using his new device. Little things like knowing how to restart your computer somewhat regularly will help keep things up to snuff. If I've told the missus once, I've told her a thousand times, when things don't do what they are supposed to do on your computer, restarting your device usually fixes the problem. I also suggested that she revisit with him the issue of how to resize his windows when he has multiple windows open on his desktop. I added the application "Mission Control" to his list of applications in the dock that basically does the same thing, but I'm less than convinced that he's going to remember how to use that app. There are other things that I'm sure she can show him but not without running headlong into what is more commonly referred to as "The law of diminishing returns."
Oh, yes. The tree. We bought our Christmas tree yesterday. The lot in North Hampton had maybe four trees left when we drove by so that came as a bit of a surprise. It's only December 10th for chrissakes. What's the rush? The calculation we should be making is, how many weekends do we have left between now and Chrsitmas? We had no business going out on a weekend to buy our tree but there we were along with everyone else looking for that last minute beauty of a six-foot Blue Spruce or Balsam to bring home and put up in our living room. We were a little surprised to see so many trees still for sale in the lot in front of Planet Fitness when we had just came from the lot in North Hampton where they were sold out in short order. It wasn't long before we realized why. The trees in the lot in front of Planet Fitness were about the scrubbiest trees I've ever seen. The tallest tree we could find was barely over 5-feet tall and they looked to be very young if not immature. You could pick up any one of the trees with one hand without breaking a sweat. Truth be told, it was a little weird. Thankfully, we found one to our liking.
I've got my eye on the weather this morning. We've had maybe a flurry thus far in the last few weeks but we might get a coating to an inch or so today if the forecast holds true. Ordinarily, I don't get terribly excited about a bit of snow but the missus is driving into Massachusetts today so it's all hands on deck. It looks like she'll avoid it all if she can get out of town and back on the road by late afternoon or so. It's all wishful thinking at this point. If the forecast called for anything more than a flurry or so she would not be making this trip. My missus is a white-knuckle driver when it comes to driving in the snow. The route she drives is hellacious enough with adding snow to the mix. Here's hoping that there is sufficiently little snow such that it doesn't stick to the roadway due to the constant flow of traffic even if it does start to come down as forecasted.
We got a voicemail yesterday informing us that we''d won the lottery. All we needed to do now is to arrange to pay the taxes in advance of collecting our windfall. There was some additional messaging about providing our bank account information. Do you suppose some people think that this sort of offer is on the up and up? How many people found this sort of thing in their inbox? Is it simply a game of averages? You send it to a million people and a handful of those recipients end up giving away their information? I can see the elderly, the infirm, and the demented, you know, the Joe Biden's of the world, giving it a second look. Even then, it seemed a little brazen. Being the life-long grifter that he is, Bumbles would have recognized the scam even through the haze of his advanced dementia. It is sad, though, when you think of it. These scam arists preying on the weakest and frailest amongst us during the holiday season. Do they have no fucking shame? And don't give me any bullshit about robbing Peter to pay Paul. This ain't no Robinhood fantasy. It's criminal and they know it.
Body Double
04/12/22 07:01
What, pray tell, will be grist for the mill this week, my friends? I'm sitting here with a completely open mind on a fine Monday morning. It's how I start every week, truth be told. Every week when I sit down to put something in this here blog, anyway. I've got my little personal heater running on high on the floor next to my feet, and it feels good. It's not all that cold out, maybe 46 degrees, give or take, but we turn off the furnace during the night, so there's a certain chill in the air when I get out of bed in the morning. Temperatures rarely get into the forties in the house overnight, but even the low fifties can have me reaching for a jacket when I get out of bed and, in a pinch, maybe a hat. And then I think of all the Ukrainians who are waking up inside their homes this morning without power and, in many instances, without running water. Damn.
This story in the news about Trump sitting down to dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Kanye West (Ye) and some White Nationalist, Nick Fuentes, is weird. You'd think that Trump sat down with the devil himself the way the left-wing media is going after him. They have one job between now and Election Day in 2024: To destroy Trump and to take him off the playing field where presidential politics are front and center. This is as good a place as any to start, I suppose. It's self-imposed, if you want to know the truth. I mean, Trump didn't have people watching his back when these clowns showed up at his home in Florida? Now, this is all anyone is talking about, and each and every republican in the Grand Ole Party will be asked to disavow Trump's sit-down with Fuentes the racist, Fuentes the White Nationalist, Fuentes the Jew-hater. It will be relentless.
I don't hear Trump threatening to release the tape of the dinner, so I have to believe that there's some truth to what's being reported. Where is Donald J Trump, the master counter-puncher? Where are his children and the former first lady, Melania? Is there no one willing to step into the fray to deflect the jabs and the uppercuts being thrown left and right at the President? All of the people hoping to run against him, the ones who have yet to announce their candidacies, are likely sitting back, watching this clusterfuck unfold, and just smacking their lips at the deliciousness of it all. Can you blame them? Keep in mind that Biden continues to do the bidding of the Communist Chinese, the bidding of the Russians, and he even signed off on Chevron's assisting Maduro, the leftist in Venezuela, in getting Venezuela's oil out of the ground. What do we hear from the media? It's fucking crickets.
It's like all of a sudden. There are Christmas Tree lots popping up everywhere. The missus and I went to Tuttles in Dover yesterday, where they were selling trees in the back lot at what seemed to me to be reasonable prices. If we had had more space in the car, we would have walked away with a tree. I don't think we've ever bought a Christmas tree this early in the season, so I'll just throw that out there. I'm not sure what it means, but the expression "striking while the iron is hot" comes to mind. It's like all of these Black Friday deals. You get them while the getting is good. Otherwise, you might not get them at all. Now, it's just a matter of time before we buy a tree. Half the battle is deciding when and where you are going to get the tree. We've got the "when" part down, now all we need is the "where" piece in order to complete the puzzle.
My neighbor stopped by yesterday with a nice serving or two of her homemade chili. I've not had any, but the missus says it was quite good and asked that I get the recipe so we can make a batch or two of our own. I can do that. She, our neighbor, talked a bit about problems she's having with her furnace. She's been using space heaters to stay warm since her furnace isn't working properly. She said something about it running okay, but it doesn't turn off when it should. She has a guy looking at it who has yet to sort out the specific problem so he can apply the appropriate fix or fixes. She also said something about her oil delivery company being too expensive, and that is why she isn't having them do the fixing. I had no sage advice to offer other than to tell her we had an extra space heater should she need it. She wasn't expecting much more from me, so she was likely not disappointed one way or another. Sometimes, I think it helps to just talk about things. Having someone listen helps too.
I'm not sure what to think of this whole recession thing that they keep talking about. How can you have a recession when unemployment rates are at an all-time low, oil prices are coming down by the day, interest rates are going up but not having the desired effect on home sales, and we just experienced a blockbuster of a Black Friday over the Thanksgiving weekend? If the Fed is supposed to be bringing down inflation by dampening demand with higher interest rates, it ain't working. Where do we go from here? Does the Fed raise interest rates by a full percentage point at their next meeting? How much more "pain" does the Fed need to inflict on the general public before they achieve their version of a soft landing? As to the impact of all of this on the stock market, even the experts can't agree at the moment on whether we're knee-deep in a Bear Market Rally or on the cusp of a new Bull Market.
Will we or will we not have a Santa Rally? The S&P is down roughly 15% YTD, so there's no question that folks following their 401k's would like to see a mother of all rallies unfold in the final weeks going into year-end. The Tech stocks have underperformed both the S&P and the DJIA year-to-date, so it would be nice to see the NASDAQ take a bit of a leadership role here. Without the NASDAQ getting back in the game, we're likely heading lower. Some say that as long as the Fed is raising interest rates, there will be no resumption of the bull market. Maybe we go sideways in the indices for a while until this all gets sorted out. I thought we might see more of a bump in the market when the republicans took the majority in the House of Representatives; You know how the stock market loves gridlock in the halls of Congress. Maybe it was priced in way back when.
What the hell is going on in China? The populace is up in arms over the heavy-handed tactics of the CCP if what I see in our media is correct. They (The American media) are bought and paid for by the CCP, so I suppose I should be taking all of it with a grain of salt. You know who else is bought and paid for by the CCP? That's right. I'm talking about Joey Bumbles Biden and the Biden Crime Family. You would think that Joey, who goes on endlessly about women's rights and the rights of the marginalized communities here in the US, would have a word or two to say about the suppression of the Chinese people. He's said nothing. Zippo. Notta. He's the first in line to get behind the "My Body, My Choice" movement, yet, when it comes to the bodies and choices of Chinese women, Joey tows the line for his CCP paymasters. He says nothing. Not one goddamn word.
As a country, we are either the shining city on the hill, or we're not. We either speak for the downtrodden and the repressed across the face of our planet, or we don't. It is particularly pathetic when you see the president of our great country taking a knee and kowtowing to the ruthless dictators of the world while they kill and silence their citizenry with their brutal tactics. These putrid fucks, from Joey Biden to the cucks in Hollywood and most of the democrats in our Congress who have taken and continue to take money from the CCP for their silence, are more than reprehensible when they say nothing. I'm embarrassed as an American citizen but not surprised since I'm well aware of the corruption that exists inside and outside our government. That is why it is so important for the new Congress to start the hearings about the Biden Crime Family and their connection with the CCP. The corruption needs to be exposed root and branch so it can be excised like the festering tumor from the American psyche that it is.
I should probably hold Apple's feet to the fire here as well. When you sign up to do business in a country like China, you essentially sell your soul just to get your feet in the door. Businesses like Apple often look the other way while profits trump human rights each and every time. I'm not aware of any country that has been considered off-limits by Apple due to its dismal record on human rights. That said, Apple is one of the more woke organizations here in our country, and they are on the front lines when it comes to vocalizing their support for the rights of the marginalized. You might expect them to have a supportive word or two about the citizens in China who make their products in factories with child labor and under very difficult circumstances. You would be wrong. The hypocrisy of Apple, staying silent while China's citizenry takes to the streets these past few days to protest their country's dismal record on human rights, as a woke corporation, is astoundingly rich.
I'm not quite sure that I understand what's going on between Apple and Elon Musk (Twitter.) I think Apple is threatening to take the Twitter application off the Apple Store if Elon Musk goes forward with his promise to release certain communications that will allegedly expose those organizations, people, and government officials who conspired with Twitter prior to Musk's purchase of the company to silence voices or to further certain narratives designed to deceive or distract the public. I think that's it in a nutshell. It sounds like Apple has some skin in the game here. It sounds like Apple is willing to do everything it can to stop Musk from going forward with his plans. Musk countered with a threat to produce his own phone that would go head-to-head with Apple's iPhone. You gotta love Musk's resolve. Hit em where it hurts, Elon! Crash the fucking joint and never look back. Before I go full Musk fanboy here, I think I'd like to know a little bit more about Musk's relationship, if any, with the CCP.
Did you see the video of Biden's nitwit of a Press Secretary at the podium yesterday? I could hardly believe my ears. I'm talking about Jean Pierre, or whatever her name is. She's the black lesbian Haitian press secretary who was hired, not for her skills and experience as a press secretary, but because of the color of her skin and the leftist ideology to which she subscribes. I'll cut to the chase. She was going on and on about the three American winners of the NOBEL prizes recently awarded, but she kept referring to the NOBLE prizes without missing a beat. I'm thinking to myself, what the bloody hell? How much more of this inept and indulgently corrupt Biden Administration are we going to have to endure? If we needed one more example of their sheer ineptness, this was it. Can you imagine how the winners felt hearing her mispronounce one of the more prestigious awards that one can receive? Were they in the audience? God, I hope not.
I wonder how the good people in Arizona who voted for Kari Lake feel today now that the Board of Supervisors in Maricopa County has certified the election for Katie Hobbs. It was heart-wrenching to watch all the Arizonans who voted for Ms. Lake plead their cases in front of the Board of Supervisors. You couldn't possibly watch those performances and walk away thinking that the election was on the up and up. The Democrats knew exactly what they had to do. They listened to the Republican pundits on radio and television as they encouraged Republican voters to wait and cast their votes on Election Day since that was likely to make it more difficult for the Democrats to steal the election. Democrats had voted early and often and had banked a large percentage of the overall vote by the time Election Day arrived. If the Democrats could gum up the works on Election Day, which they did masterfully, they could essentially prevent the Republicans from running up the numbers they needed to put Kari Lake over the top. Mission accomplished.
You might say that the Republicans made their bed, and they should now have to sleep in that bed. It's a shitty metaphor, I'll admit. That said, here we are. The question that we now have to ask is, what the hell is it going to take to have a judge agree with the voters in Arizona who have been screaming from the rooftops that their election was stolen? One possible remedy is to have a re-count in Maricopa County, where most of the alleged malfeasance took place. Surely, they have the receipts they need to make their case. And, those "receipts" cannot just be the people who showed up at the Board of Supervisors meeting to vent their frustration. They need real receipts. I know judges are remiss to redo elections without clear and convincing evidence that there was criminal intent involved in the process, but it seems that a re-count would be a reasonable remedy at a minimum, given the number of voters who signed an affidavit stating that they never had a chance to vote.
There is a lot at stake should the election results, as certified, stand in the final analysis. Some people believe that if Arizona ends up with a Democratic governor, all bets are off come 2024. In other words, it will make it even more difficult for a Republican to win the state in 2024 when the presidential elections are held. I don't think it's possible for a Republican to win the presidency without winning Arizona, electorally speaking. Someone will have to explain to me why having a Democratic governor makes a difference in who wins and who doesn't win a federal election. Are they saying that a Democratic governor can somehow skew the results of a federal election? Are they saying that having a democratic governor in place makes it easier for the democrats to steal the election? If we're to learn anything from this election in Arizona, assuming Katie Hobbs wins, it is that it didn't hurt to have a democrat like Katie Hobbs as Secretary of State when the votes were tallied (or not). The same might well be true come 2024 were Ms. Hobbs to be sworn in as Governor. I think I just answered my own question.
It's hard to believe. Tomorrow is December 1st. It's a steely grey out of doors as I look over my shoulder and across to my neighbor's yard. It's not Winter yet, but we're getting there. We have another twenty-one days to go before we start to see more daylight with each passing day instead of less. I'm feeling good about all the yard work that I've done in the last month or so, and that will have us sitting pretty once the snow starts to fall. I've added black sunflower to my nuts and berries mix in my bird feeders, and that seems to go a bit further than did a straightforward nuts and berries blend. I still have a bit of work left to do to square away the garage, and daytime temperatures are not so cold that working in the garage is a hardship. Not even close, actually. I put a little string of lights on the tree across the street from our home last year and was pleased to find out that all I needed to get them up and running this year was a new set of batteries. Never mind that the tree is on someone else's property. It's an unbuildable lot, actually, and the owners live in another state. A little more cheer never hurts.
I love these stories that you find out about after the fact and that have you scratching your head. So, Bumbles Biden and his entourage were paying a visit to a little island off the coast of Massachusetts recently called Nantucket. While on the island, they rented or otherwise secured the use of several vehicles that were theirs to use for the duration of their visit. After Bumbles and his minions departed the island, all five of the vehicles, having been parked at the airport, were summarily torched and destroyed. I use the word "torched" advisedly because no one is reporting on how the vehicles actually caught fire. In fact, I think that had I not seen the story in one of my feeds on Twitter, I might not have seen this story in the main street media. Make no mistake about it. That was by design.
It seems reasonable to me to be curious, at a minimum, about how it came to be that the entire fleet of vehicles was destroyed in the fire. Was the fire set? What were they trying to hide? What did Bumbles know, and when did he know it? One little nugget coming out is that Biden never personally used the vehicles in question. Now, why would they release that piece of information? Is it because they want to give Bumbles plausible deniability? Do they want to make sure that his press secretary also has plausible deniability once the press starts to pepper her with questions about the matter? Is there even a remote possibility that someone didn't want any DNA taken from one or more of the vehicles for fear that someone would find out that the man appearing here and there on the island as Bumbles Biden isn't really Bumbles Biden at all?
I know it sounds terribly conspiratorial, but it makes sense when you consider the fact that Bumbles couldn't even find the restroom in the Oval Office at the time of his inauguration. We're talking about advanced dementia here, folks. That reminds me. When was the last time this dope stood at the podium to take questions from the media? You know, like a real press conference? Every president in recent memory has stood at the podium every six months to take questions from the media about the state of our affairs. Not so for Bumbles. His lapdogs in the media have stopped asking why he doesn't do pressers. They know he's incapable of doing them. How much more evidence do we need before someone says something about the fact that this clown running around as Joey Bumbles Biden isn't actually Joe Biden at all? You know, Joe Biden from Scranton. Is the fire in Nantucket starting to make more sense now?
Is it me, or does something smell foul when it comes to the Biden Administration and the douchebag Zelensky in Ukraine? Is this the biggest money laundering operation in the history of money laundering? I wouldn't give that little money grubber another nickel without subjecting him and his immediate family to a forensic audit first. You know he's skimming billions right off the top, and it's likely sitting in some Switzerland bank account and out of reach of the auditors. Who the hell are these go-along-to-get-along politicians in our country who have been approving these money transfers to one of the most corrupt countries on the face of the planet? This has stink written all over it. You know Zelensky is going for the big enchilada when he talks openly about reconstruction and the trillions that will be required to fund said reconstruction. Over my fucking dead body, is what I say. I hope the new Republican Congress grows a pair and tells the little fuck, Zelensky, that he's on his own from here on in. There, I said it.
I've got a bad feeling about the run-off race in Georgia this coming Tuesday between Herschel Walker and Senator Warnock. The Democrats have taken stealing elections to a whole new level. There's no reason to think that they aren't bringing those very same skills and that very same set of political safecracking tools to the race in Georgia. They likely have a trunkload of two or more pre-filled ballots ready to go the minute the counting starts in halls and counties across the great peach state. They will only come out, of course, should Senator Warnock come up short in counties where he was expected to win or otherwise do well. Warnock's Senate seat, should he prevail, will give the democrats a one-seat majority in the Senate and, consequently, it is a seat worth stealing. You simply can't leave these things to sort themselves out anymore. There's too much at stake. God forbid the Republicans have a thing or two up their sleeves to thwart the thievery of the Democrats. There's something to be said for striking while the iron's hot.
The missus and I will be going down to Massachusetts today to wrap up the PC-to-iMac conversion that we started a couple of weeks back. The worse part of the whole schtick has been the drive down and back. What we'd hoped would be a one-trip down there to do this job turned into a two-trip instead. It's not the end of the world, but if I had my druthers, I'd not be making this trip today. Friday is no day to be driving into Boston because traffic is typically at its worse on Friday. It's just a massive snarl-fest. Maybe we can avoid some of it by going down a bit after the morning rush. I guess we'll see how that turns out. Anyway, if we can get the printer squared away, the Microsoft Office subscription moved over, and get his Carbonite up and running on his new computer, I think we can consider the trip a success.
Just another word or two on Ye. I'm not a fan of Kanye West, but I do think he knows how to manipulate the media. I can't even name a song that he's put out, and I suspect there have been more than a few of them. I don't think he did Trump any favors by showing up at Mar-a-Lago with a self-professed White Nationalist. I'm referring to this Fuentes guy. He's yet another person that I've never heard of. I have to agree with folks who say that this trip to Mar-a-Lago was a concerted effort on the part of Kanye and Fuentes to take down Trump. If Kanye was looking to take down Trump in order to better position himself in the race for the presidency, it was a nice try, but it was destined for failure. It's going to take more than a couple of thugs from the hood to take out Trump. Now, in recent days, Kanye is on tape saying something about liking Hitler. The guy doesn't know when to stop. It's no surprise that Musk had to step in and ban him from Twitter. The last thing that Musk wants, or needs, is to have his platform, Twitter, squarely in the crosshairs of the left for providing a platform for hate speech.
Did y'all see that televised handshake between President Macron of France and Bumbles Biden? It was fucking cringeworthy. Bumbles wouldn't let go of Macron's hand, and it was a good 45 seconds or so before Macron could free himself from the grips of the old man. All of this took place in full view of the audience, who had to wonder, to a person, what the bejeesus were they seeing unfold before their eyes? Where was Dr. Jill when he needed her? Who could intervene and save both Bumbles and Macron from what was quickly turning into a national, if not global, embarrassment? What the hell was Macron thinking? Imagine staring into the vacant eyes of an old demented, and senile man who has your hand in a death grip and won't let go despite your best efforts. Now imagine that this horror show is unfolding on national television. If you're Macron, you have to be seeing your future flashing before your eyes. He had to be wondering why he ever made the trip.
Bumbles and his boys played that one well, don't you think? I'm referring to his forgiving college loans to the tune of $10k for those who qualified and, better yet, $20k for those with Pell grants/loans. This was nothing more than a blatant effort to buy votes in advance of the mid-term elections. It all sounded so good. If you were laboring beneath a mountain of debt related to loans you took out to get an education, Bumbles was there to help you. It wasn't much, but $10k goes a long way when you don't have two nickels to rub together in the middle of a recession. He was Bumbles the beneficence. It didn't matter that what Bumbles was doing was unconstitutional. Most people weren't any the wiser. He would say, as only Bumbles could, I'll "work it out." The only problem with all of this is that Bumbles knew all too well that what he was offering was not in his wheelhouse to offer. It didn't matter. You beg, borrow, and steal, and you do whatever it takes to win the next election. This is who they (Democrats) are.
The mid-term election has now come and gone. The Supreme Court announced yesterday that they will be reviewing Biden's plan to forgive loans in the February 2023 session. With a six-three majority, the conservatives on the court will have the final say on Biden's plan. I think it's a foregone conclusion that Biden will get the pants-down spanking he deserves for offering to lessen the loans of so many Americans when he knew full he didn't have the authority to do it. Imagine thinking that you were going to get a reprieve of sorts on the college loans you took out all those years ago, only to find out now that it was nothing more than a pig in a poke. Bumbles did it because he expected to benefit from it at the polls. We all know politicians like Biden and just how sleazy they can be when it comes to lining their own pockets and advancing their own interests. None of it really matters anymore since Bumbles will likely not even remember making the promise by the time the Supremes hear the case. He barely remembers what he has for breakfast most days. God help us all.
Fast forward 12 hours, and I have to say, it was a long day yesterday down in Massachusetts. Thankfully, we ran into less traffic than usual both ways. We got hung up a bit when we hit a traffic jam on the way home but sitting in a snarl of traffic was a welcome reprieve to the otherwise helter-skelter nature of the rush hour traffic. They don't call it "rush" hour for nothing. Completing the set-up of the computer went well, and I think we accomplished everything we wanted to accomplish. These things always take longer than you think they are going to take, and this particular job, and I hesitate to call it a job because we were doing it for a friend, was no exception. I never anticipated having to drive down a second time to finish things up. It was instructive in the sense that it was a reminder to me of what the missus has to go through every time she makes the trip down there. I might want to make the case going forward that while it may have been profitable for the missus to make these trips from time to time to assist an old friend in the past, the risk-benefit profile all these years later is now skewing riskier than not with age being the most important consideration. Everything is more difficult when you get older. Well, almost everything.
I think it's great that the person we helped is getting a new computer with all the bells and whistles that you get when you buy a Mac. When you consider the fact that his new Mac is replacing an older PC, it paints an even prettier picture. That said, putting all of that power in the hands of someone who is no longer able to take advantage of the power that the computer wields is another story altogether. His shortcomings are almost entirely age-related, so there's literally nothing to be done. At best, I hope that he finds a way to do the few things that he enjoys doing, and by doing them over and over again, he will get the satisfaction that he's looking for from his new device. We're talking about sending and receiving e-mails, using Office applications like Word, checking this and that website, placing orders on the Amazon website, etc. He seems to have a good level of tolerance for his own inadequacies, so I don't see him getting overly frustrated, and that's a good thing. I assured him that the missus and I are but a phone call away should he have any problems that he can't resolve by himself. Driving back down there should be a last resort.
What the heck is Mr. Elon up to this time? I'm talking about Elon Musk. He's dredging up and exposing everything that was done by the previous people who ran Twitter, in conjunction with people inside and outside of Twitter, to suppress news that would be viewed as detrimental to the campaign to get Joe Biden elected in the 2020 presidential race against Donald J Trump. I guess if you're wanting to put yourself out there as a public square of sorts, it would behoove you to come clean about what those before you did and didn't do when they were in charge of the same so-called public square. You could say that Twitter's suppression of the Hunter laptop story was Exhibit A. That alone might may well have altered the outcome of the election and, ultimately, the direction of our country in the aftermath of the Biden inauguration. Is it possible that Russia might not have invaded Ukraine if Trump were still president? Indeed, it is.
I don't think there's any question that what Elon Musk is doing in revealing all of Twitter's past sins, especially in conjunction with the efforts by our own government to prevent Donald Trump from getting a second term, has put him at great personal and professional risk. He doesn't seem to care, so that's a good thing. Then again, will we ever know everything there is to know, or will we have to take what he's telling us with a grain of salt. I'm going to wait to see if the frauds and the freaks from the Deep State are exposed before taking a full measure of what I think it is that Musk is wanting to accomplish. Until then, I remain a fan of the man, but a skeptical fan of the man. The Deep State might be perfectly happy to see all of this fall on Joe Biden's doorstep. Everyone knows that Scranton Joe has been bought and sold many times over in his fifty years in public service. More self-service than public service, you might say, but corrupt to the core nonetheless. Maybe this is the final straw that gives us the even more corrupt, and twice as stupid if that's possible, President Kamala Harris.
This story in the news about Trump sitting down to dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Kanye West (Ye) and some White Nationalist, Nick Fuentes, is weird. You'd think that Trump sat down with the devil himself the way the left-wing media is going after him. They have one job between now and Election Day in 2024: To destroy Trump and to take him off the playing field where presidential politics are front and center. This is as good a place as any to start, I suppose. It's self-imposed, if you want to know the truth. I mean, Trump didn't have people watching his back when these clowns showed up at his home in Florida? Now, this is all anyone is talking about, and each and every republican in the Grand Ole Party will be asked to disavow Trump's sit-down with Fuentes the racist, Fuentes the White Nationalist, Fuentes the Jew-hater. It will be relentless.
I don't hear Trump threatening to release the tape of the dinner, so I have to believe that there's some truth to what's being reported. Where is Donald J Trump, the master counter-puncher? Where are his children and the former first lady, Melania? Is there no one willing to step into the fray to deflect the jabs and the uppercuts being thrown left and right at the President? All of the people hoping to run against him, the ones who have yet to announce their candidacies, are likely sitting back, watching this clusterfuck unfold, and just smacking their lips at the deliciousness of it all. Can you blame them? Keep in mind that Biden continues to do the bidding of the Communist Chinese, the bidding of the Russians, and he even signed off on Chevron's assisting Maduro, the leftist in Venezuela, in getting Venezuela's oil out of the ground. What do we hear from the media? It's fucking crickets.
It's like all of a sudden. There are Christmas Tree lots popping up everywhere. The missus and I went to Tuttles in Dover yesterday, where they were selling trees in the back lot at what seemed to me to be reasonable prices. If we had had more space in the car, we would have walked away with a tree. I don't think we've ever bought a Christmas tree this early in the season, so I'll just throw that out there. I'm not sure what it means, but the expression "striking while the iron is hot" comes to mind. It's like all of these Black Friday deals. You get them while the getting is good. Otherwise, you might not get them at all. Now, it's just a matter of time before we buy a tree. Half the battle is deciding when and where you are going to get the tree. We've got the "when" part down, now all we need is the "where" piece in order to complete the puzzle.
My neighbor stopped by yesterday with a nice serving or two of her homemade chili. I've not had any, but the missus says it was quite good and asked that I get the recipe so we can make a batch or two of our own. I can do that. She, our neighbor, talked a bit about problems she's having with her furnace. She's been using space heaters to stay warm since her furnace isn't working properly. She said something about it running okay, but it doesn't turn off when it should. She has a guy looking at it who has yet to sort out the specific problem so he can apply the appropriate fix or fixes. She also said something about her oil delivery company being too expensive, and that is why she isn't having them do the fixing. I had no sage advice to offer other than to tell her we had an extra space heater should she need it. She wasn't expecting much more from me, so she was likely not disappointed one way or another. Sometimes, I think it helps to just talk about things. Having someone listen helps too.
I'm not sure what to think of this whole recession thing that they keep talking about. How can you have a recession when unemployment rates are at an all-time low, oil prices are coming down by the day, interest rates are going up but not having the desired effect on home sales, and we just experienced a blockbuster of a Black Friday over the Thanksgiving weekend? If the Fed is supposed to be bringing down inflation by dampening demand with higher interest rates, it ain't working. Where do we go from here? Does the Fed raise interest rates by a full percentage point at their next meeting? How much more "pain" does the Fed need to inflict on the general public before they achieve their version of a soft landing? As to the impact of all of this on the stock market, even the experts can't agree at the moment on whether we're knee-deep in a Bear Market Rally or on the cusp of a new Bull Market.
Will we or will we not have a Santa Rally? The S&P is down roughly 15% YTD, so there's no question that folks following their 401k's would like to see a mother of all rallies unfold in the final weeks going into year-end. The Tech stocks have underperformed both the S&P and the DJIA year-to-date, so it would be nice to see the NASDAQ take a bit of a leadership role here. Without the NASDAQ getting back in the game, we're likely heading lower. Some say that as long as the Fed is raising interest rates, there will be no resumption of the bull market. Maybe we go sideways in the indices for a while until this all gets sorted out. I thought we might see more of a bump in the market when the republicans took the majority in the House of Representatives; You know how the stock market loves gridlock in the halls of Congress. Maybe it was priced in way back when.
What the hell is going on in China? The populace is up in arms over the heavy-handed tactics of the CCP if what I see in our media is correct. They (The American media) are bought and paid for by the CCP, so I suppose I should be taking all of it with a grain of salt. You know who else is bought and paid for by the CCP? That's right. I'm talking about Joey Bumbles Biden and the Biden Crime Family. You would think that Joey, who goes on endlessly about women's rights and the rights of the marginalized communities here in the US, would have a word or two to say about the suppression of the Chinese people. He's said nothing. Zippo. Notta. He's the first in line to get behind the "My Body, My Choice" movement, yet, when it comes to the bodies and choices of Chinese women, Joey tows the line for his CCP paymasters. He says nothing. Not one goddamn word.
As a country, we are either the shining city on the hill, or we're not. We either speak for the downtrodden and the repressed across the face of our planet, or we don't. It is particularly pathetic when you see the president of our great country taking a knee and kowtowing to the ruthless dictators of the world while they kill and silence their citizenry with their brutal tactics. These putrid fucks, from Joey Biden to the cucks in Hollywood and most of the democrats in our Congress who have taken and continue to take money from the CCP for their silence, are more than reprehensible when they say nothing. I'm embarrassed as an American citizen but not surprised since I'm well aware of the corruption that exists inside and outside our government. That is why it is so important for the new Congress to start the hearings about the Biden Crime Family and their connection with the CCP. The corruption needs to be exposed root and branch so it can be excised like the festering tumor from the American psyche that it is.
I should probably hold Apple's feet to the fire here as well. When you sign up to do business in a country like China, you essentially sell your soul just to get your feet in the door. Businesses like Apple often look the other way while profits trump human rights each and every time. I'm not aware of any country that has been considered off-limits by Apple due to its dismal record on human rights. That said, Apple is one of the more woke organizations here in our country, and they are on the front lines when it comes to vocalizing their support for the rights of the marginalized. You might expect them to have a supportive word or two about the citizens in China who make their products in factories with child labor and under very difficult circumstances. You would be wrong. The hypocrisy of Apple, staying silent while China's citizenry takes to the streets these past few days to protest their country's dismal record on human rights, as a woke corporation, is astoundingly rich.
I'm not quite sure that I understand what's going on between Apple and Elon Musk (Twitter.) I think Apple is threatening to take the Twitter application off the Apple Store if Elon Musk goes forward with his promise to release certain communications that will allegedly expose those organizations, people, and government officials who conspired with Twitter prior to Musk's purchase of the company to silence voices or to further certain narratives designed to deceive or distract the public. I think that's it in a nutshell. It sounds like Apple has some skin in the game here. It sounds like Apple is willing to do everything it can to stop Musk from going forward with his plans. Musk countered with a threat to produce his own phone that would go head-to-head with Apple's iPhone. You gotta love Musk's resolve. Hit em where it hurts, Elon! Crash the fucking joint and never look back. Before I go full Musk fanboy here, I think I'd like to know a little bit more about Musk's relationship, if any, with the CCP.
Did you see the video of Biden's nitwit of a Press Secretary at the podium yesterday? I could hardly believe my ears. I'm talking about Jean Pierre, or whatever her name is. She's the black lesbian Haitian press secretary who was hired, not for her skills and experience as a press secretary, but because of the color of her skin and the leftist ideology to which she subscribes. I'll cut to the chase. She was going on and on about the three American winners of the NOBEL prizes recently awarded, but she kept referring to the NOBLE prizes without missing a beat. I'm thinking to myself, what the bloody hell? How much more of this inept and indulgently corrupt Biden Administration are we going to have to endure? If we needed one more example of their sheer ineptness, this was it. Can you imagine how the winners felt hearing her mispronounce one of the more prestigious awards that one can receive? Were they in the audience? God, I hope not.
I wonder how the good people in Arizona who voted for Kari Lake feel today now that the Board of Supervisors in Maricopa County has certified the election for Katie Hobbs. It was heart-wrenching to watch all the Arizonans who voted for Ms. Lake plead their cases in front of the Board of Supervisors. You couldn't possibly watch those performances and walk away thinking that the election was on the up and up. The Democrats knew exactly what they had to do. They listened to the Republican pundits on radio and television as they encouraged Republican voters to wait and cast their votes on Election Day since that was likely to make it more difficult for the Democrats to steal the election. Democrats had voted early and often and had banked a large percentage of the overall vote by the time Election Day arrived. If the Democrats could gum up the works on Election Day, which they did masterfully, they could essentially prevent the Republicans from running up the numbers they needed to put Kari Lake over the top. Mission accomplished.
You might say that the Republicans made their bed, and they should now have to sleep in that bed. It's a shitty metaphor, I'll admit. That said, here we are. The question that we now have to ask is, what the hell is it going to take to have a judge agree with the voters in Arizona who have been screaming from the rooftops that their election was stolen? One possible remedy is to have a re-count in Maricopa County, where most of the alleged malfeasance took place. Surely, they have the receipts they need to make their case. And, those "receipts" cannot just be the people who showed up at the Board of Supervisors meeting to vent their frustration. They need real receipts. I know judges are remiss to redo elections without clear and convincing evidence that there was criminal intent involved in the process, but it seems that a re-count would be a reasonable remedy at a minimum, given the number of voters who signed an affidavit stating that they never had a chance to vote.
There is a lot at stake should the election results, as certified, stand in the final analysis. Some people believe that if Arizona ends up with a Democratic governor, all bets are off come 2024. In other words, it will make it even more difficult for a Republican to win the state in 2024 when the presidential elections are held. I don't think it's possible for a Republican to win the presidency without winning Arizona, electorally speaking. Someone will have to explain to me why having a Democratic governor makes a difference in who wins and who doesn't win a federal election. Are they saying that a Democratic governor can somehow skew the results of a federal election? Are they saying that having a democratic governor in place makes it easier for the democrats to steal the election? If we're to learn anything from this election in Arizona, assuming Katie Hobbs wins, it is that it didn't hurt to have a democrat like Katie Hobbs as Secretary of State when the votes were tallied (or not). The same might well be true come 2024 were Ms. Hobbs to be sworn in as Governor. I think I just answered my own question.
It's hard to believe. Tomorrow is December 1st. It's a steely grey out of doors as I look over my shoulder and across to my neighbor's yard. It's not Winter yet, but we're getting there. We have another twenty-one days to go before we start to see more daylight with each passing day instead of less. I'm feeling good about all the yard work that I've done in the last month or so, and that will have us sitting pretty once the snow starts to fall. I've added black sunflower to my nuts and berries mix in my bird feeders, and that seems to go a bit further than did a straightforward nuts and berries blend. I still have a bit of work left to do to square away the garage, and daytime temperatures are not so cold that working in the garage is a hardship. Not even close, actually. I put a little string of lights on the tree across the street from our home last year and was pleased to find out that all I needed to get them up and running this year was a new set of batteries. Never mind that the tree is on someone else's property. It's an unbuildable lot, actually, and the owners live in another state. A little more cheer never hurts.
I love these stories that you find out about after the fact and that have you scratching your head. So, Bumbles Biden and his entourage were paying a visit to a little island off the coast of Massachusetts recently called Nantucket. While on the island, they rented or otherwise secured the use of several vehicles that were theirs to use for the duration of their visit. After Bumbles and his minions departed the island, all five of the vehicles, having been parked at the airport, were summarily torched and destroyed. I use the word "torched" advisedly because no one is reporting on how the vehicles actually caught fire. In fact, I think that had I not seen the story in one of my feeds on Twitter, I might not have seen this story in the main street media. Make no mistake about it. That was by design.
It seems reasonable to me to be curious, at a minimum, about how it came to be that the entire fleet of vehicles was destroyed in the fire. Was the fire set? What were they trying to hide? What did Bumbles know, and when did he know it? One little nugget coming out is that Biden never personally used the vehicles in question. Now, why would they release that piece of information? Is it because they want to give Bumbles plausible deniability? Do they want to make sure that his press secretary also has plausible deniability once the press starts to pepper her with questions about the matter? Is there even a remote possibility that someone didn't want any DNA taken from one or more of the vehicles for fear that someone would find out that the man appearing here and there on the island as Bumbles Biden isn't really Bumbles Biden at all?
I know it sounds terribly conspiratorial, but it makes sense when you consider the fact that Bumbles couldn't even find the restroom in the Oval Office at the time of his inauguration. We're talking about advanced dementia here, folks. That reminds me. When was the last time this dope stood at the podium to take questions from the media? You know, like a real press conference? Every president in recent memory has stood at the podium every six months to take questions from the media about the state of our affairs. Not so for Bumbles. His lapdogs in the media have stopped asking why he doesn't do pressers. They know he's incapable of doing them. How much more evidence do we need before someone says something about the fact that this clown running around as Joey Bumbles Biden isn't actually Joe Biden at all? You know, Joe Biden from Scranton. Is the fire in Nantucket starting to make more sense now?
Is it me, or does something smell foul when it comes to the Biden Administration and the douchebag Zelensky in Ukraine? Is this the biggest money laundering operation in the history of money laundering? I wouldn't give that little money grubber another nickel without subjecting him and his immediate family to a forensic audit first. You know he's skimming billions right off the top, and it's likely sitting in some Switzerland bank account and out of reach of the auditors. Who the hell are these go-along-to-get-along politicians in our country who have been approving these money transfers to one of the most corrupt countries on the face of the planet? This has stink written all over it. You know Zelensky is going for the big enchilada when he talks openly about reconstruction and the trillions that will be required to fund said reconstruction. Over my fucking dead body, is what I say. I hope the new Republican Congress grows a pair and tells the little fuck, Zelensky, that he's on his own from here on in. There, I said it.
I've got a bad feeling about the run-off race in Georgia this coming Tuesday between Herschel Walker and Senator Warnock. The Democrats have taken stealing elections to a whole new level. There's no reason to think that they aren't bringing those very same skills and that very same set of political safecracking tools to the race in Georgia. They likely have a trunkload of two or more pre-filled ballots ready to go the minute the counting starts in halls and counties across the great peach state. They will only come out, of course, should Senator Warnock come up short in counties where he was expected to win or otherwise do well. Warnock's Senate seat, should he prevail, will give the democrats a one-seat majority in the Senate and, consequently, it is a seat worth stealing. You simply can't leave these things to sort themselves out anymore. There's too much at stake. God forbid the Republicans have a thing or two up their sleeves to thwart the thievery of the Democrats. There's something to be said for striking while the iron's hot.
The missus and I will be going down to Massachusetts today to wrap up the PC-to-iMac conversion that we started a couple of weeks back. The worse part of the whole schtick has been the drive down and back. What we'd hoped would be a one-trip down there to do this job turned into a two-trip instead. It's not the end of the world, but if I had my druthers, I'd not be making this trip today. Friday is no day to be driving into Boston because traffic is typically at its worse on Friday. It's just a massive snarl-fest. Maybe we can avoid some of it by going down a bit after the morning rush. I guess we'll see how that turns out. Anyway, if we can get the printer squared away, the Microsoft Office subscription moved over, and get his Carbonite up and running on his new computer, I think we can consider the trip a success.
Just another word or two on Ye. I'm not a fan of Kanye West, but I do think he knows how to manipulate the media. I can't even name a song that he's put out, and I suspect there have been more than a few of them. I don't think he did Trump any favors by showing up at Mar-a-Lago with a self-professed White Nationalist. I'm referring to this Fuentes guy. He's yet another person that I've never heard of. I have to agree with folks who say that this trip to Mar-a-Lago was a concerted effort on the part of Kanye and Fuentes to take down Trump. If Kanye was looking to take down Trump in order to better position himself in the race for the presidency, it was a nice try, but it was destined for failure. It's going to take more than a couple of thugs from the hood to take out Trump. Now, in recent days, Kanye is on tape saying something about liking Hitler. The guy doesn't know when to stop. It's no surprise that Musk had to step in and ban him from Twitter. The last thing that Musk wants, or needs, is to have his platform, Twitter, squarely in the crosshairs of the left for providing a platform for hate speech.
Did y'all see that televised handshake between President Macron of France and Bumbles Biden? It was fucking cringeworthy. Bumbles wouldn't let go of Macron's hand, and it was a good 45 seconds or so before Macron could free himself from the grips of the old man. All of this took place in full view of the audience, who had to wonder, to a person, what the bejeesus were they seeing unfold before their eyes? Where was Dr. Jill when he needed her? Who could intervene and save both Bumbles and Macron from what was quickly turning into a national, if not global, embarrassment? What the hell was Macron thinking? Imagine staring into the vacant eyes of an old demented, and senile man who has your hand in a death grip and won't let go despite your best efforts. Now imagine that this horror show is unfolding on national television. If you're Macron, you have to be seeing your future flashing before your eyes. He had to be wondering why he ever made the trip.
Bumbles and his boys played that one well, don't you think? I'm referring to his forgiving college loans to the tune of $10k for those who qualified and, better yet, $20k for those with Pell grants/loans. This was nothing more than a blatant effort to buy votes in advance of the mid-term elections. It all sounded so good. If you were laboring beneath a mountain of debt related to loans you took out to get an education, Bumbles was there to help you. It wasn't much, but $10k goes a long way when you don't have two nickels to rub together in the middle of a recession. He was Bumbles the beneficence. It didn't matter that what Bumbles was doing was unconstitutional. Most people weren't any the wiser. He would say, as only Bumbles could, I'll "work it out." The only problem with all of this is that Bumbles knew all too well that what he was offering was not in his wheelhouse to offer. It didn't matter. You beg, borrow, and steal, and you do whatever it takes to win the next election. This is who they (Democrats) are.
The mid-term election has now come and gone. The Supreme Court announced yesterday that they will be reviewing Biden's plan to forgive loans in the February 2023 session. With a six-three majority, the conservatives on the court will have the final say on Biden's plan. I think it's a foregone conclusion that Biden will get the pants-down spanking he deserves for offering to lessen the loans of so many Americans when he knew full he didn't have the authority to do it. Imagine thinking that you were going to get a reprieve of sorts on the college loans you took out all those years ago, only to find out now that it was nothing more than a pig in a poke. Bumbles did it because he expected to benefit from it at the polls. We all know politicians like Biden and just how sleazy they can be when it comes to lining their own pockets and advancing their own interests. None of it really matters anymore since Bumbles will likely not even remember making the promise by the time the Supremes hear the case. He barely remembers what he has for breakfast most days. God help us all.
Fast forward 12 hours, and I have to say, it was a long day yesterday down in Massachusetts. Thankfully, we ran into less traffic than usual both ways. We got hung up a bit when we hit a traffic jam on the way home but sitting in a snarl of traffic was a welcome reprieve to the otherwise helter-skelter nature of the rush hour traffic. They don't call it "rush" hour for nothing. Completing the set-up of the computer went well, and I think we accomplished everything we wanted to accomplish. These things always take longer than you think they are going to take, and this particular job, and I hesitate to call it a job because we were doing it for a friend, was no exception. I never anticipated having to drive down a second time to finish things up. It was instructive in the sense that it was a reminder to me of what the missus has to go through every time she makes the trip down there. I might want to make the case going forward that while it may have been profitable for the missus to make these trips from time to time to assist an old friend in the past, the risk-benefit profile all these years later is now skewing riskier than not with age being the most important consideration. Everything is more difficult when you get older. Well, almost everything.
I think it's great that the person we helped is getting a new computer with all the bells and whistles that you get when you buy a Mac. When you consider the fact that his new Mac is replacing an older PC, it paints an even prettier picture. That said, putting all of that power in the hands of someone who is no longer able to take advantage of the power that the computer wields is another story altogether. His shortcomings are almost entirely age-related, so there's literally nothing to be done. At best, I hope that he finds a way to do the few things that he enjoys doing, and by doing them over and over again, he will get the satisfaction that he's looking for from his new device. We're talking about sending and receiving e-mails, using Office applications like Word, checking this and that website, placing orders on the Amazon website, etc. He seems to have a good level of tolerance for his own inadequacies, so I don't see him getting overly frustrated, and that's a good thing. I assured him that the missus and I are but a phone call away should he have any problems that he can't resolve by himself. Driving back down there should be a last resort.
What the heck is Mr. Elon up to this time? I'm talking about Elon Musk. He's dredging up and exposing everything that was done by the previous people who ran Twitter, in conjunction with people inside and outside of Twitter, to suppress news that would be viewed as detrimental to the campaign to get Joe Biden elected in the 2020 presidential race against Donald J Trump. I guess if you're wanting to put yourself out there as a public square of sorts, it would behoove you to come clean about what those before you did and didn't do when they were in charge of the same so-called public square. You could say that Twitter's suppression of the Hunter laptop story was Exhibit A. That alone might may well have altered the outcome of the election and, ultimately, the direction of our country in the aftermath of the Biden inauguration. Is it possible that Russia might not have invaded Ukraine if Trump were still president? Indeed, it is.
I don't think there's any question that what Elon Musk is doing in revealing all of Twitter's past sins, especially in conjunction with the efforts by our own government to prevent Donald Trump from getting a second term, has put him at great personal and professional risk. He doesn't seem to care, so that's a good thing. Then again, will we ever know everything there is to know, or will we have to take what he's telling us with a grain of salt. I'm going to wait to see if the frauds and the freaks from the Deep State are exposed before taking a full measure of what I think it is that Musk is wanting to accomplish. Until then, I remain a fan of the man, but a skeptical fan of the man. The Deep State might be perfectly happy to see all of this fall on Joe Biden's doorstep. Everyone knows that Scranton Joe has been bought and sold many times over in his fifty years in public service. More self-service than public service, you might say, but corrupt to the core nonetheless. Maybe this is the final straw that gives us the even more corrupt, and twice as stupid if that's possible, President Kamala Harris.
Top Of Mind
27/11/22 07:01
Happy Thanksgiving week, boys and girls! Who's looking forward to Thanksgiving? Who doesn't like a nice turkey dinner with all the fixings? That's what we're talking about. The best part is probably getting together with family and friends and giving thanks for all your blessings over this past year. That's what the pilgrims did back in the day. Right? It's a great tradition, any way you slice it. I've checked the forecast, and the temperatures will be in the forties. It will be a perfect day to get out for a walk after dinner and, God willing, get down to the beach for a change of scenery. We won't be the only ones there, I can assure you.
The missus and I were on our way out the door yesterday afternoon, going nowhere in particular, when I suggested we call the Ev man to see if he needed us to bring him anything. It was spur of the moment, and I wasn't surprised to hear the Ev man say that he was definitely up for having us bring him something to eat. "Call your order into the restaurant, and we'll stop and pick it up," I told him. "In fact," I added, "order yourself something for tomorrow as well." When we finally arrived at his place, I don't think I've seen him happier to see us stopping by with a so-called care package. If I had to guess, I would imagine that he was probably looking through his freezer to see what he might have for dinner before we called to check in. Just file this under "The Lord works in mysterious ways."
I think this is going to be one of those weeks where I may need to make a list just to stay organized. My bike has been in the shop for a few days now, and I missed my chance to pick it up last Friday when they sent an e-mail that I didn't see in time. I was out of town all day Saturday, and the shop was closed on Sunday. I don't like not riding my bike for more than a few days in a row because I tend to lose a bit of momentum. The more momentum I lose, the longer it takes me to get back on track. The weather hereabouts has been cold and blustery, with temperatures mostly in the thirties, so I'm not sure I would have been out and about on my bike even if it weren't in the shop. I don't mind riding in the extreme cold, but I need to work up to doing that. It's too cold too soon. Brrr rabbit.
I'm also not sure that I'm done with my pre-winter yardwork. I need to cut down a couple of tall grass plants near the shed, and I should probably rake up the garden. It's more of a tidying exercise than anything else. If I did none of it, it wouldn't be a big deal one way or another. I also have the garage to square away. I need to make room to get our cars in there, so that should take me a good few hours to get that done. The missus offered to help me with sorting through any number of boxes that she had stored in the garage some years ago so I may take her up on her offer. She's a bit of a hoarder, so those boxes have been doing nothing but collecting dust all these past many years. Now that we're needing maybe a little more room to store other things, it's high time that they get carried off to the local recycling center. Good riddance.
I sure hope that I can have a constructive discussion with my local mechanic about fixing the Ev man's car. I'll need to do that today just to get the ball rolling. The last thing I want to hear from him is that he can't do the job. That will probably mean having the dealership do it instead. I'm not against having the dealership do it, but I imagine I'll be paying a premium for their services. Maybe, that's the price you pay if you want things done correctly the first time. That's not to say I don't trust my local mechanic because I surely do. It's a big job with a hefty price tag, and I'm running out of time to get this done if I understand the inspection process and how much time one gets before they tell you they can't put another sticker on your car. Then what? The Ev man has no car? We can't let that happen. Not on my watch, as they say in the movies.
We're a couple of days out from Thanksgiving, and I seem to have the wind at my back when it comes to getting a few things done around here. I never did make that list I was talking about, so I'll keep putting one foot in front of the other until I get everything done. I didn't have covering our air conditioner on my bingo card, but I got that done yesterday while I was otherwise putzing around in the garage. Whenever I clean one area of the garage, I come across something else or some other area that needs to be squared away. It's never-ending. It's easy to just stuff as much as possible into one or more places in the garage. It's more challenging to ensure that what you're putting away isn't something that should be thrown away instead. That means pouring over this, that, and the other thing until you've teased out the things that need to get thrown away. All in good time, my friends.
I finally got around to picking up my bike at Colonial yesterday. The repair was not as expensive as I thought it would be. It always irks me when I think they'll give me a bill that costs me half of what I paid for the bike. My bike is relatively new, but if it weren't, I might buy a new one instead of paying monies to pay for a costly repair. I've always bought reasonably priced road bikes since I'm hard on them, and I don't need an expensive bike to do what I like to do every day. When I say "reasonably" priced, I'm referring to bicycles in the $500-$600 range. I can usually get a good ten years out of a bike if my history is any indication. That includes riding in the winter when the roads hereabouts are riddled with frost heaves, covered with sand and salt, and, not inconsequently, wind-swept down along the ocean.
I haven't been paying much attention to the senatorial run-off race in Georgia between Rafael Warnock and Herschel Walker. I feel a little snake-bitten after watching the Republicans do so poorly in the midterms, and I'm just not allowing myself the luxury of thinking that Walker can win that race. I don't know how, but the Democrats have perfected the art of stealing elections. The Republicans are just no match for the Democrats. Maybe I should take my clues from the fact that some races are still being counted some two weeks after November 8th, Election Day. That's just a fucking disgrace. I'm not talking about recounts. I'm talking about counts. I have to wonder how many Republicans in Georgia feel like I do. They're just going to say, "fuck it." What difference does my vote make, anyway? The Democrats are going to steal it, and they know that we know they will steal it. Is that how the Democrats are doing it? If they steal enough elections, the Republicans will lose faith in the system and stay home on Election Day. It seems to be working.
I use an application called Grammarly to clean up some of this here blogging of mine from time to time. It cleans up a lot of stuff that probably should be cleaned up before I get it out the door at the end of any given week. I don't always go back and review the corrections that I make, so no one should be surprised if some sentences don't make much sense. I seem to have a lot of trouble with tenses, so thank the baby Jesus that Grammarly cleans those puppies up as nicely as it does. I also don't always agree with some of Grammarly's recommendations, and, if I didn't know better, I'd say that they are sometimes just wrong. I think I have a pretty good ear when it comes to word use and placement, so I'm just fine with saying no to using their suggestions when and where that seems appropriate. Either way, I'd rather have the application than not because I think it makes what I put down on paper more readable and easier to digest. Who gives a flying fuck is an entirely different story.
Here we are, the day before Thanksgiving, and I think we're in pretty good shape. What I mean by that is I think that we have everything we need for our Thanksgiving meal tomorrow without having to go to the store one more time. No one, and I mean no one, wants to be running into the supermarket the day before Thanksgiving. The lines are too long, the shelves are picked over, the clerks are unusually harried, and for what? So that you can have apple sauce with your turkey and giblets on Thanksgiving day? That's right, the missus informed me this morning that we have no apple sauce. A Thanksgiving meal really isn't complete without apple sauce, is it? Damn. So, I'm going to be that guy. I'm going to be that guy running back into the store for all the reasons I've already given as to why I'd rather not be that guy. How badly do I want it? right?
I'm guessing that were I to look back at all of my pre-Thanksgiving blog postings going back 10 years or so, I would find more than one or two mentions about the fact that I've never liked the Thanksgiving holiday for one reason and one reason only. That is to say, there isn't much in the way of news coming out of anywhere that is worthy of paying attention to. You go from drinking your news out of a firehose to licking the condensation off your water bottle just to quench your thirst. That's a pretty good metaphor, yes? Thankfully, there are books to read and other distractions like getting in a little extra pre-winter yard work to keep my mind occupied. You know, things that get you up and off the couch and onto your feet. That's always a good thing. Maybe I should be thankful that we don't have to travel during the Thanksgiving holiday. I feel sorry for those people. Then again, there's probably something to be said for sticking with your tried and true traditions. It's what you do. It's who you are.
More and more stores have quick self-checkouts these days so maybe going into the store the day before Thanksgiving isn't the dreadful sort of thing that it used to be. The Ev man and I went into Whole Foods in Portsmouth yesterday to pick up our Thanksgiving meal order, and that place was hopping. It was maybe busier than I've seen it in quite a while. I guess that makes sense. Thanksgiving might be that one holiday when you want nothing but the best for your family. That is what Whole Foods has to offer its shoppers. It's a cut above, and if you've ever been to Whole Foods to shop for your family, you know what I mean.
We ordered our items online a week or two ago, and we showed up at the designated hour to pick up our turkey and fixings. We ordered a turkey between 12 and 14 pounds, and it came in at 12.2 pounds. I'd have preferred that it be closer to 14 pounds than 12 pounds, but that's fine. Ev went off looking in the prepared meals section of the store while I waited for the turkey, and he returned shortly with some lasagna and a couple of other things. All in all, I think we spent something like $150 on everything. I thought our organic turkey was reasonably priced at $2.99 a pound. I'm not sure how much organic turkeys cost elsewhere, but I might like to have a look around just to satisfy my curiosity. Oh, and we didn't buy any alcohol. It's not our thing. Just sayin'.
Don't tell the missus, but I've been bringing a few things to the recycling center lately without telling her. When I'm on a roll doing what I'm doing, and I'm referring to cleaning out the garage or other, I'll get up a head of steam, and the last thing I need is someone having to sign off on things that I intend to throw away. She catches me doing that every once in a while, and the next thing I know, she's emptying out my bags and admonishing me for throwing this or that away without consulting her. I think that if I don't get rid of some of this stuff, in the dark of night or otherwise, someone is going to have a godawful job ahead of them when the time comes to move out of this home of ours. If I do it right, I'll never have her asking me about this or that article of clothing or other that she used to have sitting in the garage or wherever. That's the plan, anyway.
The missus will make her grandmother's pumpkin pie recipe today. She will also put together some deviled eggs. If the deviled eggs last until tomorrow, it would be a small miracle. I bought some hard-boiled eggs for her to use rather than having to cook and peel the darn things before adding the yolk concoction. Peeling eggs can be a frightful task. Oh, and I have this little pet peeve of mine that is not a big deal, but it is worth mentioning. I hate eating egg dishes, be it egg salad or deviled eggs, and finding pieces of shell in the end product. I simply won't have it. That is so yesterday when you think about the fact that pre-hard-boiled eggs are a relatively new product to hit the store shelves. Is that something I can look up on Wikipedia? Lest we forget, the missus will be making a nice cranberry sauce using real cranberries. I'm good with the canned stuff, but you'll not hear those words crossing my lips in her presence. No siree, Bob.
That's all I have for today. It's my list of "top of mind" items. God, I hate that expression. I first heard it coming out of the mouth of Jean Pierre, Biden's press secretary. I now hear it here and there, and it still irks me just as much as it did the first time I heard it. Did you see her clown act yesterday when a reporter in the room asked Fauci about the origins of Covid? She went bananas. She shut him down and wouldn't let Fauci answer the question. Fauci was there to say goodbye, and she wasn't about to let things go south by allowing someone to ask a legitimate question. God forbid. Do you think that she even knows how stupid she looks? Forget the words coming out of her mouth, she is a caricature of herself if she's anything. That's par for the course when you consider who hired her. Yep, we're talking about Joey Bumbles Biden. The main act in what is a three-ring circus each and every day of the week. They all fucking deserve each other. There, I said it.
Will someone please tell me why this FTX fraudster, Sam Bankman-Fried, isn't in jail? You know, this crypto exchange guy who stole lots of money from people and is still at large in the Bahamas. I'm talking about millions and billions of dollars. This is not chump change, folks. This is the real thing. Is anyone in our government making any efforts whatsoever to bring this guy back to the United States to face justice? He's fucking Bernie Madoff on steroids, for chrissakes. You can probably make the case that he is so well-connected politically that he's not going to spend so much as a day behind bars for his "crimes." You can probably also make the case that the people who lost money by parking their life's savings on the FTX exchange were doing so willingly and with full knowledge of the inherent risk associated with their investing activities.
Am I answering my own questions here? His donating millions to the Democrat party will only serve to enhance his chances of staying out of jail. I'm talking about that double standard as it applies to democrats who commit crimes compared to republicans who commit crimes. The latter are more likely to rot in jail without bail while awaiting their sentencing. The former, not so much. Look at this Theranos bitch. You know, the young upstart who built a medical empire on a lie and who hoodwinked the elite into investing millions of their hard-earned dollars into what they believed was a good investment when she knew full well that it was nothing but a crock. Now, the judge in her case recommends that she spend her eleven-year sentence in a "prison" essentially without walls. Is that your idea of justice? It ain't mine. Meanwhile, Trump supporters who were ushed into our nation's capitol on January sixth by the Capitol police, having been charged with trespassing, sit in jail interminably awaiting their trials and, when ultimately convicted, their sentencing.
I'll have to take a look around online to see if there isn't a Black Friday deal or two to be had. I don't need anything, but I'm a sucker for a good deal, so, as I said, I'll take a look around. The missus could use a new iPad, so that's a thought. I usually look forward to Black Friday to update our hardware or maybe buy an extra storage device or two. Remember when people used to fight with one another just to get in line at midnight outside a Best Buy so they could be the first one into the store at the stroke of midnight to get that flat-screen television for just $77? With inventories at all-time highs this year, I wouldn't be surprised to see a return of those midnight openings. You want to clear out those inventories and clear them out fast. Selling your stuff online doesn't do the trick. That isn't to say that you can't find some good discounts online. You can.
I read something this morning about Bumbles Biden and someone in his immediate family having their wedding on the grounds of the White House. These fucking grifters never stop feeding at the trough of governmental largess. Do it on your own goddamn dime. The White House belongs to the American people, and we don't need hucksters like the Bidens using our beloved White House as a backdrop for their bullshit. It gets worse. I'm also reading that the people getting married have been living at the White House for months now. What? The Bidens and their corrupt spawn have been sullying our nation at every turn since that clown was inaugurated some two years ago. Who paid for the wedding? Was it the Communist Chinese? You know, the ones Hunter has been doing deals with since you (Bumbles) were Vice President? Or, maybe the wedding, as lavish as it likely was, was paid for with kickbacks from the money we gave to the Ukrainians to pay for weapon systems, etc. Then again, how would we know? The wedding was closed to the general public, so nobody would be the wiser.
I just don't know how we as a nation can hold ourselves up as a model of everything that is right and everything that is good with a fraudster and a cheat the likes of Joe Bumbles Biden sitting in our White House. Everyone knows that this ass clown has been on the take for years. The infamous laptop from hell is replete with stories about the deals that Bumbles and his son, Hunter, made with America's enemies abroad. They even have Joey on video saying that if the Ukrainians didn't fire the person investigating his son Hunter that the Ukrainian government wouldn't get the billion dollars in aid that they had been promised. That's what they call quid-pro-quo, my friends. You scratch my back, I scratch your back. Oh, and how about the many stories of "ten percent" for the Big Guy? Hunter is not only a druggie with a proclivity for call girls and crack cocaine, he's also the Biden Crime Family's bag man. So, I say to you again. How does this not sully our nation having this grifter go about his criminal activity without a worry in the world and without so much as one agency looking into his grift as a public official? How does any of this make sense? I don't get it.
What's this I'm hearing about the new leftist president in Brazil freezing the bank accounts of people who are protesting his ascension to the presidency. I know there have been a lot of questions about whether he stole the election from Bolsonaoro or not, but the courts have dismissed Bolsonaro's claims, so it seems like a done deal to me. Funny thing is, who else do you know that has frozen people's bank accounts when their citizens took to the streets to fight back against what they perceived as governmental overreach? That's right. I'm referring to the president of Canada, Justin Trudeau. These are the tactics of dictators, if I'm not mistaken. I suppose that the people who disagree with the protesters are quite happy to see the government stepping to separate people from their money. Short of running over protestors with tanks, ala Tiananmen Square, separating people from their money is a bloodless solution to an irksome problem for a dictatorial government. The cautionary tale here, dictators aside, is that people should be careful what they wish for when it comes to governments coining their own digital currency. The spigot is not yours to control.
Thanksgiving has now come and gone. It was quite nice. Coordinating all the dishes so that everything got to the table while still hot has always been a challenge. This year was no different. I think letting the turkey sit for a good half hour while we finished prepping the remaining dishes was the key to our success this year. The missus and I worked hand-in-hand in the final hour before we sat down to our meal putting the final pieces in place. We even delivered the buttery rolls straight out of the oven while still piping hot. That never happens. We made certain that the things we know the Ev man enjoys most were served just the way he likes them: In paper bowls and with plastic serving spoons. The turkey was spectacularly moist and nicely browned with a golden crust. It might have been a tad over the recommended 157 degrees, but not by much. I'll carve the remaining turkey off the carcass today, and we'll have nice turkey for sandwiches for the next few days.
I was a little disappointed in the quality of the roasted vegetables that we purchased from Whole Foods. I think their stuffing, which we also ordered from Whole Foods, was subpar. The veggies were dry and rubbery, and the stuffing, while tasty, looked like it came out of the north end of a jackass. I expected more from Whole Foods, so, yes, it was a disappointment. The missus suggested that we stick with the tried and true Stovetop stuffing next year. That never disappoints. The missus wasn't happy with the way her cranberry sauce turned out, but it was just fine as long as you didn't eat too much of it. It was sufficiently tart, you might say. And, as much as I made of the big container of applesauce that the missus purchased at the store in recent days, I had none of it. There simply wasn't room on my plate for one more thing. I prefer the individualized six-packs of applesauce, truth be told. The mashed potatoes the missus prepared were to die for.
It's always good to see the Ev man sitting down to a home-cooked meal. He hasn't missed a Thanksgiving meal with us yet, so we feel pretty darned good about that. It was interesting to see him passing on the mashed potatoes. I think he's got a keen eye for the kinds of foodstuffs that spike his glucose, and mashed potatoes fall squarely into that category. In other words, he knows which foods make him feel good, and he knows to stay away from food like mashed potatoes which, nutritiously and medically speaking, are a bloody disaster. That didn't stop him from eating the rolls, but I think he may have had just one or two, and he was done with them as well. He decided not to stay the night, and he agreed to have us pack up some leftovers for him to take home. Who doesn't like to take home a little Thanksgiving with them? No pumpkin pie was served after dinner, and that was just fine with everybody. Better to leave some things for tomorrow.
The missus and I drove into downtown Portsmouth after the Ev man departed for home. It's always better to move your body than not after eating a large meal, so that is what we did. It didn't take too much cajoling to get the missus up and out of the house since she is, more often than not, a bigger proponent of moving one's body than I. Temperatures were in the forties, and it was actually a delightful evening to be out and about. Even better was the fact that no stores were open in downtown Portsmouth and we literally had the streets to ourselves. If we saw a handful of people milling about, I might say that was an exaggeration. The missus loves to window shop, so she was in seventh heaven. And, of course, every window of every store in the downtown area has been turned into something resembling Santa's workshop now that the holiday season is upon us. I have little patience or interest when it comes to such things, but none of it was about me. It never is, and that suits me just fine.
I'm not sure how we left it with the Ev man. Now that he and a friend have had a chance to tidy up his place, I'm not sure there's much for the missus and me to do. Once the dishes are done, and the trash has been taken out, that's about all she wrote. Maybe that's how we left it with him. The Ev man is lucky to have such friends, and that is not lost on him or us. Housework is not one of the Ev man's strengths, and, if anything, it is something he struggles with. He'd be the first to admit it. I think it's not something he has a lot of control over, so you kind of have to take that into account when you're looking to improve things on the margins. That's not to say that he doesn't appreciate having order restored once he's knee-deep in the chaos of it all. He does. He's often said that it sometimes feels as though he's moving into a new place after this or that deep cleaning. If I had my druthers, and if I thought it would improve his lot, I would hire the Maids house cleaning service to go into his place once a week. It's not a very practical solution, but one of many thoughts I have from time to time.
I don't know what got into me. After saying I never make things like soup from the carcass of the turkey that we have for Thanksgiving, I do just that. Well, no need to jump the gun here. I don't actually have soup just yet. What I do have, after about five hours, is a lovely stock that I can now use to make a tasty soup. It was easy peasy. So easy peasy, in fact, that I haven't a clue as to why I haven't done this before. My dad, God rest his soul, would be so proud. This is something that he, and probably his father before him, would have done without blinking an eye. And, my dad was no Chef Boyardee. Memories are funny things, though, so I could be wrong. I can see him making the soup in my mind's eye, but I can't quite see myself sitting down with a heel of crusty bread in one hand and a soup spoon in the other. Still, it's not a stretch to see myself asking him for advice on what he would do with a leftover turkey carcass a day or two after Thanksgiving. You just never know.
Now that I have a stock, and plenty of it, I might add, I need to think about next steps. I was thinking about using wide egg noodles in the soup instead of rice but ended up with bowtie pasta in my cart after all was said and done. I think the missus has now talked me out of using the bowtie pasta, so I'll be going back to the store for the wide egg noodles after all. I have some frozen peas that will do just fine, and now I have to give a little more thought to what I might add next to spice it up a bit. They say that poultry seasoning has a way of bringing out the flavor in an otherwise tasteless broth, so maybe I'll do that. The recipe that I'm looking at calls for adding a can of this or that soup to the broth. I worked too hard to reduce the turkey carcass to bones, so I'll not be muddying up the nice broth with some store-bought bullshit. It's not happening. Last but not least, I had a lot of leftover turkey meat, so I'll need to dice that up before adding it to the soup. How am I doing, Pops?
This week's blog is getting a little long in the tooth. I was going to go on and on a bit about the missus and her complete and utter failing when it comes to using our various and sundry remotes. You know, the ones we use to turn on our television sets. Imagine, if you can, a fish out of water flip-flopping around on the deck of your boat with his or her mouth agape and bulging eyes while gasping for air with every essence of its being. That's my missus to a tee when it comes to sorting out which buttons to press when all she ever wants to do is watch one or more of her favorite shows. "Have I taught you nothing all these past many years, little darlings?" It's a rhetorical question. She knows it, and I know it. I say it anyway. Enough said, I suppose. I did say this was getting a little long in the tooth. Let's leave it there.
The missus and I were on our way out the door yesterday afternoon, going nowhere in particular, when I suggested we call the Ev man to see if he needed us to bring him anything. It was spur of the moment, and I wasn't surprised to hear the Ev man say that he was definitely up for having us bring him something to eat. "Call your order into the restaurant, and we'll stop and pick it up," I told him. "In fact," I added, "order yourself something for tomorrow as well." When we finally arrived at his place, I don't think I've seen him happier to see us stopping by with a so-called care package. If I had to guess, I would imagine that he was probably looking through his freezer to see what he might have for dinner before we called to check in. Just file this under "The Lord works in mysterious ways."
I think this is going to be one of those weeks where I may need to make a list just to stay organized. My bike has been in the shop for a few days now, and I missed my chance to pick it up last Friday when they sent an e-mail that I didn't see in time. I was out of town all day Saturday, and the shop was closed on Sunday. I don't like not riding my bike for more than a few days in a row because I tend to lose a bit of momentum. The more momentum I lose, the longer it takes me to get back on track. The weather hereabouts has been cold and blustery, with temperatures mostly in the thirties, so I'm not sure I would have been out and about on my bike even if it weren't in the shop. I don't mind riding in the extreme cold, but I need to work up to doing that. It's too cold too soon. Brrr rabbit.
I'm also not sure that I'm done with my pre-winter yardwork. I need to cut down a couple of tall grass plants near the shed, and I should probably rake up the garden. It's more of a tidying exercise than anything else. If I did none of it, it wouldn't be a big deal one way or another. I also have the garage to square away. I need to make room to get our cars in there, so that should take me a good few hours to get that done. The missus offered to help me with sorting through any number of boxes that she had stored in the garage some years ago so I may take her up on her offer. She's a bit of a hoarder, so those boxes have been doing nothing but collecting dust all these past many years. Now that we're needing maybe a little more room to store other things, it's high time that they get carried off to the local recycling center. Good riddance.
I sure hope that I can have a constructive discussion with my local mechanic about fixing the Ev man's car. I'll need to do that today just to get the ball rolling. The last thing I want to hear from him is that he can't do the job. That will probably mean having the dealership do it instead. I'm not against having the dealership do it, but I imagine I'll be paying a premium for their services. Maybe, that's the price you pay if you want things done correctly the first time. That's not to say I don't trust my local mechanic because I surely do. It's a big job with a hefty price tag, and I'm running out of time to get this done if I understand the inspection process and how much time one gets before they tell you they can't put another sticker on your car. Then what? The Ev man has no car? We can't let that happen. Not on my watch, as they say in the movies.
We're a couple of days out from Thanksgiving, and I seem to have the wind at my back when it comes to getting a few things done around here. I never did make that list I was talking about, so I'll keep putting one foot in front of the other until I get everything done. I didn't have covering our air conditioner on my bingo card, but I got that done yesterday while I was otherwise putzing around in the garage. Whenever I clean one area of the garage, I come across something else or some other area that needs to be squared away. It's never-ending. It's easy to just stuff as much as possible into one or more places in the garage. It's more challenging to ensure that what you're putting away isn't something that should be thrown away instead. That means pouring over this, that, and the other thing until you've teased out the things that need to get thrown away. All in good time, my friends.
I finally got around to picking up my bike at Colonial yesterday. The repair was not as expensive as I thought it would be. It always irks me when I think they'll give me a bill that costs me half of what I paid for the bike. My bike is relatively new, but if it weren't, I might buy a new one instead of paying monies to pay for a costly repair. I've always bought reasonably priced road bikes since I'm hard on them, and I don't need an expensive bike to do what I like to do every day. When I say "reasonably" priced, I'm referring to bicycles in the $500-$600 range. I can usually get a good ten years out of a bike if my history is any indication. That includes riding in the winter when the roads hereabouts are riddled with frost heaves, covered with sand and salt, and, not inconsequently, wind-swept down along the ocean.
I haven't been paying much attention to the senatorial run-off race in Georgia between Rafael Warnock and Herschel Walker. I feel a little snake-bitten after watching the Republicans do so poorly in the midterms, and I'm just not allowing myself the luxury of thinking that Walker can win that race. I don't know how, but the Democrats have perfected the art of stealing elections. The Republicans are just no match for the Democrats. Maybe I should take my clues from the fact that some races are still being counted some two weeks after November 8th, Election Day. That's just a fucking disgrace. I'm not talking about recounts. I'm talking about counts. I have to wonder how many Republicans in Georgia feel like I do. They're just going to say, "fuck it." What difference does my vote make, anyway? The Democrats are going to steal it, and they know that we know they will steal it. Is that how the Democrats are doing it? If they steal enough elections, the Republicans will lose faith in the system and stay home on Election Day. It seems to be working.
I use an application called Grammarly to clean up some of this here blogging of mine from time to time. It cleans up a lot of stuff that probably should be cleaned up before I get it out the door at the end of any given week. I don't always go back and review the corrections that I make, so no one should be surprised if some sentences don't make much sense. I seem to have a lot of trouble with tenses, so thank the baby Jesus that Grammarly cleans those puppies up as nicely as it does. I also don't always agree with some of Grammarly's recommendations, and, if I didn't know better, I'd say that they are sometimes just wrong. I think I have a pretty good ear when it comes to word use and placement, so I'm just fine with saying no to using their suggestions when and where that seems appropriate. Either way, I'd rather have the application than not because I think it makes what I put down on paper more readable and easier to digest. Who gives a flying fuck is an entirely different story.
Here we are, the day before Thanksgiving, and I think we're in pretty good shape. What I mean by that is I think that we have everything we need for our Thanksgiving meal tomorrow without having to go to the store one more time. No one, and I mean no one, wants to be running into the supermarket the day before Thanksgiving. The lines are too long, the shelves are picked over, the clerks are unusually harried, and for what? So that you can have apple sauce with your turkey and giblets on Thanksgiving day? That's right, the missus informed me this morning that we have no apple sauce. A Thanksgiving meal really isn't complete without apple sauce, is it? Damn. So, I'm going to be that guy. I'm going to be that guy running back into the store for all the reasons I've already given as to why I'd rather not be that guy. How badly do I want it? right?
I'm guessing that were I to look back at all of my pre-Thanksgiving blog postings going back 10 years or so, I would find more than one or two mentions about the fact that I've never liked the Thanksgiving holiday for one reason and one reason only. That is to say, there isn't much in the way of news coming out of anywhere that is worthy of paying attention to. You go from drinking your news out of a firehose to licking the condensation off your water bottle just to quench your thirst. That's a pretty good metaphor, yes? Thankfully, there are books to read and other distractions like getting in a little extra pre-winter yard work to keep my mind occupied. You know, things that get you up and off the couch and onto your feet. That's always a good thing. Maybe I should be thankful that we don't have to travel during the Thanksgiving holiday. I feel sorry for those people. Then again, there's probably something to be said for sticking with your tried and true traditions. It's what you do. It's who you are.
More and more stores have quick self-checkouts these days so maybe going into the store the day before Thanksgiving isn't the dreadful sort of thing that it used to be. The Ev man and I went into Whole Foods in Portsmouth yesterday to pick up our Thanksgiving meal order, and that place was hopping. It was maybe busier than I've seen it in quite a while. I guess that makes sense. Thanksgiving might be that one holiday when you want nothing but the best for your family. That is what Whole Foods has to offer its shoppers. It's a cut above, and if you've ever been to Whole Foods to shop for your family, you know what I mean.
We ordered our items online a week or two ago, and we showed up at the designated hour to pick up our turkey and fixings. We ordered a turkey between 12 and 14 pounds, and it came in at 12.2 pounds. I'd have preferred that it be closer to 14 pounds than 12 pounds, but that's fine. Ev went off looking in the prepared meals section of the store while I waited for the turkey, and he returned shortly with some lasagna and a couple of other things. All in all, I think we spent something like $150 on everything. I thought our organic turkey was reasonably priced at $2.99 a pound. I'm not sure how much organic turkeys cost elsewhere, but I might like to have a look around just to satisfy my curiosity. Oh, and we didn't buy any alcohol. It's not our thing. Just sayin'.
Don't tell the missus, but I've been bringing a few things to the recycling center lately without telling her. When I'm on a roll doing what I'm doing, and I'm referring to cleaning out the garage or other, I'll get up a head of steam, and the last thing I need is someone having to sign off on things that I intend to throw away. She catches me doing that every once in a while, and the next thing I know, she's emptying out my bags and admonishing me for throwing this or that away without consulting her. I think that if I don't get rid of some of this stuff, in the dark of night or otherwise, someone is going to have a godawful job ahead of them when the time comes to move out of this home of ours. If I do it right, I'll never have her asking me about this or that article of clothing or other that she used to have sitting in the garage or wherever. That's the plan, anyway.
The missus will make her grandmother's pumpkin pie recipe today. She will also put together some deviled eggs. If the deviled eggs last until tomorrow, it would be a small miracle. I bought some hard-boiled eggs for her to use rather than having to cook and peel the darn things before adding the yolk concoction. Peeling eggs can be a frightful task. Oh, and I have this little pet peeve of mine that is not a big deal, but it is worth mentioning. I hate eating egg dishes, be it egg salad or deviled eggs, and finding pieces of shell in the end product. I simply won't have it. That is so yesterday when you think about the fact that pre-hard-boiled eggs are a relatively new product to hit the store shelves. Is that something I can look up on Wikipedia? Lest we forget, the missus will be making a nice cranberry sauce using real cranberries. I'm good with the canned stuff, but you'll not hear those words crossing my lips in her presence. No siree, Bob.
That's all I have for today. It's my list of "top of mind" items. God, I hate that expression. I first heard it coming out of the mouth of Jean Pierre, Biden's press secretary. I now hear it here and there, and it still irks me just as much as it did the first time I heard it. Did you see her clown act yesterday when a reporter in the room asked Fauci about the origins of Covid? She went bananas. She shut him down and wouldn't let Fauci answer the question. Fauci was there to say goodbye, and she wasn't about to let things go south by allowing someone to ask a legitimate question. God forbid. Do you think that she even knows how stupid she looks? Forget the words coming out of her mouth, she is a caricature of herself if she's anything. That's par for the course when you consider who hired her. Yep, we're talking about Joey Bumbles Biden. The main act in what is a three-ring circus each and every day of the week. They all fucking deserve each other. There, I said it.
Will someone please tell me why this FTX fraudster, Sam Bankman-Fried, isn't in jail? You know, this crypto exchange guy who stole lots of money from people and is still at large in the Bahamas. I'm talking about millions and billions of dollars. This is not chump change, folks. This is the real thing. Is anyone in our government making any efforts whatsoever to bring this guy back to the United States to face justice? He's fucking Bernie Madoff on steroids, for chrissakes. You can probably make the case that he is so well-connected politically that he's not going to spend so much as a day behind bars for his "crimes." You can probably also make the case that the people who lost money by parking their life's savings on the FTX exchange were doing so willingly and with full knowledge of the inherent risk associated with their investing activities.
Am I answering my own questions here? His donating millions to the Democrat party will only serve to enhance his chances of staying out of jail. I'm talking about that double standard as it applies to democrats who commit crimes compared to republicans who commit crimes. The latter are more likely to rot in jail without bail while awaiting their sentencing. The former, not so much. Look at this Theranos bitch. You know, the young upstart who built a medical empire on a lie and who hoodwinked the elite into investing millions of their hard-earned dollars into what they believed was a good investment when she knew full well that it was nothing but a crock. Now, the judge in her case recommends that she spend her eleven-year sentence in a "prison" essentially without walls. Is that your idea of justice? It ain't mine. Meanwhile, Trump supporters who were ushed into our nation's capitol on January sixth by the Capitol police, having been charged with trespassing, sit in jail interminably awaiting their trials and, when ultimately convicted, their sentencing.
I'll have to take a look around online to see if there isn't a Black Friday deal or two to be had. I don't need anything, but I'm a sucker for a good deal, so, as I said, I'll take a look around. The missus could use a new iPad, so that's a thought. I usually look forward to Black Friday to update our hardware or maybe buy an extra storage device or two. Remember when people used to fight with one another just to get in line at midnight outside a Best Buy so they could be the first one into the store at the stroke of midnight to get that flat-screen television for just $77? With inventories at all-time highs this year, I wouldn't be surprised to see a return of those midnight openings. You want to clear out those inventories and clear them out fast. Selling your stuff online doesn't do the trick. That isn't to say that you can't find some good discounts online. You can.
I read something this morning about Bumbles Biden and someone in his immediate family having their wedding on the grounds of the White House. These fucking grifters never stop feeding at the trough of governmental largess. Do it on your own goddamn dime. The White House belongs to the American people, and we don't need hucksters like the Bidens using our beloved White House as a backdrop for their bullshit. It gets worse. I'm also reading that the people getting married have been living at the White House for months now. What? The Bidens and their corrupt spawn have been sullying our nation at every turn since that clown was inaugurated some two years ago. Who paid for the wedding? Was it the Communist Chinese? You know, the ones Hunter has been doing deals with since you (Bumbles) were Vice President? Or, maybe the wedding, as lavish as it likely was, was paid for with kickbacks from the money we gave to the Ukrainians to pay for weapon systems, etc. Then again, how would we know? The wedding was closed to the general public, so nobody would be the wiser.
I just don't know how we as a nation can hold ourselves up as a model of everything that is right and everything that is good with a fraudster and a cheat the likes of Joe Bumbles Biden sitting in our White House. Everyone knows that this ass clown has been on the take for years. The infamous laptop from hell is replete with stories about the deals that Bumbles and his son, Hunter, made with America's enemies abroad. They even have Joey on video saying that if the Ukrainians didn't fire the person investigating his son Hunter that the Ukrainian government wouldn't get the billion dollars in aid that they had been promised. That's what they call quid-pro-quo, my friends. You scratch my back, I scratch your back. Oh, and how about the many stories of "ten percent" for the Big Guy? Hunter is not only a druggie with a proclivity for call girls and crack cocaine, he's also the Biden Crime Family's bag man. So, I say to you again. How does this not sully our nation having this grifter go about his criminal activity without a worry in the world and without so much as one agency looking into his grift as a public official? How does any of this make sense? I don't get it.
What's this I'm hearing about the new leftist president in Brazil freezing the bank accounts of people who are protesting his ascension to the presidency. I know there have been a lot of questions about whether he stole the election from Bolsonaoro or not, but the courts have dismissed Bolsonaro's claims, so it seems like a done deal to me. Funny thing is, who else do you know that has frozen people's bank accounts when their citizens took to the streets to fight back against what they perceived as governmental overreach? That's right. I'm referring to the president of Canada, Justin Trudeau. These are the tactics of dictators, if I'm not mistaken. I suppose that the people who disagree with the protesters are quite happy to see the government stepping to separate people from their money. Short of running over protestors with tanks, ala Tiananmen Square, separating people from their money is a bloodless solution to an irksome problem for a dictatorial government. The cautionary tale here, dictators aside, is that people should be careful what they wish for when it comes to governments coining their own digital currency. The spigot is not yours to control.
Thanksgiving has now come and gone. It was quite nice. Coordinating all the dishes so that everything got to the table while still hot has always been a challenge. This year was no different. I think letting the turkey sit for a good half hour while we finished prepping the remaining dishes was the key to our success this year. The missus and I worked hand-in-hand in the final hour before we sat down to our meal putting the final pieces in place. We even delivered the buttery rolls straight out of the oven while still piping hot. That never happens. We made certain that the things we know the Ev man enjoys most were served just the way he likes them: In paper bowls and with plastic serving spoons. The turkey was spectacularly moist and nicely browned with a golden crust. It might have been a tad over the recommended 157 degrees, but not by much. I'll carve the remaining turkey off the carcass today, and we'll have nice turkey for sandwiches for the next few days.
I was a little disappointed in the quality of the roasted vegetables that we purchased from Whole Foods. I think their stuffing, which we also ordered from Whole Foods, was subpar. The veggies were dry and rubbery, and the stuffing, while tasty, looked like it came out of the north end of a jackass. I expected more from Whole Foods, so, yes, it was a disappointment. The missus suggested that we stick with the tried and true Stovetop stuffing next year. That never disappoints. The missus wasn't happy with the way her cranberry sauce turned out, but it was just fine as long as you didn't eat too much of it. It was sufficiently tart, you might say. And, as much as I made of the big container of applesauce that the missus purchased at the store in recent days, I had none of it. There simply wasn't room on my plate for one more thing. I prefer the individualized six-packs of applesauce, truth be told. The mashed potatoes the missus prepared were to die for.
It's always good to see the Ev man sitting down to a home-cooked meal. He hasn't missed a Thanksgiving meal with us yet, so we feel pretty darned good about that. It was interesting to see him passing on the mashed potatoes. I think he's got a keen eye for the kinds of foodstuffs that spike his glucose, and mashed potatoes fall squarely into that category. In other words, he knows which foods make him feel good, and he knows to stay away from food like mashed potatoes which, nutritiously and medically speaking, are a bloody disaster. That didn't stop him from eating the rolls, but I think he may have had just one or two, and he was done with them as well. He decided not to stay the night, and he agreed to have us pack up some leftovers for him to take home. Who doesn't like to take home a little Thanksgiving with them? No pumpkin pie was served after dinner, and that was just fine with everybody. Better to leave some things for tomorrow.
The missus and I drove into downtown Portsmouth after the Ev man departed for home. It's always better to move your body than not after eating a large meal, so that is what we did. It didn't take too much cajoling to get the missus up and out of the house since she is, more often than not, a bigger proponent of moving one's body than I. Temperatures were in the forties, and it was actually a delightful evening to be out and about. Even better was the fact that no stores were open in downtown Portsmouth and we literally had the streets to ourselves. If we saw a handful of people milling about, I might say that was an exaggeration. The missus loves to window shop, so she was in seventh heaven. And, of course, every window of every store in the downtown area has been turned into something resembling Santa's workshop now that the holiday season is upon us. I have little patience or interest when it comes to such things, but none of it was about me. It never is, and that suits me just fine.
I'm not sure how we left it with the Ev man. Now that he and a friend have had a chance to tidy up his place, I'm not sure there's much for the missus and me to do. Once the dishes are done, and the trash has been taken out, that's about all she wrote. Maybe that's how we left it with him. The Ev man is lucky to have such friends, and that is not lost on him or us. Housework is not one of the Ev man's strengths, and, if anything, it is something he struggles with. He'd be the first to admit it. I think it's not something he has a lot of control over, so you kind of have to take that into account when you're looking to improve things on the margins. That's not to say that he doesn't appreciate having order restored once he's knee-deep in the chaos of it all. He does. He's often said that it sometimes feels as though he's moving into a new place after this or that deep cleaning. If I had my druthers, and if I thought it would improve his lot, I would hire the Maids house cleaning service to go into his place once a week. It's not a very practical solution, but one of many thoughts I have from time to time.
I don't know what got into me. After saying I never make things like soup from the carcass of the turkey that we have for Thanksgiving, I do just that. Well, no need to jump the gun here. I don't actually have soup just yet. What I do have, after about five hours, is a lovely stock that I can now use to make a tasty soup. It was easy peasy. So easy peasy, in fact, that I haven't a clue as to why I haven't done this before. My dad, God rest his soul, would be so proud. This is something that he, and probably his father before him, would have done without blinking an eye. And, my dad was no Chef Boyardee. Memories are funny things, though, so I could be wrong. I can see him making the soup in my mind's eye, but I can't quite see myself sitting down with a heel of crusty bread in one hand and a soup spoon in the other. Still, it's not a stretch to see myself asking him for advice on what he would do with a leftover turkey carcass a day or two after Thanksgiving. You just never know.
Now that I have a stock, and plenty of it, I might add, I need to think about next steps. I was thinking about using wide egg noodles in the soup instead of rice but ended up with bowtie pasta in my cart after all was said and done. I think the missus has now talked me out of using the bowtie pasta, so I'll be going back to the store for the wide egg noodles after all. I have some frozen peas that will do just fine, and now I have to give a little more thought to what I might add next to spice it up a bit. They say that poultry seasoning has a way of bringing out the flavor in an otherwise tasteless broth, so maybe I'll do that. The recipe that I'm looking at calls for adding a can of this or that soup to the broth. I worked too hard to reduce the turkey carcass to bones, so I'll not be muddying up the nice broth with some store-bought bullshit. It's not happening. Last but not least, I had a lot of leftover turkey meat, so I'll need to dice that up before adding it to the soup. How am I doing, Pops?
This week's blog is getting a little long in the tooth. I was going to go on and on a bit about the missus and her complete and utter failing when it comes to using our various and sundry remotes. You know, the ones we use to turn on our television sets. Imagine, if you can, a fish out of water flip-flopping around on the deck of your boat with his or her mouth agape and bulging eyes while gasping for air with every essence of its being. That's my missus to a tee when it comes to sorting out which buttons to press when all she ever wants to do is watch one or more of her favorite shows. "Have I taught you nothing all these past many years, little darlings?" It's a rhetorical question. She knows it, and I know it. I say it anyway. Enough said, I suppose. I did say this was getting a little long in the tooth. Let's leave it there.
Here We Go Again
20/11/22 07:09
Let's do this, fam. We've got another week coming up so let's make the best of it. I've been keeping an eye on the crypto market over the weekend after the shenanigans with the FTX bankruptcy filing. You have to wonder if one thing won't lead to another, with the end result being some sort of contagion rippling or, worse yet, ripping through the financial markets taking down every asset class imaginable. What pisses me off is that the people involved in the FTX fiasco will likely escape any kind of responsibility because they are 1) well-connected, and 2) major contributors to the Democrat party. This is what passes for justice in the year of the lord 2022 in the United States of America. This, sadly, is our new reality.
The same form of chicanery is currently underway in several states here in the United States as it relates to the week-old mid-term elections. The democrats just keep counting and counting until they have enough ballots to declare themselves the winners of this or that House or Senate seat. As you might guess, the additional ballots needed to secure a win are conjured up out of thin air and delivered or printed on-site where they can be counted alongside valid ballots. Where are the voices of leadership in the Republican party who should be hollering from the rooftops at the injustice of it all? It's fucking crickets. Meanwhile, the Nevada Senate seat goes to the democrat after all the "valid" votes are tallied. The Governor's seat in Arizona has yet to be determined, but the longer the count goes on, the more likely it is that the democrat in the race will emerge the winner. The majority in the House is still undecided.
It's enough for the average Joe to say "fuck it" when it comes to going to the polls every time we have an election. The Democrats are going to steal it anyway, so why bother? I've even considered joining the Democrat party because I'm getting tired of losing. I don't believe in anything they stand for, so that's probably not likely. Who in their right mind wants to join a band of thieves and charlatans whose political platform calls for the complete and utter destruction of our great republic?
Did I mention that we have one town here in New Hampshire with a population of 700, give or take, that turned in some 1,100 ballots for the democrat in the senate race? How does that happen? We have a republican governor who hasn't said a word and probably won't say a word about it. The idea of sending a Trump-endorsed republican senatorial candidate to Washington was a bridge too far for this squishy governor of ours. So much so, that he would rather see a democrat go to Washington to represent our state. In his own words, and I quote, "our candidates are just too "extreme.""
This is the time of year when the average investor starts to wonder about that elusive "Santa Rally" that comes along every so often. We've had such a nasty year when it comes to portfolio returns, with the S&P down some 15% YTD and the NASDAQ down some 27% YTD. Were it not for the 5-10% spike in the market this past Thursday following a surprisingly good CPI number, the S&P losses YTD would be north of 20% and the NASDAQ north of 30%. Have we seen the low for the year in both indices? I guess a lot depends on what the FED does next and how much they depend on data in making the decisions that they make. If you've been out of the market since the beginning of this rout, is it now time to stick your toes back in the water? Is the thought of missing out on a rally such that you're willing to take a little risk after being risk-off for months? How much of a financial bitch slap can you tolerate if you're wrong about jumping back in with both feet? Is capital preservation still key?
I know it's hard to believe, but Katie Hobbs has been declared the winner of the gubernatorial race in Arizona. She's a veritable dolt so let's get that on the record. A real dunce by any standard measure. She never agreed to any debates, either in the primaries or in the general election. Why she was ever even within ten points of Kari Lake in the polls at any point in the race had to be a shocker to anyone who was paying attention. I had the missus watch one or two things where she got to get a good look at this Katie Hobbs, and she agreed that Hobbs was effectively the dimmest of dimwits. I may have even tweeted that I wouldn't vote for Hobbs had she been a candidate for dog catcher, much less governor. She's the perfect stooge to sit at the pinnacle of Arizona's government as governor, where she can ensure that the MAGA movement never gains a long-lasting foothold in the state of Arizona and that Donald J Trump is never elevated to the presidency on her watch.
More insidious than stealing the election from Kari Lake is the fact that they were able to pull off the steal in broad daylight. I guess it's true what they say about how election winners are chosen: It's not the votes that count. It's the people who count the votes. This really is an abomination. Hobbs belongs in jail for the crime that she and her comrades in the Democrat party have committed. Did I mention that she never recused herself from anything to do with the election that she was responsible for administering as the sitting Secretary of State? And now, she's in a position to sign off on the election that she and her people just stole? I'll say it again. Nobody believes that she won the election fair and square. Hobbs was never ahead in any poll in the days leading up to Election Day in Arizona. If we're counting elections that the democrats have stolen this time around, we can now add Arizona to the list right behind Pennsylvania and Nevada.
How do you hold people accountable for this sort of thing? Is Kari Lake supposed to play the gracious loser and just walk away knowing what she knows about how the election was stolen from her? How can she mount a defense without being called an election denier? You know how that term has been bandied about by the main street media as of late. It is designed to tag, taint or paint, the so-called election denier as a January 6th insurrectionist or worse.
This is what scoundrels do when they lose elections. Never mind that democrats like Hillary Clinton and Stacy Abrams and others of their ilk have also not conceded when they've lost their elections. Let's be clear. This election in Arizona has been far from perfect from the start. Machines have malfunctioned; Voters have been turned away in republican districts due to long lines; People checking the election website have seen that their votes were not properly tabulated, ad nauseam. The sitting governor of the state can call for either an audit or a new election. Do it. Do it today. Do it for the people of Arizona.
There seems to be a movement afoot to bring down the MAGA movement at all costs. They are an existential threat to the future of the Democrat party, don't you know? The Democrats want to hold power in perpetuity, and the MAGA movement is the only thing that stands in their way. The democrats and their enablers in the left-wing media denounced each and every republican candidate in the midterms with labels like "extremists," "insurrectionists, and "election deniers." It was an overly broad brush, but it worked in a few races.
We republicans lost a few more races when Senator Lindsey Graham went public just weeks before the election with a proposed bill to limit abortions nationally to 15 weeks or something like that. Who does that? Anyway, we republicans are in the fight of our lives to save our republic from the leftists in the Democrat party. Who better to lead us into battle than the MAGA king himself, Donald J Trump? He's speaking to the American people on the telly later this evening to declare his candidacy for 2024 allegedly. Welcome back, Mr. President!
Fast forward eight hours, and Trump has given his speech as promised. I thought the speech was a bit too long, and if I'm to be honest, I'm getting more than a little tired of hearing the same old stories from Trump that I've heard him tell hundreds of times. I don't understand why he thinks he needs to tell the same stories over and over again. Trump's speech could have been truncated to take out the old stories, and the speech might have still come in a little long. I like that he didn't dwell on the criminality of the 2020 election, which we all know was stolen, although he did catch himself mid-sentence a couple of times just to let us know that it's still a sore subject with him. I also thought that he sounded a little less polished in the delivery of his speech compared to previous speeches he's made. Did he misspeak, or is he just getting back up to speed after not delivering speeches in a while? Is what I watched somehow age-related? The last thing we need after having Bumbles Biden at the helm for two years is to have another befuddled old man looking to take his place.
I'm not saying that I think Trump is bewildered in any way, shape, or form. Maybe I'm more attuned to what these things look like after watching Bumbles make a fool of himself on the world stage repeatedly. I will say that I thought there was something about how Trump took a drink of bottled water a couple of times during his speech that got me wondering. It was almost as though Trump was doing his level best to make sure that his hands didn't shake or something worse as he went to quench his thirst. These comparisons and others like them, however petty they sound, will be grist for the political mill once Trump gets on the debate stage with more youthful candidates. It will amplify and exacerbate any age-related shortcomings we see in Trump. It will remind everyone and anyone watching that it may be time to elect someone more youthful to the highest office in our land. Political leanings aside, think JFK.
I like that everything we're likely to hear now coming out of the Trump camp will be taken in a political context and not just the usual sour grapes we hear coming from the guy standing on the sidelines after losing his last election. Let bygones be bygones, is what I say. Trump needs to keep his messages forward-looking and to the point. People don't like things about Trump, so let's see if Trump can change those things up for the better going forward. I'm not sure we have to worry about his mean tweets since he's not back on Twitter, at least as of this morning. It makes me wonder just a little bit about the outcome of the mid-term elections in Arizona and whether or not Trump's comments before 2016 about John "Songbird" McCain not being a hero back in the day have now come back to haunt those candidates who currently support Trump and who went on to lose this past Tuesday. Do I think that Trump should quit while he's ahead? That horse has left the barn.
I told you that this FTX thing was going to get worse before it got better. It's not just a story about a Bermuda-based crypto exchange run by some 20-something wunderkind that went belly up. We're now finding out that taxpayer dollars sent to Ukraine by the billions in support of their efforts to defend themselves against the Russian invaders over the last year or more were then laundered by FTX and subsequently doled out by FTX in the form of kickbacks to mostly democratic politicians in the United States to support their political campaigns.
How much Ukraine and Ukraine's president Zelensky ended up with is not yet known. Is there any doubt that Joe Bumbles Biden and the Biden Crime Family got their cut? None whatsoever. FTX has been a major donor to the democrat party since the founding of FTX, and we now have a better idea as to how they came by the funds they needed to make said contributions. The extent of the stench around this fraudulent conveyance of funds and the political influence it bought and paid for is almost incalculable. A worst-case scenario, if you will.
Maxine Waters, the congresswoman from California, when asked about the donations from FTX to her campaign, responded as follows: "Both parties received donations." Oh, okay. I guess that makes it okay. Let me see if I have this right. These same politicians who approve the payment of taxpayer monies to fund the war in Ukraine are also beneficiaries of the monies that they are approving. Maybe politicians getting kickbacks is nothing new in the scheme of things, but this thing stinks to high heaven. The United States is the largest donor to the war effort in Ukraine, and Ukraine isn't even on our fucking continent. I guess we now know why we're shoveling money hand over fist to Zelensky and his ilk in Ukraine. We are also starting to see how all of the pieces fit together when republicans have been at their wit's end trying to explain how the democrats did as well as they did in the mid-term elections. FTX essentially funded get-out-the-vote efforts on behalf of the democrats.
I have a question. How much did the Minority Leader (Mitch McConnell) in the Senate get from FTX, and what role did those donations play in suppressing efforts to get certain republican senators elected? We know that McConnell played fast and loose with dollars when it came to certain candidates who, were they to win their races, would give Republicans the Senate. He actually withdrew funding from certain senatorial candidates in the days leading up to the elections when they were seemingly on the cusp of pulling off an upset against their Democratic opponent. It's all so obvious now.
Can the same be said for Minority Leader McCarthy in the House of Representatives? We know he pulled funds from the Leavitt campaign here in New Hampshire, so I guess you could say we have the receipts. So, you see now that this isn't just a story about some kid running a crypto exchange. It was also well known that FTX spread a lot of money around to publishing houses to make sure that certain articles were written to cast FTX and, more specifically, its founder, SBF, in the best light possible.
The bottom line here, Ukraine aside, is that FTX funded the theft of our mid-term elections with taxpayer dollars and with the explicit consent and involvement (votes) of politicians on both sides of the aisle. How do they then hold hearings to suss out the specifics of the case? Is this not a criminal proceeding, or are politicians somehow protected by virtue of their protected status as elected officials? How is it that FTX wasn't able to cover its financial shortfalls by yet another tranche of monies approved by the US government before having to declare bankruptcy? Like any other Bernie Madoff-style pyramid scheme, timing is everything,
Can you imagine the consequences had all of this come to light before the mid-term elections? I'm still scratching my head trying to understand why it had to happen at all, especially when you consider that we're still cutting checks to Ukraine. Someone had to know that when this house of cards came tumbling down that they would be exposed. We also know there is a double standard when it comes to the application of the law between the democrats and the republicans. I think we need a few more cards to come out of the deck before we know how this is going to play out.
It sounds like the Republican Majority in the House of Representatives is finally going to look into the Biden Crime Family and their corruption. None of that was happening when the Democrats were in power. They had nothing but praise for their bumbling and demented leader sitting in the Oval Office. You know, the guy who sniffs the hair of young children every chance he gets. Yes, the very same guy that has been taking ten percent off the top of every influence-peddling deal he and his son, Hunter, have put together since they began selling access to everything under the sun.
I was hoping that the American people would go to the polls during the midterms and express their outrage by voting against the democrats. Little did I know that there were other forces at play that would have the Republicans coming up short. Nonetheless, the Republicans are now in charge of the House of Representatives, so proceed they will in taking the Biden Family to task for selling out their country for personal gain. It ain't going to be pretty.
The Ev man and I dropped his car off at the dealership in Exeter last night. We need them to diagnose the code that keeps coming up when I try to get his car inspected. I think the code suggests an issue with the catalytic converter, but my local guy can't tell me with any degree of certainty whether it's something as simple as an oxygen sensor or something pricier like a new catalytic converter. I can't have him replacing parts willy-nilly until the code goes away, so off to the dealership it goes. If it's an expensive fix, then so be it. I'm not going to run around looking to see if I can have it done elsewhere for less. Just bite the bullet, Johnny. Get it done and get it done right the first time. Ev will be happier about it, and so will I. We picked up a couple of subs across the street from the dealership, and I dropped him back at his place. Now, I just wait for the call from the dealership to let me know what they've found. Fingers crossed.
The missus and I stopped into a Chipolte at the mall yesterday afternoon. We were looking to pick up a couple of burritos for a quick pick-me-up. While waiting to place our order, we noticed a few things that gave us pause. The missus was the first to notice that there was a notable shortage of employees compared to what we were accustomed to seeing at this particular store. That, in and of itself, was not a big deal. That said, we watched intently as the lone employee behind the counter rolled up burritos for the customers ahead of us. She was doing a particularly bad job of it.
Her final product resembled more of an engorged mushroom than the usual cylindrically shaped delight that we're accustomed to. Maybe she was a new employee. Maybe she never got the hang of rolling up burritos Chipolte-style. Whatever. We also noticed that the place wasn't all that clean. The missus and I looked at each other, and we decided almost simultaneously that we'd seen enough. Chipolte has had issues with cleanliness before, and it didn't end well for them in a lot of respects. We gave up our place in line and placed our order with a Chipolte across town, where we hoped to do better. Maybe this speaks to the bigger issue of how much of the sausage-making you want your customers to see while they wait in line to place their orders. Food for thought.
If it isn't one thing, it's another. I was just getting started down Ocean Boulevard on my bike the other day when I noticed that my gear shifting became totally untethered. I got zero resistance when shifting from one gear to the next, and I was all of a sudden in either the highest or lowest gear, I'm not sure which. You know, the one that you want to be in when you're going down a steep hill and you want to keep up or increase your speed by the time you get to the bottom of the hill. There was no way I was going to be able to complete my ride. It would require more effort and muscle than I could possibly muster.
I was wondering if I had what it took to get home, much less complete my usual hour-long ride. There was one stretch of road as I headed home where I needed to get off my bike and walk it up the incline. Thankfully, it was all downhill from there. What I discovered once I got home was that my gear wire had snapped, and it was now hanging loose off the frame of the bike. Dang. It's been at the shop now for a couple of days, and I hope to pick it up later today. It's probably just the usual wear and tear kind of stuff. Better that it happens now than during the winter when breaking down on the road can become a little trickier.
The missus and I will be traveling to Massachusetts today to assist a friend (Mr. R) with getting his new iMac up and running. He's been on a PC platform all these past years and is finally taking the plunge. I'll be in the driver's seat for the changeover, and the missus will be lending a hand here and there as needed. Mr. R is not a techie by any stretch of the imagination, so I assume that what I'll find when I get there is that he has nothing more than a collection of documents and a few photos that will have to be moved from his PC to his Mac.
Apple has a migration application that I'll be using for the first time to move settings and other things that are less obvious to the naked eye. If that doesn't work for whatever reason, I may have to use my handy dandy flash drive to move things. This shouldn't be complicated. The good news is that I can't break anything, and I can't lose anything if I get this right. He also has Carbonite, so I might look to download what they have in its entirety just so we have a complete file on hand after all is said and done.
There is somewhat of a fly in the ointment now that the day has arrived to take this trip down to Massachusetts. Apple posted something overnight about holiday savings that they are offering for purchases made between November 25th and the 28th. The offer includes up to $250 dollars off (an Apple Gift Card) for the purchase of certain items, such as Mr. R's iMac. If I'm not mistaken, Mr. R has yet to unpack his new iMac, so it may be worth a try to give the Apple store a call to inquire about their return policy. I'm quite certain that the store doesn't want the return, so they may be willing to negotiate one thing or the other to avoid the physical return of the computer.
So, should we or should we not make this trip? Should the missus give Mr. R a call to see what he wants to do? Knowing Mr. R as I think I do, he is going to want to see what, if anything, can be done to take advantage of the offer. At a minimum, maybe that means delaying our trip until he can arrange to avail himself of the discount, whatever that looks like. We won't be leaving the house here for a few hours, and the missus is still fast asleep, so I'll discuss it with her when she comes around. I don't think not telling Mr. R about the discount is an option. Mrs. R would likely agree with that assessment.
This thing with the Ev man's car has become something of a cluster fuck. I don't even want to tell you what they (Volvo dealership) told me about how much it's going to cost to fix. It's so expensive that I'll need to ask about an aftermarket solution if one exists. Even with the aftermarket parts, the expense will be extraordinarily expensive. And then, thanks to known supply chain issues, I'll be paying more and waiting longer than would otherwise be necessary for the parts needed for the fix. I just can't catch a break with this damn thing. I want to do the right thing for the Ev man here, but it's going to cost me dearly. I'll have a chat with my local mechanic and see what, if anything, he can do about the aftermarket dilemma so we can move forward with getting this fixed. The weird part is that the car runs great, so that's not the issue. It's all about the catalytic converters. It's no fucking wonder you hear about people stealing these things (and getting arrested) left and right. Wish me luck.
What the hell! Who stabbed and killed those four beautiful college students in Idaho? It's unbelievable. I think the coppers are keeping a lid on things as best they can, but they aren't offering much to the public. People living in the community are concerned, and as well they should be, as they have a killer walking around in their midst. No person or persons of interest have been identified as yet, so I have to imagine that everyone in the community is locked and loaded and hunkered down behind closed doors. Are we talking about a deranged drifter here? Is this a lover's spat gone awry?
I was telling the missus that I could see a killer going from room to room, slitting throats along the way. There wouldn't be much noise, certainly not enough to wake a sleeping household from a deep sleep. This is almost Ted Bundy-level stuff, but Bundy was more likely to bludgeon his victims to death than slit their throats from ear to ear. It's no wonder students from the local university have left early and, without permission, to be with their families for Thanksgiving. The missus says that many will likely not return after the holiday. I think she's right.
Speaking of Thanksgiving, the Ev man and I will be heading over to Whole Foods on Tuesday to pick up the items we ordered. I'm a little hard-pressed to call this a tradition, and I'm talking about the Ev man coming with me to Whole Foods, but this is the second year in a row where he's coming along for the ride. He's not a fan of going into these kinds of places, but he did just fine last year, so I suspect he's gotten over whatever hump he needs to get over to do it again.
It was a little disorganized last year when we went to pick up our order, and I think the Ev man found that to be challenging in a fun sort of way. We went here, there, and everywhere inside the store, looking to piece together the items we had ordered online, and it just wasn't falling in place as one might otherwise expect from an Amazon-owned store like Whole Foods. Amazon is all about connecting the dots when it comes to the organization and delivery of goods. No? I wanted to make this paragraph about the Ev man, but it morphed into a larger story about Amazon and its subsidiary, Whole Foods.
I'll finish up this week's bloggy stuff by saying that we did about as much as we could when we visited Mr. R in Massachusetts. We got his new iMac up and running, and that took the better part of the day. It took longer than I expected it would. The migration of his data from his PC to his new iMac was pretty straightforward once we got our arms around it. I'm a little less well-versed when it comes to using PC's so I had a few issues there. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to quit the application, Chrome, on the PC since it was interfering with the migration process that I was trying to get up and running.
I ended up uninstalling the application, and that did the trick. I tried to establish a wired connection between the devices to migrate the data, but that wasn't working out either, so we did everything wirelessly. I also wasn't able to establish a wireless connection between his printer and the iMac. We're going to need to bring a printer cable with us when we go down to finish the job. I wasn't expecting to make a second trip, but there you have it. Here's hoping Mr. R takes my advice and spends a little bit of time looking at iMac tutorials on YouTube. It's a good a place as any to start. You (he) can do this.
The same form of chicanery is currently underway in several states here in the United States as it relates to the week-old mid-term elections. The democrats just keep counting and counting until they have enough ballots to declare themselves the winners of this or that House or Senate seat. As you might guess, the additional ballots needed to secure a win are conjured up out of thin air and delivered or printed on-site where they can be counted alongside valid ballots. Where are the voices of leadership in the Republican party who should be hollering from the rooftops at the injustice of it all? It's fucking crickets. Meanwhile, the Nevada Senate seat goes to the democrat after all the "valid" votes are tallied. The Governor's seat in Arizona has yet to be determined, but the longer the count goes on, the more likely it is that the democrat in the race will emerge the winner. The majority in the House is still undecided.
It's enough for the average Joe to say "fuck it" when it comes to going to the polls every time we have an election. The Democrats are going to steal it anyway, so why bother? I've even considered joining the Democrat party because I'm getting tired of losing. I don't believe in anything they stand for, so that's probably not likely. Who in their right mind wants to join a band of thieves and charlatans whose political platform calls for the complete and utter destruction of our great republic?
Did I mention that we have one town here in New Hampshire with a population of 700, give or take, that turned in some 1,100 ballots for the democrat in the senate race? How does that happen? We have a republican governor who hasn't said a word and probably won't say a word about it. The idea of sending a Trump-endorsed republican senatorial candidate to Washington was a bridge too far for this squishy governor of ours. So much so, that he would rather see a democrat go to Washington to represent our state. In his own words, and I quote, "our candidates are just too "extreme.""
This is the time of year when the average investor starts to wonder about that elusive "Santa Rally" that comes along every so often. We've had such a nasty year when it comes to portfolio returns, with the S&P down some 15% YTD and the NASDAQ down some 27% YTD. Were it not for the 5-10% spike in the market this past Thursday following a surprisingly good CPI number, the S&P losses YTD would be north of 20% and the NASDAQ north of 30%. Have we seen the low for the year in both indices? I guess a lot depends on what the FED does next and how much they depend on data in making the decisions that they make. If you've been out of the market since the beginning of this rout, is it now time to stick your toes back in the water? Is the thought of missing out on a rally such that you're willing to take a little risk after being risk-off for months? How much of a financial bitch slap can you tolerate if you're wrong about jumping back in with both feet? Is capital preservation still key?
I know it's hard to believe, but Katie Hobbs has been declared the winner of the gubernatorial race in Arizona. She's a veritable dolt so let's get that on the record. A real dunce by any standard measure. She never agreed to any debates, either in the primaries or in the general election. Why she was ever even within ten points of Kari Lake in the polls at any point in the race had to be a shocker to anyone who was paying attention. I had the missus watch one or two things where she got to get a good look at this Katie Hobbs, and she agreed that Hobbs was effectively the dimmest of dimwits. I may have even tweeted that I wouldn't vote for Hobbs had she been a candidate for dog catcher, much less governor. She's the perfect stooge to sit at the pinnacle of Arizona's government as governor, where she can ensure that the MAGA movement never gains a long-lasting foothold in the state of Arizona and that Donald J Trump is never elevated to the presidency on her watch.
More insidious than stealing the election from Kari Lake is the fact that they were able to pull off the steal in broad daylight. I guess it's true what they say about how election winners are chosen: It's not the votes that count. It's the people who count the votes. This really is an abomination. Hobbs belongs in jail for the crime that she and her comrades in the Democrat party have committed. Did I mention that she never recused herself from anything to do with the election that she was responsible for administering as the sitting Secretary of State? And now, she's in a position to sign off on the election that she and her people just stole? I'll say it again. Nobody believes that she won the election fair and square. Hobbs was never ahead in any poll in the days leading up to Election Day in Arizona. If we're counting elections that the democrats have stolen this time around, we can now add Arizona to the list right behind Pennsylvania and Nevada.
How do you hold people accountable for this sort of thing? Is Kari Lake supposed to play the gracious loser and just walk away knowing what she knows about how the election was stolen from her? How can she mount a defense without being called an election denier? You know how that term has been bandied about by the main street media as of late. It is designed to tag, taint or paint, the so-called election denier as a January 6th insurrectionist or worse.
This is what scoundrels do when they lose elections. Never mind that democrats like Hillary Clinton and Stacy Abrams and others of their ilk have also not conceded when they've lost their elections. Let's be clear. This election in Arizona has been far from perfect from the start. Machines have malfunctioned; Voters have been turned away in republican districts due to long lines; People checking the election website have seen that their votes were not properly tabulated, ad nauseam. The sitting governor of the state can call for either an audit or a new election. Do it. Do it today. Do it for the people of Arizona.
There seems to be a movement afoot to bring down the MAGA movement at all costs. They are an existential threat to the future of the Democrat party, don't you know? The Democrats want to hold power in perpetuity, and the MAGA movement is the only thing that stands in their way. The democrats and their enablers in the left-wing media denounced each and every republican candidate in the midterms with labels like "extremists," "insurrectionists, and "election deniers." It was an overly broad brush, but it worked in a few races.
We republicans lost a few more races when Senator Lindsey Graham went public just weeks before the election with a proposed bill to limit abortions nationally to 15 weeks or something like that. Who does that? Anyway, we republicans are in the fight of our lives to save our republic from the leftists in the Democrat party. Who better to lead us into battle than the MAGA king himself, Donald J Trump? He's speaking to the American people on the telly later this evening to declare his candidacy for 2024 allegedly. Welcome back, Mr. President!
Fast forward eight hours, and Trump has given his speech as promised. I thought the speech was a bit too long, and if I'm to be honest, I'm getting more than a little tired of hearing the same old stories from Trump that I've heard him tell hundreds of times. I don't understand why he thinks he needs to tell the same stories over and over again. Trump's speech could have been truncated to take out the old stories, and the speech might have still come in a little long. I like that he didn't dwell on the criminality of the 2020 election, which we all know was stolen, although he did catch himself mid-sentence a couple of times just to let us know that it's still a sore subject with him. I also thought that he sounded a little less polished in the delivery of his speech compared to previous speeches he's made. Did he misspeak, or is he just getting back up to speed after not delivering speeches in a while? Is what I watched somehow age-related? The last thing we need after having Bumbles Biden at the helm for two years is to have another befuddled old man looking to take his place.
I'm not saying that I think Trump is bewildered in any way, shape, or form. Maybe I'm more attuned to what these things look like after watching Bumbles make a fool of himself on the world stage repeatedly. I will say that I thought there was something about how Trump took a drink of bottled water a couple of times during his speech that got me wondering. It was almost as though Trump was doing his level best to make sure that his hands didn't shake or something worse as he went to quench his thirst. These comparisons and others like them, however petty they sound, will be grist for the political mill once Trump gets on the debate stage with more youthful candidates. It will amplify and exacerbate any age-related shortcomings we see in Trump. It will remind everyone and anyone watching that it may be time to elect someone more youthful to the highest office in our land. Political leanings aside, think JFK.
I like that everything we're likely to hear now coming out of the Trump camp will be taken in a political context and not just the usual sour grapes we hear coming from the guy standing on the sidelines after losing his last election. Let bygones be bygones, is what I say. Trump needs to keep his messages forward-looking and to the point. People don't like things about Trump, so let's see if Trump can change those things up for the better going forward. I'm not sure we have to worry about his mean tweets since he's not back on Twitter, at least as of this morning. It makes me wonder just a little bit about the outcome of the mid-term elections in Arizona and whether or not Trump's comments before 2016 about John "Songbird" McCain not being a hero back in the day have now come back to haunt those candidates who currently support Trump and who went on to lose this past Tuesday. Do I think that Trump should quit while he's ahead? That horse has left the barn.
I told you that this FTX thing was going to get worse before it got better. It's not just a story about a Bermuda-based crypto exchange run by some 20-something wunderkind that went belly up. We're now finding out that taxpayer dollars sent to Ukraine by the billions in support of their efforts to defend themselves against the Russian invaders over the last year or more were then laundered by FTX and subsequently doled out by FTX in the form of kickbacks to mostly democratic politicians in the United States to support their political campaigns.
How much Ukraine and Ukraine's president Zelensky ended up with is not yet known. Is there any doubt that Joe Bumbles Biden and the Biden Crime Family got their cut? None whatsoever. FTX has been a major donor to the democrat party since the founding of FTX, and we now have a better idea as to how they came by the funds they needed to make said contributions. The extent of the stench around this fraudulent conveyance of funds and the political influence it bought and paid for is almost incalculable. A worst-case scenario, if you will.
Maxine Waters, the congresswoman from California, when asked about the donations from FTX to her campaign, responded as follows: "Both parties received donations." Oh, okay. I guess that makes it okay. Let me see if I have this right. These same politicians who approve the payment of taxpayer monies to fund the war in Ukraine are also beneficiaries of the monies that they are approving. Maybe politicians getting kickbacks is nothing new in the scheme of things, but this thing stinks to high heaven. The United States is the largest donor to the war effort in Ukraine, and Ukraine isn't even on our fucking continent. I guess we now know why we're shoveling money hand over fist to Zelensky and his ilk in Ukraine. We are also starting to see how all of the pieces fit together when republicans have been at their wit's end trying to explain how the democrats did as well as they did in the mid-term elections. FTX essentially funded get-out-the-vote efforts on behalf of the democrats.
I have a question. How much did the Minority Leader (Mitch McConnell) in the Senate get from FTX, and what role did those donations play in suppressing efforts to get certain republican senators elected? We know that McConnell played fast and loose with dollars when it came to certain candidates who, were they to win their races, would give Republicans the Senate. He actually withdrew funding from certain senatorial candidates in the days leading up to the elections when they were seemingly on the cusp of pulling off an upset against their Democratic opponent. It's all so obvious now.
Can the same be said for Minority Leader McCarthy in the House of Representatives? We know he pulled funds from the Leavitt campaign here in New Hampshire, so I guess you could say we have the receipts. So, you see now that this isn't just a story about some kid running a crypto exchange. It was also well known that FTX spread a lot of money around to publishing houses to make sure that certain articles were written to cast FTX and, more specifically, its founder, SBF, in the best light possible.
The bottom line here, Ukraine aside, is that FTX funded the theft of our mid-term elections with taxpayer dollars and with the explicit consent and involvement (votes) of politicians on both sides of the aisle. How do they then hold hearings to suss out the specifics of the case? Is this not a criminal proceeding, or are politicians somehow protected by virtue of their protected status as elected officials? How is it that FTX wasn't able to cover its financial shortfalls by yet another tranche of monies approved by the US government before having to declare bankruptcy? Like any other Bernie Madoff-style pyramid scheme, timing is everything,
Can you imagine the consequences had all of this come to light before the mid-term elections? I'm still scratching my head trying to understand why it had to happen at all, especially when you consider that we're still cutting checks to Ukraine. Someone had to know that when this house of cards came tumbling down that they would be exposed. We also know there is a double standard when it comes to the application of the law between the democrats and the republicans. I think we need a few more cards to come out of the deck before we know how this is going to play out.
It sounds like the Republican Majority in the House of Representatives is finally going to look into the Biden Crime Family and their corruption. None of that was happening when the Democrats were in power. They had nothing but praise for their bumbling and demented leader sitting in the Oval Office. You know, the guy who sniffs the hair of young children every chance he gets. Yes, the very same guy that has been taking ten percent off the top of every influence-peddling deal he and his son, Hunter, have put together since they began selling access to everything under the sun.
I was hoping that the American people would go to the polls during the midterms and express their outrage by voting against the democrats. Little did I know that there were other forces at play that would have the Republicans coming up short. Nonetheless, the Republicans are now in charge of the House of Representatives, so proceed they will in taking the Biden Family to task for selling out their country for personal gain. It ain't going to be pretty.
The Ev man and I dropped his car off at the dealership in Exeter last night. We need them to diagnose the code that keeps coming up when I try to get his car inspected. I think the code suggests an issue with the catalytic converter, but my local guy can't tell me with any degree of certainty whether it's something as simple as an oxygen sensor or something pricier like a new catalytic converter. I can't have him replacing parts willy-nilly until the code goes away, so off to the dealership it goes. If it's an expensive fix, then so be it. I'm not going to run around looking to see if I can have it done elsewhere for less. Just bite the bullet, Johnny. Get it done and get it done right the first time. Ev will be happier about it, and so will I. We picked up a couple of subs across the street from the dealership, and I dropped him back at his place. Now, I just wait for the call from the dealership to let me know what they've found. Fingers crossed.
The missus and I stopped into a Chipolte at the mall yesterday afternoon. We were looking to pick up a couple of burritos for a quick pick-me-up. While waiting to place our order, we noticed a few things that gave us pause. The missus was the first to notice that there was a notable shortage of employees compared to what we were accustomed to seeing at this particular store. That, in and of itself, was not a big deal. That said, we watched intently as the lone employee behind the counter rolled up burritos for the customers ahead of us. She was doing a particularly bad job of it.
Her final product resembled more of an engorged mushroom than the usual cylindrically shaped delight that we're accustomed to. Maybe she was a new employee. Maybe she never got the hang of rolling up burritos Chipolte-style. Whatever. We also noticed that the place wasn't all that clean. The missus and I looked at each other, and we decided almost simultaneously that we'd seen enough. Chipolte has had issues with cleanliness before, and it didn't end well for them in a lot of respects. We gave up our place in line and placed our order with a Chipolte across town, where we hoped to do better. Maybe this speaks to the bigger issue of how much of the sausage-making you want your customers to see while they wait in line to place their orders. Food for thought.
If it isn't one thing, it's another. I was just getting started down Ocean Boulevard on my bike the other day when I noticed that my gear shifting became totally untethered. I got zero resistance when shifting from one gear to the next, and I was all of a sudden in either the highest or lowest gear, I'm not sure which. You know, the one that you want to be in when you're going down a steep hill and you want to keep up or increase your speed by the time you get to the bottom of the hill. There was no way I was going to be able to complete my ride. It would require more effort and muscle than I could possibly muster.
I was wondering if I had what it took to get home, much less complete my usual hour-long ride. There was one stretch of road as I headed home where I needed to get off my bike and walk it up the incline. Thankfully, it was all downhill from there. What I discovered once I got home was that my gear wire had snapped, and it was now hanging loose off the frame of the bike. Dang. It's been at the shop now for a couple of days, and I hope to pick it up later today. It's probably just the usual wear and tear kind of stuff. Better that it happens now than during the winter when breaking down on the road can become a little trickier.
The missus and I will be traveling to Massachusetts today to assist a friend (Mr. R) with getting his new iMac up and running. He's been on a PC platform all these past years and is finally taking the plunge. I'll be in the driver's seat for the changeover, and the missus will be lending a hand here and there as needed. Mr. R is not a techie by any stretch of the imagination, so I assume that what I'll find when I get there is that he has nothing more than a collection of documents and a few photos that will have to be moved from his PC to his Mac.
Apple has a migration application that I'll be using for the first time to move settings and other things that are less obvious to the naked eye. If that doesn't work for whatever reason, I may have to use my handy dandy flash drive to move things. This shouldn't be complicated. The good news is that I can't break anything, and I can't lose anything if I get this right. He also has Carbonite, so I might look to download what they have in its entirety just so we have a complete file on hand after all is said and done.
There is somewhat of a fly in the ointment now that the day has arrived to take this trip down to Massachusetts. Apple posted something overnight about holiday savings that they are offering for purchases made between November 25th and the 28th. The offer includes up to $250 dollars off (an Apple Gift Card) for the purchase of certain items, such as Mr. R's iMac. If I'm not mistaken, Mr. R has yet to unpack his new iMac, so it may be worth a try to give the Apple store a call to inquire about their return policy. I'm quite certain that the store doesn't want the return, so they may be willing to negotiate one thing or the other to avoid the physical return of the computer.
So, should we or should we not make this trip? Should the missus give Mr. R a call to see what he wants to do? Knowing Mr. R as I think I do, he is going to want to see what, if anything, can be done to take advantage of the offer. At a minimum, maybe that means delaying our trip until he can arrange to avail himself of the discount, whatever that looks like. We won't be leaving the house here for a few hours, and the missus is still fast asleep, so I'll discuss it with her when she comes around. I don't think not telling Mr. R about the discount is an option. Mrs. R would likely agree with that assessment.
This thing with the Ev man's car has become something of a cluster fuck. I don't even want to tell you what they (Volvo dealership) told me about how much it's going to cost to fix. It's so expensive that I'll need to ask about an aftermarket solution if one exists. Even with the aftermarket parts, the expense will be extraordinarily expensive. And then, thanks to known supply chain issues, I'll be paying more and waiting longer than would otherwise be necessary for the parts needed for the fix. I just can't catch a break with this damn thing. I want to do the right thing for the Ev man here, but it's going to cost me dearly. I'll have a chat with my local mechanic and see what, if anything, he can do about the aftermarket dilemma so we can move forward with getting this fixed. The weird part is that the car runs great, so that's not the issue. It's all about the catalytic converters. It's no fucking wonder you hear about people stealing these things (and getting arrested) left and right. Wish me luck.
What the hell! Who stabbed and killed those four beautiful college students in Idaho? It's unbelievable. I think the coppers are keeping a lid on things as best they can, but they aren't offering much to the public. People living in the community are concerned, and as well they should be, as they have a killer walking around in their midst. No person or persons of interest have been identified as yet, so I have to imagine that everyone in the community is locked and loaded and hunkered down behind closed doors. Are we talking about a deranged drifter here? Is this a lover's spat gone awry?
I was telling the missus that I could see a killer going from room to room, slitting throats along the way. There wouldn't be much noise, certainly not enough to wake a sleeping household from a deep sleep. This is almost Ted Bundy-level stuff, but Bundy was more likely to bludgeon his victims to death than slit their throats from ear to ear. It's no wonder students from the local university have left early and, without permission, to be with their families for Thanksgiving. The missus says that many will likely not return after the holiday. I think she's right.
Speaking of Thanksgiving, the Ev man and I will be heading over to Whole Foods on Tuesday to pick up the items we ordered. I'm a little hard-pressed to call this a tradition, and I'm talking about the Ev man coming with me to Whole Foods, but this is the second year in a row where he's coming along for the ride. He's not a fan of going into these kinds of places, but he did just fine last year, so I suspect he's gotten over whatever hump he needs to get over to do it again.
It was a little disorganized last year when we went to pick up our order, and I think the Ev man found that to be challenging in a fun sort of way. We went here, there, and everywhere inside the store, looking to piece together the items we had ordered online, and it just wasn't falling in place as one might otherwise expect from an Amazon-owned store like Whole Foods. Amazon is all about connecting the dots when it comes to the organization and delivery of goods. No? I wanted to make this paragraph about the Ev man, but it morphed into a larger story about Amazon and its subsidiary, Whole Foods.
I'll finish up this week's bloggy stuff by saying that we did about as much as we could when we visited Mr. R in Massachusetts. We got his new iMac up and running, and that took the better part of the day. It took longer than I expected it would. The migration of his data from his PC to his new iMac was pretty straightforward once we got our arms around it. I'm a little less well-versed when it comes to using PC's so I had a few issues there. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to quit the application, Chrome, on the PC since it was interfering with the migration process that I was trying to get up and running.
I ended up uninstalling the application, and that did the trick. I tried to establish a wired connection between the devices to migrate the data, but that wasn't working out either, so we did everything wirelessly. I also wasn't able to establish a wireless connection between his printer and the iMac. We're going to need to bring a printer cable with us when we go down to finish the job. I wasn't expecting to make a second trip, but there you have it. Here's hoping Mr. R takes my advice and spends a little bit of time looking at iMac tutorials on YouTube. It's a good a place as any to start. You (he) can do this.
Sitting Ducks
13/11/22 07:04
One more day to go here, folks. Election Day is tomorrow. Bumbles Biden is out there on the stump talking about how he's going to shut down all drilling in the United States. He's actually talking about this as Pennsylvanians are planning to go to the polls to vote in the midterm elections tomorrow. Pennsylvania has some of the largest deposits of natural gas and oil in the country. They will be voting against their best interests if they vote for the Democrats. Why their Senate and Gubernatorial races are so close, I have no idea. We're down to the wire now, so let's hope that people wake up before it's too late. There's a lot riding on the outcome of tomorrow's elections. Here's praying that we republicans take back both houses of Congress.
You have to admit, though, Bumbles Biden did say that he was all in on the green energy bullshit when he ran for president in 2020. He may have actually said that he was going to shut down all energy production here in the United States. The left-wing media had done such a good job of demonizing Trump over the course of his four-year term that a lot of Americans were willing to vote for Beezlebub rather than endure one more mean tweet from Trump. I'm still not buying the fact that Biden got eighty-one million votes, so let's not lose sight of that fact. One of Biden's first directives after his inauguration was to shut down the Keystone Pipeline project, which put thirty thousand people out of work. I don't know how having both houses of Congress is going to stop Bumbles from doing more damage to our country, but it probably can't hurt.
It would be a mistake to view this election as just one more change of political leadership in races across our country. Never before in the history of our country have we been in a position to speak more loudly and more clearly about our collective displeasure at where Biden and his leftist minions have taken our country over the last two years. If tomorrow does turn out to be the tsunami that everyone thinks it is going to be, it will be a total and complete repudiation of Biden and everything that his Administration represents.
Enough is enough. None of what Biden has done, and continues to do, from leaving our borders open to shutting down our domestic oil production, has benefitted Americans. It has benefitted the Communist Chinese and the Russians, and God only knows who else. They would love nothing better than to see our country limit itself to wind and solar while they continue to build coal-burning plants and invest in natural gas and oil production around the world. We'd be, in a word or two, sitting ducks if and when the time came to defend our interests and those of our allies around the world.
I do worry, though, about whether or not the elections tomorrow are going to be on the up and up. Who doesn't think for a minute that Kathy Hochul (Democrat Governor) in New York won't do everything and anything she can to hang onto power? Stealing elections is nothing new to Democrats, so this should be a walk in the park if that is what they're planning. Would it surprise me to find out that she and her people were working hand-in-hand with the Communist Chinese to print ballots that they could dump into one or more of New York's Boroughs under the darkness of night just to ensure her victory? No, it would not. When it comes to Democrats stealing elections, it's wash, rinse, repeat. The same is true of Hobbs, the Democrat candidate running against Kari Lake in Arizona. Hobbs seems eerily confident despite lagging behind Lake in the polls by maybe double digits. It just worries me to no end when I hear the leftist media asking the question time and time again of candidates like Kari Lake, "will you accept the outcome of the election?"
I'll probably never understand why so many of these races are as close as they are. It seems like the Senate races are all within a point or two, and all are within the margin of error. Does that mean that half of our citizenry agrees with what Joey Bumbles Biden has done and continues to do to our country? That is one scary thought. Maybe it just speaks to the fact that we are polarized as all get out when it comes to our politics. Democrats think that everything Republicans do is bad for our country and vice versa. But it's not just some theoretical framework we're talking about when you can't afford to put food on your family's tables because one political party or the other has implemented policies that throw your living standards into a cocked hat. Why would you tolerate a political party whose policies encourage criminals rather than hold them to account for their crimes? These differences couldn't be starker. I still don't know why these damn races are as close as they are. Color me skeptical.
Election Day has arrived. I never thought it would get here, but here we are. The missus and I will cast our ballots sometime this morning at the local elementary school. And then, we wait. I'll want to be careful about drawing conclusions prematurely as it all unfolds later this evening since early returns can be notoriously misleading. I don't want to break out the pom-poms too early, nor do I wish to get too distressed early on, thinking that my candidates are not going to have a good night. A good night in my humble opinion is for the republicans to win back majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. If it comes down to a run-off in Georgia to see who wins the Senate, then I think it's a fairly safe bet that Walker will win that battle, and we'll end up with a 51-49 advantage in the Senate after all the valid votes are counted. If we can get Walker in the door with anything better than 50% of the vote, that will avoid a run-off, and we can all rest easy.
Elon Musk tweeted something yesterday to the effect that everyone should vote "Republican." He said that he's always voted for democrats, but this year would be different. No explanation was needed, and none was required from anyone who follows Elon Musk. They knew precisely what he meant, although I have to imagine that the left had their panties in a wad after seeing Elon's tweet. The old Twitter, the Twitter that everyone used prior to Musk buying the company, would have had its leftist algorithms up and running to ensure that the leftist candidates were given the highest priority right up until Election Day. If you were a Trump supporter, you could just forget about having your tweets see the light of day. They would be dead in the water, euphemistically speaking. So, we need to take our hats off to Mr. Musk and thank him for providing a level playing field for everyone. File this under "Not all heroes wear capes."
Well, so much for the red wave. It was barely worth staying up for last night. Nobody saw this coming. If the Republicans win the House of Representatives, it will only be by a couple of seats. I guess that's better than not winning the House at all. The best estimates were that the Republicans would win the House by maybe 20 seats or more. I should be satisfied that we'll see Pelosi unseated as House Majority leader, yet the margin is so thin that it remains to be seen what Republicans can get done. The Senate is up in the air as well. That retard Fetterman beat Oz in Pennsylvania, if you can believe that. You know, the guy who wants to do away with fracking and any sort of energy production in an otherwise energy-rich Pennsylvania. So, half of the residents in Pennsylvania went to the polls yesterday to vote against their best interests? I'm just not buying it. Did I mention that Fetterman can't speak in complete sentences?
Polls in Arizona just three days ago had Kari Lake (Gubernatorial candidate) running ahead of her opponent, Hobbs, by some 11 points. Yet, I think Hobbs is ahead, if only by a little, as I sit here the morning after. There were issues in Maricopa County that surfaced midday yesterday where votes were not being properly tabulated or some such nonsense. Mind you, Republicans were expected to flood the polls on Election Day in Arizona, so if you were a county in Arizona looking to manipulate counts, this was your opportunity. It looks like they stepped up to the plate and did just that. I don't know who, maybe the Mexican Cartels, but whoever it was wanted nothing to do with the policies that Lake and her people were promising to implement once in office. Lake may still pull this one out, so let the counting continue. If Lake doesn't win, it will be the most obvious theft of an election that I've seen as of late, and I've seen a few. So much for the Momma bear.
If I'm feeling good about anything this morning, it is that the swine Pappas and his counterpart in the Senate, Hassan, will both be in the Minority in the next Congress. Polls had Leavitt beating Pappas by 5 points here in New Hampshire just a day or two ahead of Election day. So, explain to me where that lead went. Is this yet another stolen election? How did the Democrats steal it? Have they perfected the steal so completely and thoroughly that it leaves you speechless when you see a candidate who is expected to lose, then win, and by a surprising margin? Let's just say there are a lot of people waking up this morning to an election outcome that nobody saw coming. Is this all about Trump? Was the plan all along to take Trump-like candidates off the table ahead of the 2024 presidential election? They would have needed buy-in from a lot of people from both political camps. Don't give me any bullshit about a more perfect Union. Please.
I'm happy to see the missus using our new Vornado space heater. It gets the job done, so why wouldn't she use it? Well, it has a smell to it that you may be familiar with if you've ever bought a new hair dryer. I left it in the garage for a couple of days to see if it wouldn't air out a little bit, but that didn't help much. The trick is that the longer you run it, the sooner the smell goes away. I walked in on her when she was working in the computer room yesterday, and she had the space heater up and running, and I couldn't have been happier. It reminds me of the television commercial back in the day for Life cereal with the character, Mikey, who loves his Life cereal: Mikey likes it! It makes me want to order another one for our living room. I think the missus would like one for the bathroom, too. That might make a nice Christmas present for the missus!
I'm starting to feel the crunch now when it comes to getting this place ready for Winter. I spent a couple of hours outside yesterday raking leaves, so that has me feeling like I'm getting things under control. I cleared the deck off at the end of last week, and that got the ball rolling a little bit. I need to clean out the room in the garage so I can squeeze a few things in there over the winter. I told the missus the other day that it might be a good idea to fill up the generator with gas and fill a couple of five-gallon jugs with gasoline as well in the event we have something akin to energy blackouts or worse over these next few months. Our generator works great, and we have our home wired to run mostly off the generator in the event of a power outage. It's all about being prepared for contingencies. The sooner I buy the gasoline, the better I'll feel.
We need to get on the stick and order our Thanksgiving stuff. It's November 10th already, for chrissakes. We should take care of that today. We'll be buying everything we need from Whole Foods again. I'm trying to talk the missus into making as few dishes as possible just to make my life easier when it comes time to clean up everything after dinner. She'll want to make her grandmother's pumpkin pie and a nice batch of her homemade whipped cream for dessert. She said something about using Stovetop stuffing, but I reminded her that Whole Foods has an even better stuffing that we can order along with our turkey. We've never cooked our stuffing inside our turkey, and we'll likely not do that this year. I might suggest to the missus that we forgo our usual LeSeur canned peas this year and have frozen sweet peas instead. Aside from lessening the sodium in our diets that come with consuming peas from the can, frozen peas are likely superior in taste to the canned variety. Oh, and the missus loves to make her own cranberry sauce using real cranberries. God bless her little heart.
The vote counting continues in a lot of races country-wide that have yet to be settled. Kari Lake is expecting to win the gubernatorial race in Arizona when all the votes are counted, but that hasn't happened yet. They released one tranche of votes last evening that may have added to her opponent's numbers. This is death by a thousand cuts, any way you slice it. Kari and her people believe that same-day votes heavily favor her and her fellow republican candidates, so if that's how it shakes out, that's great. What if that Hobbs bitch tips the scales in her favor behind the scenes? She and her people are doing the counting, so who doesn't think that she would cheat if that's what it takes to become Governor of the great state of Arizona? I guess what I'm saying is that if the new vote tallies favor Hobbs instead, then all hell could break loose. Have you ever seen a momma bear on steroids? The House races have yet to secure a win for the Republicans, and the Senate is still undecided just two days out from the mid-term election. Don't forget the runoff in Georgia.
I signed up for an Amazon Music trial this summer, and I canceled it after the 6-month trial period. Who doesn't like free music? The funny thing is, once I quit the trial, I could still access and play the music. I'm thinking to myself, what is this all about? Did my cancellation not go through? Are they going to start charging me a monthly fee to listen to the music? I thought I was going to have to ask the missus to check our statement to make sure that we weren't being charged. It all felt a little criminal to me as I was using a music service without paying for the service. If it was an honest mistake on their part, and they failed to put through the cancellation behind the scenes, is that my problem? Who am I to tell them how to run their business? No sooner had I stopped worrying about having the music police show up on my doorstep when Amazon went public with the statement that any and all Amazon Prime members now had unlimited access to their music libraries. That explains everything. I am fucking good to go. Is it too early to start listening to Christmas music?
Speaking of Christmas, can you believe that Whole Foods had Christmas trees on sale when we visited the store the other day? What the hell, man! It's too early, no? That got the missus and me talking about our plans to buy a tree for the upcoming holiday. The missus said something about the price of trees this year and how they are likely to be up over last year. I think we paid about $75 for a tree last year, and, believe me, it wasn't any great shakes. Could trees come in at $100 this year, with inflation being cray-cray and all? I think it could. We talked about buying a tree from Walmart or at least taking a look at what they have, thinking their prices would be more reasonable than those trees sold at roadside sites. "But they're all trussed up, and we can't see what they look like", the missus exclaimed. Who buys a Christmas tree sight unseen? The quick and dirty answer is, nobody. I'll unbundle as many as I have to until I'm satisfied if that is what it takes. Arrest me if you have to.
I feel a little bad about a conversation I had with my neighbor yesterday. It wasn't so much about what was said, but rather it had more to do with what went unsaid. She had blown the leaves on her lawn to the edge of the street, and there they were in all their glory. There were several piles, in fact, and all seemingly destined to be taken across the street and deposited into the woods. I don't know that she was hinting that I should lend a hand in accomplishing that task, but I think there may have been a little bit of that, truth be told.
I was out moving my own piles of leaves here and there when she stopped to talk to me, so she may have thought to herself, maybe I can get this schlep to help a little old lady in distress. I didn't tell her that I was doing my best to clean up my own lawn despite the fact that I was suffering from bruised ribs after falling off my bike a couple of weeks back. I suggested that she have the lad that she hired over the summer to cut her lawn to now assist in moving the piles of leaves. I think that wasn't the answer she was looking for, so that was the end of that conversation. I don't mind pitching in here and there to mow her lawn when she's away on vacation, but I'm not wanting to extend those services to include leaf removal in the Fall. That's a big job, and that's no word of a lie. Once you sign up for that sort of thing, there's no turning back. I'll be on the hook every year. It's better to nip this fucker in the bud right here and now. She didn't ask me outright, and I didn't volunteer.
Trump will be making an announcement next week from his home in Mar-a-lago, Florida. Prior to the lackluster results coming on the heels of the mid-term elections this past Tuesday, Trump was expected to make his decision on running in 2024 based on how well or how poorly the Republicans fared in the mid-terms. We still don't know who won the House or the Senate because certain states are still counting votes. That's right, I said. They are still counting votes. Or, knowing democrats as we do, they are still in the process of stealing votes. I'm not sure where all of this leaves Trump when it comes to making his decision. What I do know is that the RINO's in the Republican party are out on the stump pushing the narrative that the tepid results of the mid-terms are a direct result of Trump's involvement in the races. They are pushing for Republicans to move past Trump as quickly as possible lest he jeopardizes even more seats come 2024.
It's pure poppycock, of course. Keep in mind that backstabbers behind the scenes, the likes of Paul Ryan and his ilk, want to push their own version of republicanism, and it's Trump who sees a clearer path to victory for America and, I think, fully intends to see that through to completion when he announces that he'll be running for president again in 2024. Trump has been pretty darn prescient about a lot of things since he came down the elevator in 2015 to announce his run for the presidency, and in the intervening years until he "lost" to Biden in 2020, so I trust his judgment and now await his announcement next week before breaking out the champagne. I'm not sure what this means for DeSantis, so we'll just have to wait to see how it all plays out. What if, and this is a big if, Trump announces that DeSantis is going to join him on the ticket as his Vice President? I'm just spitballing here, but 2024 is coming, and it'll be here before we know it.
The missus asked me yesterday what I wanted for Christmas. I told her that there wasn't anything in particular that I wanted or needed. Are there any toys that I don't have that I might want? Not really. Our televisions are getting a little long in the tooth, but they still work fine, so I don't need the next best thing that Sony or Samsung have to offer. I need a couple of tires for my bike, but that isn't something that I would expect Santa to put beneath our tree on Christmas morning. The missus has other people to consider when it comes to buying presents, so I'll suggest that she concentrate on them and not me. What about those video headsets that are all the rage this year? I have this nagging fear that if I put them on, I might not want to take them off. I spend enough time on electronic devices as it is, so enough said there. I think it's true what they say about giving being better than receiving, so that's my answer, and I'm sticking to it.
What the heck happened in the financial markets yesterday? The major indices here in the United States surged throughout the day after the CPI report came in below expectations. Just barely below expectations, I would hasten to add. With good news being hard to come by in today's markets, any good news will be enough to light a fire under a stock market that has been under pressure since January of this year. The S&P was up some 5.5% on the day. The NASDAQ was up some 8%. For people who have lost their shirts in the market this year, they got a little bit of relief when all was said and done. How far it goes and how long it lasts remains to be seen. We're still in an inflationary bear market, so anyone not attuned to that fact is going to be an unhappy camper when they see their returns edging downward again. We're a ways away from capitulation, so here's my advice: Buckle up.! By the time this is all over, you'll wish you had jumped on the iBonds that went on sale a couple of weeks back at 9%. It's true as well that you don't see the kind of action that we saw in the markets today in bull markets. You just don't.
What the hell is going on with this so-called FTX bankruptcy? This company is worth $16 billion one day, and four days later, they're worth zero. How the hell does that happen? I'm not going to pretend that I understand what FTX was other than what I'm now reading. It was an exchange of sorts for cryptocurrencies. I give the founder credit for building a company worth that much money, but to see the damn thing go under this quickly is just kind of weird. I'd have to see their list of creditors to get a sense as to who lost what, but I'm already hearing some familiar names (Tom Brady) of people who can probably afford the kind of money I'm hearing they've lost. I'm also not sure that any of these people will ever get anything back since FTX didn't have much in the way of hard assets that could be liquidated. It's worth mentioning that the founder was a major contributor to the democrat party, maybe only second to the likes of George Soros. That works for me. Just sayin'.
Can you believe those sons-of-bitches out in Arizona and Nevada are still counting ballots? The damn election was this past Tuesday and today is Friday. You know those mother fucking democrats are working overtime to steal both the Governor's seat in Arizona and the Senatorial spot in Nevada. Right? If Nevada knows how to do anything, they know how to count things. Nevada is the home of the best casinos in the world, and, believe me, they know how to count things. Evidently, that skill set does not extend to the people currently counting ballots in that state. And, wouldn't you know it, the last ballots to be counted are those ballots coming from Clark county in Nevada, home to none other than the infamous Las Vegas strip. Remember, the democrats can't win if they can't steal. It looks like the heist of the century is in motion and underway. Oh, and if the republicans are counting on winning a few seats in California to put them over the top in the race to win the House, they don't know much about California politics.
It's been a poopy week for the missus. She's just exhausted. I'm glad that she won't be traveling to Massachusetts this weekend. She needs to say "no" now and then when she's being asked to work. These weekend schticks that she's been doing here and there for years now should be winding down soon. Driving home in the dark will be a thing of the past. A distant memory, if you will. It's possible that she can do what she needs to do long distance, so we'll have to see how that works out, if at all. I'll miss the oatmeal raisin cookies that they send her home with, and I'm quite sure that the missus will miss having her Flat Whites at Starbucks before hitting the road for her drive home. I'm just as happy that she won't be putting the extra miles on our car, and with the price of gas as expensive as it is these days, the trip down and back is now less lucrative than it used to be. Speaking of gas, it's quite possible that her employer will run out of gas long before the missus needs to tell him that she can't do it anymore.
It's so funny. One thing that I remember my dad being emphatic about back in the day was that we should stay away from preservatives like BHA and BHT. I don't even remember where we might have seen these so-called preservatives. If I had to guess, I would guess that it was used in the packaging of cereals as it is these days. We ate a lot of Puffed Rice and Puffed Wheat back in the day, so maybe those cereals were suspect. Wheaties and Cheerios may have contained the preservative as well. When we didn't have Pop-Tarts available, we consumed all of the above. Pops might have preferred that we eat oatmeal all the time, but being teenagers on the run as we were, oatmeal just didn't cut the mustard. I see BHA and BHT these days in the same cereals, and I find myself looking for healthier alternatives that are available at stores like Whole Foods. It does make me wonder if Pop's cautionary tales of the past were more than just bluster seeing as I'm still here talking about them decades later. Pops wasn't a zealot one way or the other about these kinds of things, but as lessons go, I think this was a good one. Whether it explains why I'm still here all these years later is an altogether different question.
I saw Bumbles Biden on the telly at some Climate Change meeting the other day going on and on about doing away with our country's reliance on carbon-based fuels by 2030. Has he completely lost his mind? I know he just reads what they put in front of him, but this is sheer lunacy. Our nation is an energy powerhouse, a literal Saudi Arabia of the Americas, yet he and his left-wing nut jobs want to regulate these energy sources out of business. I was hopeful that Republicans winning the House and Senate in the mid-terms would help to keep Biden's nuttier initiatives like killing our oil and gas industries in check. I didn't factor in the theft of key races by the Democrats, so that's on me. He was even talking about monitoring methane levels using satellite technology. If you're in the livestock business, they're coming for you. If you enjoy a nice cut of prime rib with the missus on the weekends, you'll need to think again. This is a global initiative, and the Bidenistas are making up for lost time after four years of Trump in office. Oh, and global powerhouses like China and Russia could not be happier. We're sitting ducks with this green-energy bullshit, and Biden knows it.
I don't know that I have any good parting words for this weeks blog. We're probably just one or two stolen seats away from the Democrats stealing the House after they stole the Senate seat in Nevada from Adam Laxalt within the last twenty fours. Did I mention that the cameras went down for around eight hours in the building where the votes were being tallied in Nevada senate race? That only happens when people are stealing things. The Democrats now have 50 senate seats, by hook or crook I might add, and they are looking to make it 51 seats when they steal the Georgia seat from Herschel Walker in the runoff scheduled for December 6th. If Republicans can win that seat, and if Republicans can convince Joe Manchin to switch political parties, Republicans can take back the Senate. Wouldn't that be something. And what, pray tell, will this FTX bankruptcy fiasco mean for the crypto world this coming week? Aside from all of that, everything is just fucking ducky.
You have to admit, though, Bumbles Biden did say that he was all in on the green energy bullshit when he ran for president in 2020. He may have actually said that he was going to shut down all energy production here in the United States. The left-wing media had done such a good job of demonizing Trump over the course of his four-year term that a lot of Americans were willing to vote for Beezlebub rather than endure one more mean tweet from Trump. I'm still not buying the fact that Biden got eighty-one million votes, so let's not lose sight of that fact. One of Biden's first directives after his inauguration was to shut down the Keystone Pipeline project, which put thirty thousand people out of work. I don't know how having both houses of Congress is going to stop Bumbles from doing more damage to our country, but it probably can't hurt.
It would be a mistake to view this election as just one more change of political leadership in races across our country. Never before in the history of our country have we been in a position to speak more loudly and more clearly about our collective displeasure at where Biden and his leftist minions have taken our country over the last two years. If tomorrow does turn out to be the tsunami that everyone thinks it is going to be, it will be a total and complete repudiation of Biden and everything that his Administration represents.
Enough is enough. None of what Biden has done, and continues to do, from leaving our borders open to shutting down our domestic oil production, has benefitted Americans. It has benefitted the Communist Chinese and the Russians, and God only knows who else. They would love nothing better than to see our country limit itself to wind and solar while they continue to build coal-burning plants and invest in natural gas and oil production around the world. We'd be, in a word or two, sitting ducks if and when the time came to defend our interests and those of our allies around the world.
I do worry, though, about whether or not the elections tomorrow are going to be on the up and up. Who doesn't think for a minute that Kathy Hochul (Democrat Governor) in New York won't do everything and anything she can to hang onto power? Stealing elections is nothing new to Democrats, so this should be a walk in the park if that is what they're planning. Would it surprise me to find out that she and her people were working hand-in-hand with the Communist Chinese to print ballots that they could dump into one or more of New York's Boroughs under the darkness of night just to ensure her victory? No, it would not. When it comes to Democrats stealing elections, it's wash, rinse, repeat. The same is true of Hobbs, the Democrat candidate running against Kari Lake in Arizona. Hobbs seems eerily confident despite lagging behind Lake in the polls by maybe double digits. It just worries me to no end when I hear the leftist media asking the question time and time again of candidates like Kari Lake, "will you accept the outcome of the election?"
I'll probably never understand why so many of these races are as close as they are. It seems like the Senate races are all within a point or two, and all are within the margin of error. Does that mean that half of our citizenry agrees with what Joey Bumbles Biden has done and continues to do to our country? That is one scary thought. Maybe it just speaks to the fact that we are polarized as all get out when it comes to our politics. Democrats think that everything Republicans do is bad for our country and vice versa. But it's not just some theoretical framework we're talking about when you can't afford to put food on your family's tables because one political party or the other has implemented policies that throw your living standards into a cocked hat. Why would you tolerate a political party whose policies encourage criminals rather than hold them to account for their crimes? These differences couldn't be starker. I still don't know why these damn races are as close as they are. Color me skeptical.
Election Day has arrived. I never thought it would get here, but here we are. The missus and I will cast our ballots sometime this morning at the local elementary school. And then, we wait. I'll want to be careful about drawing conclusions prematurely as it all unfolds later this evening since early returns can be notoriously misleading. I don't want to break out the pom-poms too early, nor do I wish to get too distressed early on, thinking that my candidates are not going to have a good night. A good night in my humble opinion is for the republicans to win back majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. If it comes down to a run-off in Georgia to see who wins the Senate, then I think it's a fairly safe bet that Walker will win that battle, and we'll end up with a 51-49 advantage in the Senate after all the valid votes are counted. If we can get Walker in the door with anything better than 50% of the vote, that will avoid a run-off, and we can all rest easy.
Elon Musk tweeted something yesterday to the effect that everyone should vote "Republican." He said that he's always voted for democrats, but this year would be different. No explanation was needed, and none was required from anyone who follows Elon Musk. They knew precisely what he meant, although I have to imagine that the left had their panties in a wad after seeing Elon's tweet. The old Twitter, the Twitter that everyone used prior to Musk buying the company, would have had its leftist algorithms up and running to ensure that the leftist candidates were given the highest priority right up until Election Day. If you were a Trump supporter, you could just forget about having your tweets see the light of day. They would be dead in the water, euphemistically speaking. So, we need to take our hats off to Mr. Musk and thank him for providing a level playing field for everyone. File this under "Not all heroes wear capes."
Well, so much for the red wave. It was barely worth staying up for last night. Nobody saw this coming. If the Republicans win the House of Representatives, it will only be by a couple of seats. I guess that's better than not winning the House at all. The best estimates were that the Republicans would win the House by maybe 20 seats or more. I should be satisfied that we'll see Pelosi unseated as House Majority leader, yet the margin is so thin that it remains to be seen what Republicans can get done. The Senate is up in the air as well. That retard Fetterman beat Oz in Pennsylvania, if you can believe that. You know, the guy who wants to do away with fracking and any sort of energy production in an otherwise energy-rich Pennsylvania. So, half of the residents in Pennsylvania went to the polls yesterday to vote against their best interests? I'm just not buying it. Did I mention that Fetterman can't speak in complete sentences?
Polls in Arizona just three days ago had Kari Lake (Gubernatorial candidate) running ahead of her opponent, Hobbs, by some 11 points. Yet, I think Hobbs is ahead, if only by a little, as I sit here the morning after. There were issues in Maricopa County that surfaced midday yesterday where votes were not being properly tabulated or some such nonsense. Mind you, Republicans were expected to flood the polls on Election Day in Arizona, so if you were a county in Arizona looking to manipulate counts, this was your opportunity. It looks like they stepped up to the plate and did just that. I don't know who, maybe the Mexican Cartels, but whoever it was wanted nothing to do with the policies that Lake and her people were promising to implement once in office. Lake may still pull this one out, so let the counting continue. If Lake doesn't win, it will be the most obvious theft of an election that I've seen as of late, and I've seen a few. So much for the Momma bear.
If I'm feeling good about anything this morning, it is that the swine Pappas and his counterpart in the Senate, Hassan, will both be in the Minority in the next Congress. Polls had Leavitt beating Pappas by 5 points here in New Hampshire just a day or two ahead of Election day. So, explain to me where that lead went. Is this yet another stolen election? How did the Democrats steal it? Have they perfected the steal so completely and thoroughly that it leaves you speechless when you see a candidate who is expected to lose, then win, and by a surprising margin? Let's just say there are a lot of people waking up this morning to an election outcome that nobody saw coming. Is this all about Trump? Was the plan all along to take Trump-like candidates off the table ahead of the 2024 presidential election? They would have needed buy-in from a lot of people from both political camps. Don't give me any bullshit about a more perfect Union. Please.
I'm happy to see the missus using our new Vornado space heater. It gets the job done, so why wouldn't she use it? Well, it has a smell to it that you may be familiar with if you've ever bought a new hair dryer. I left it in the garage for a couple of days to see if it wouldn't air out a little bit, but that didn't help much. The trick is that the longer you run it, the sooner the smell goes away. I walked in on her when she was working in the computer room yesterday, and she had the space heater up and running, and I couldn't have been happier. It reminds me of the television commercial back in the day for Life cereal with the character, Mikey, who loves his Life cereal: Mikey likes it! It makes me want to order another one for our living room. I think the missus would like one for the bathroom, too. That might make a nice Christmas present for the missus!
I'm starting to feel the crunch now when it comes to getting this place ready for Winter. I spent a couple of hours outside yesterday raking leaves, so that has me feeling like I'm getting things under control. I cleared the deck off at the end of last week, and that got the ball rolling a little bit. I need to clean out the room in the garage so I can squeeze a few things in there over the winter. I told the missus the other day that it might be a good idea to fill up the generator with gas and fill a couple of five-gallon jugs with gasoline as well in the event we have something akin to energy blackouts or worse over these next few months. Our generator works great, and we have our home wired to run mostly off the generator in the event of a power outage. It's all about being prepared for contingencies. The sooner I buy the gasoline, the better I'll feel.
We need to get on the stick and order our Thanksgiving stuff. It's November 10th already, for chrissakes. We should take care of that today. We'll be buying everything we need from Whole Foods again. I'm trying to talk the missus into making as few dishes as possible just to make my life easier when it comes time to clean up everything after dinner. She'll want to make her grandmother's pumpkin pie and a nice batch of her homemade whipped cream for dessert. She said something about using Stovetop stuffing, but I reminded her that Whole Foods has an even better stuffing that we can order along with our turkey. We've never cooked our stuffing inside our turkey, and we'll likely not do that this year. I might suggest to the missus that we forgo our usual LeSeur canned peas this year and have frozen sweet peas instead. Aside from lessening the sodium in our diets that come with consuming peas from the can, frozen peas are likely superior in taste to the canned variety. Oh, and the missus loves to make her own cranberry sauce using real cranberries. God bless her little heart.
The vote counting continues in a lot of races country-wide that have yet to be settled. Kari Lake is expecting to win the gubernatorial race in Arizona when all the votes are counted, but that hasn't happened yet. They released one tranche of votes last evening that may have added to her opponent's numbers. This is death by a thousand cuts, any way you slice it. Kari and her people believe that same-day votes heavily favor her and her fellow republican candidates, so if that's how it shakes out, that's great. What if that Hobbs bitch tips the scales in her favor behind the scenes? She and her people are doing the counting, so who doesn't think that she would cheat if that's what it takes to become Governor of the great state of Arizona? I guess what I'm saying is that if the new vote tallies favor Hobbs instead, then all hell could break loose. Have you ever seen a momma bear on steroids? The House races have yet to secure a win for the Republicans, and the Senate is still undecided just two days out from the mid-term election. Don't forget the runoff in Georgia.
I signed up for an Amazon Music trial this summer, and I canceled it after the 6-month trial period. Who doesn't like free music? The funny thing is, once I quit the trial, I could still access and play the music. I'm thinking to myself, what is this all about? Did my cancellation not go through? Are they going to start charging me a monthly fee to listen to the music? I thought I was going to have to ask the missus to check our statement to make sure that we weren't being charged. It all felt a little criminal to me as I was using a music service without paying for the service. If it was an honest mistake on their part, and they failed to put through the cancellation behind the scenes, is that my problem? Who am I to tell them how to run their business? No sooner had I stopped worrying about having the music police show up on my doorstep when Amazon went public with the statement that any and all Amazon Prime members now had unlimited access to their music libraries. That explains everything. I am fucking good to go. Is it too early to start listening to Christmas music?
Speaking of Christmas, can you believe that Whole Foods had Christmas trees on sale when we visited the store the other day? What the hell, man! It's too early, no? That got the missus and me talking about our plans to buy a tree for the upcoming holiday. The missus said something about the price of trees this year and how they are likely to be up over last year. I think we paid about $75 for a tree last year, and, believe me, it wasn't any great shakes. Could trees come in at $100 this year, with inflation being cray-cray and all? I think it could. We talked about buying a tree from Walmart or at least taking a look at what they have, thinking their prices would be more reasonable than those trees sold at roadside sites. "But they're all trussed up, and we can't see what they look like", the missus exclaimed. Who buys a Christmas tree sight unseen? The quick and dirty answer is, nobody. I'll unbundle as many as I have to until I'm satisfied if that is what it takes. Arrest me if you have to.
I feel a little bad about a conversation I had with my neighbor yesterday. It wasn't so much about what was said, but rather it had more to do with what went unsaid. She had blown the leaves on her lawn to the edge of the street, and there they were in all their glory. There were several piles, in fact, and all seemingly destined to be taken across the street and deposited into the woods. I don't know that she was hinting that I should lend a hand in accomplishing that task, but I think there may have been a little bit of that, truth be told.
I was out moving my own piles of leaves here and there when she stopped to talk to me, so she may have thought to herself, maybe I can get this schlep to help a little old lady in distress. I didn't tell her that I was doing my best to clean up my own lawn despite the fact that I was suffering from bruised ribs after falling off my bike a couple of weeks back. I suggested that she have the lad that she hired over the summer to cut her lawn to now assist in moving the piles of leaves. I think that wasn't the answer she was looking for, so that was the end of that conversation. I don't mind pitching in here and there to mow her lawn when she's away on vacation, but I'm not wanting to extend those services to include leaf removal in the Fall. That's a big job, and that's no word of a lie. Once you sign up for that sort of thing, there's no turning back. I'll be on the hook every year. It's better to nip this fucker in the bud right here and now. She didn't ask me outright, and I didn't volunteer.
Trump will be making an announcement next week from his home in Mar-a-lago, Florida. Prior to the lackluster results coming on the heels of the mid-term elections this past Tuesday, Trump was expected to make his decision on running in 2024 based on how well or how poorly the Republicans fared in the mid-terms. We still don't know who won the House or the Senate because certain states are still counting votes. That's right, I said. They are still counting votes. Or, knowing democrats as we do, they are still in the process of stealing votes. I'm not sure where all of this leaves Trump when it comes to making his decision. What I do know is that the RINO's in the Republican party are out on the stump pushing the narrative that the tepid results of the mid-terms are a direct result of Trump's involvement in the races. They are pushing for Republicans to move past Trump as quickly as possible lest he jeopardizes even more seats come 2024.
It's pure poppycock, of course. Keep in mind that backstabbers behind the scenes, the likes of Paul Ryan and his ilk, want to push their own version of republicanism, and it's Trump who sees a clearer path to victory for America and, I think, fully intends to see that through to completion when he announces that he'll be running for president again in 2024. Trump has been pretty darn prescient about a lot of things since he came down the elevator in 2015 to announce his run for the presidency, and in the intervening years until he "lost" to Biden in 2020, so I trust his judgment and now await his announcement next week before breaking out the champagne. I'm not sure what this means for DeSantis, so we'll just have to wait to see how it all plays out. What if, and this is a big if, Trump announces that DeSantis is going to join him on the ticket as his Vice President? I'm just spitballing here, but 2024 is coming, and it'll be here before we know it.
The missus asked me yesterday what I wanted for Christmas. I told her that there wasn't anything in particular that I wanted or needed. Are there any toys that I don't have that I might want? Not really. Our televisions are getting a little long in the tooth, but they still work fine, so I don't need the next best thing that Sony or Samsung have to offer. I need a couple of tires for my bike, but that isn't something that I would expect Santa to put beneath our tree on Christmas morning. The missus has other people to consider when it comes to buying presents, so I'll suggest that she concentrate on them and not me. What about those video headsets that are all the rage this year? I have this nagging fear that if I put them on, I might not want to take them off. I spend enough time on electronic devices as it is, so enough said there. I think it's true what they say about giving being better than receiving, so that's my answer, and I'm sticking to it.
What the heck happened in the financial markets yesterday? The major indices here in the United States surged throughout the day after the CPI report came in below expectations. Just barely below expectations, I would hasten to add. With good news being hard to come by in today's markets, any good news will be enough to light a fire under a stock market that has been under pressure since January of this year. The S&P was up some 5.5% on the day. The NASDAQ was up some 8%. For people who have lost their shirts in the market this year, they got a little bit of relief when all was said and done. How far it goes and how long it lasts remains to be seen. We're still in an inflationary bear market, so anyone not attuned to that fact is going to be an unhappy camper when they see their returns edging downward again. We're a ways away from capitulation, so here's my advice: Buckle up.! By the time this is all over, you'll wish you had jumped on the iBonds that went on sale a couple of weeks back at 9%. It's true as well that you don't see the kind of action that we saw in the markets today in bull markets. You just don't.
What the hell is going on with this so-called FTX bankruptcy? This company is worth $16 billion one day, and four days later, they're worth zero. How the hell does that happen? I'm not going to pretend that I understand what FTX was other than what I'm now reading. It was an exchange of sorts for cryptocurrencies. I give the founder credit for building a company worth that much money, but to see the damn thing go under this quickly is just kind of weird. I'd have to see their list of creditors to get a sense as to who lost what, but I'm already hearing some familiar names (Tom Brady) of people who can probably afford the kind of money I'm hearing they've lost. I'm also not sure that any of these people will ever get anything back since FTX didn't have much in the way of hard assets that could be liquidated. It's worth mentioning that the founder was a major contributor to the democrat party, maybe only second to the likes of George Soros. That works for me. Just sayin'.
Can you believe those sons-of-bitches out in Arizona and Nevada are still counting ballots? The damn election was this past Tuesday and today is Friday. You know those mother fucking democrats are working overtime to steal both the Governor's seat in Arizona and the Senatorial spot in Nevada. Right? If Nevada knows how to do anything, they know how to count things. Nevada is the home of the best casinos in the world, and, believe me, they know how to count things. Evidently, that skill set does not extend to the people currently counting ballots in that state. And, wouldn't you know it, the last ballots to be counted are those ballots coming from Clark county in Nevada, home to none other than the infamous Las Vegas strip. Remember, the democrats can't win if they can't steal. It looks like the heist of the century is in motion and underway. Oh, and if the republicans are counting on winning a few seats in California to put them over the top in the race to win the House, they don't know much about California politics.
It's been a poopy week for the missus. She's just exhausted. I'm glad that she won't be traveling to Massachusetts this weekend. She needs to say "no" now and then when she's being asked to work. These weekend schticks that she's been doing here and there for years now should be winding down soon. Driving home in the dark will be a thing of the past. A distant memory, if you will. It's possible that she can do what she needs to do long distance, so we'll have to see how that works out, if at all. I'll miss the oatmeal raisin cookies that they send her home with, and I'm quite sure that the missus will miss having her Flat Whites at Starbucks before hitting the road for her drive home. I'm just as happy that she won't be putting the extra miles on our car, and with the price of gas as expensive as it is these days, the trip down and back is now less lucrative than it used to be. Speaking of gas, it's quite possible that her employer will run out of gas long before the missus needs to tell him that she can't do it anymore.
It's so funny. One thing that I remember my dad being emphatic about back in the day was that we should stay away from preservatives like BHA and BHT. I don't even remember where we might have seen these so-called preservatives. If I had to guess, I would guess that it was used in the packaging of cereals as it is these days. We ate a lot of Puffed Rice and Puffed Wheat back in the day, so maybe those cereals were suspect. Wheaties and Cheerios may have contained the preservative as well. When we didn't have Pop-Tarts available, we consumed all of the above. Pops might have preferred that we eat oatmeal all the time, but being teenagers on the run as we were, oatmeal just didn't cut the mustard. I see BHA and BHT these days in the same cereals, and I find myself looking for healthier alternatives that are available at stores like Whole Foods. It does make me wonder if Pop's cautionary tales of the past were more than just bluster seeing as I'm still here talking about them decades later. Pops wasn't a zealot one way or the other about these kinds of things, but as lessons go, I think this was a good one. Whether it explains why I'm still here all these years later is an altogether different question.
I saw Bumbles Biden on the telly at some Climate Change meeting the other day going on and on about doing away with our country's reliance on carbon-based fuels by 2030. Has he completely lost his mind? I know he just reads what they put in front of him, but this is sheer lunacy. Our nation is an energy powerhouse, a literal Saudi Arabia of the Americas, yet he and his left-wing nut jobs want to regulate these energy sources out of business. I was hopeful that Republicans winning the House and Senate in the mid-terms would help to keep Biden's nuttier initiatives like killing our oil and gas industries in check. I didn't factor in the theft of key races by the Democrats, so that's on me. He was even talking about monitoring methane levels using satellite technology. If you're in the livestock business, they're coming for you. If you enjoy a nice cut of prime rib with the missus on the weekends, you'll need to think again. This is a global initiative, and the Bidenistas are making up for lost time after four years of Trump in office. Oh, and global powerhouses like China and Russia could not be happier. We're sitting ducks with this green-energy bullshit, and Biden knows it.
I don't know that I have any good parting words for this weeks blog. We're probably just one or two stolen seats away from the Democrats stealing the House after they stole the Senate seat in Nevada from Adam Laxalt within the last twenty fours. Did I mention that the cameras went down for around eight hours in the building where the votes were being tallied in Nevada senate race? That only happens when people are stealing things. The Democrats now have 50 senate seats, by hook or crook I might add, and they are looking to make it 51 seats when they steal the Georgia seat from Herschel Walker in the runoff scheduled for December 6th. If Republicans can win that seat, and if Republicans can convince Joe Manchin to switch political parties, Republicans can take back the Senate. Wouldn't that be something. And what, pray tell, will this FTX bankruptcy fiasco mean for the crypto world this coming week? Aside from all of that, everything is just fucking ducky.
A GOP Tsunami, God Willing
06/11/22 07:05
I'm trying out this new space heater that we bought at Walmart yesterday. She's a Honeywell 360 model, and, thus far, I guess I can see that it works pretty well, but it's a bit too noisy for my tastes. The good news is that I can return this little baby and try out another one, and I can keep doing that until I find the one that works best. Isn't living in America great? I've got my eye on a Vornado AH10 now, so I'll have to see if Walmart carries this particular model. I could order it from Amazon but returning things to Amazon is a bit more complicated. The bigger story here is that I'm now resorting to using a space heater. It's a first for me. I'm always up at least three hours before the missus, and I've always felt a little selfish turning the heat on in the house just to keep myself warm. Now that the cost of energy is surging, this space heater is just what the doctor ordered.
Temperatures should be in the sixties this week, so it should be a good week to get some work done around the house. The missus said something about hiring someone to take up the leaves on our property, but I told her that wasn't necessary. I'll get around to it if she can just be a little more patient. I'm still a little sore from taking a spill on my bike last week, but I'm on the mend, as they say in the movies. It's not a big job, so that's not the issue. And, I don't have far to go with the leaves. I think this is one of those "how do you eat an elephant" types of jobs. I'll be raking up smaller sections at a time, and it will take longer, but it should require less effort at the end of the day. That's how you do it.
I'm sorry to see that the great country of Brazil elected the leftist, Lula, as president over the weekend. Brazil was the one democracy left in that section of the Americas that hadn't turned into a socialist shit hole along with Venezuala and others like it. To think that this guy, Lula, was in prison for looting and pillaging his own country after a stint as president of Brazil before his prison term was terminated thanks to a left-wing Supreme Court, makes his return to the presidency even more bizarre. It was a pretty close race, so at least half of the country has no use for socialism or the rogues who are selling it to the masses. I'm not sure there isn't a lesson in there somewhere for we Americans. God knows we have socialists waiting in the wings, like Bernie Sanders and others of his ilk, who would like nothing better than to go full Venezuela here in the states. Here's what I say to that: Not on my fucking watch.
The other thing we looked at while in Walmart was bird food. The bird food I've been buying for the last few years has gone up in price like everything else these days. Add to that the fact that the birds hereabouts empty my feeder on average every five days, and it starts to get expensive. The fourteen-pound bag that I paid $17 for just a year ago now costs $24, and that's no word of a lie. I didn't even think about spending $17 for a bag of bird food back in the day. I would have put that down as a miscellaneous expenditure in the books. So, not only has the price gone up, but now, the birds are emptying the feeder faster than ever before. I don't know if that's because there are more birds or the birds that we do have are just hungrier. Maybe it says something about the upcoming winter. We compared prices while at Walmart with other comparable brands but decided to leave well enough alone. We'll stay with the brand that our birds seem to like. They deserve to be happy too. Right? It's not all about us.
This little space heater seems to be getting the job done. The temperature in this room has gone from 51 to 57 over the course of two hours. That's not bad. 51 degrees has me wanting to put on a pair of gloves. 57 degrees has me thinking that this whole space heater idea is a good one. The missus stuck her head in the room a minute or two ago and said something about the fact that she doesn't smell that new hair dryer smell anymore. We both agreed that it makes a bit too much noise, and she said something about returning the unit sooner rather than later. I'll plan to do that today. We weren't the only ones looking at space heaters while in Walmart yesterday, so it wouldn't surprise me to see their stocks somewhat depleted by the time I get to the store later today. I guess I could go to Home Depot or Lowes to see what they have in stock if Walmart doesn't have much in stock. My Monday seems to be shaping up to be a busy day.
I was happy to see General Bolduc on the telly yesterday. The General is running for the Senate here in New Hampshire to replace that no-good piece of shite, Maggie Hassan. She's voted with Bumbles Biden every step of the way, so that disqualifies her, in my humble opinion, from representing the good people of New Hampshire in Washington. The General seems to be getting the right kind of exposure, so that can't hurt his chances of beating this loser, Hassan, at the polls next week. We just need to turn out like never before. I've answered no pollsters, so I'll be one of the millions of silent voters who plan to turn up unannounced at the polls to oust these leftist bastards who have turned our great country into something barely recognizable just two years into the Biden presidency. I heard one talking head suggest that the Senate race here in New Hamshire will be one of maybe several bellwether contests, which, ultimately, should tell us everything we need to know about how the overall election is going to turn out. I would add Karoline Leavitt to that list.
What is this I'm hearing about where we have big tech firms like Twitter conspiring with the government to stifle free speech? No one doubts for a minute that the likes of Google and Twitter are on board when it comes to rearranging algorithms to make sure that people either see things that they want them to see or, conversely, to make sure that they don't see things that they don't want them to see. I'm not sure if this is related to Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter or not, but they've discovered a trove of documents that detail the relationships between government officials and Twitter management. Can you think of anything more nefarious? It's one thing to hear rumors of this sort of thing happening, and it's quite another to have the receipts of said meetings. Where do we go from here, folks? I'm glad the information is out in the open, and I'm glad Elon fired the bitch at Twitter who was at the heart of it all. Anything else we need to know before we go to the polls in 7 days to vote in the mid-term elections?
Speaking of Elon Musk, I noticed that Twitter took a candidate by the name of Mark Finchem off Twitter yesterday. Finchem is running for Secretary of State in Arizona, and, by most accounts, he's up by 5 points or so over his Democratic opponent. How do you take a candidate down off of a platform five days out from a general election? What possible rule or rules did he break that would prompt somebody at Twitter to pull the rug out from beneath his campaign? What rogue employee in the bowels of Twitter thought that he could take it upon himself or herself to do such a thing? Did they not think Elon would find out? Maybe they thought that it would take at least a week or so for to sort out, and in the meantime, Finchem's opponent would have free reign on the platform without the usual give and take we normally see between the candidates this close to an election. I think they call that an in-kind contribution.
Finchem, of course, was outraged, and rightly so. He reached out to his peeps on alternate platforms asking that someone, anyone, reach out to Elon Musk to have his account reinstated. It wasn't long before Elon weighed in with a simple, "I'll look into it." Within an hour or so, Finchem's account was reinstated, and it was game-on once again. That would have never happened in the Twitter we all knew before Elon Musk bought the joint. Finchem would have been off the platform for God only knows how long, and he probably would have lost his election. That just tells me that Musk hasn't fired nearly enough employees. He needs to get rid of the rot in the organization, even if that means firing every last fucking one of them. I was happy to see the executives get perp-walked out of the building the day Elon walked in the front door, and now the real work begins. I think Elon is the real deal. Now, he just needs to prove it. Reinstating Finchem is a good start.
There was an article in the Atlantic magazine the other day talking about how we as a society now need to take a critical look at what happened during the Covid era and, where appropriate, we need to "forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about Covid." Just so you know, this is the liberal establishment's way of admitting that they fucked things up royally back in the day, and now they're looking for some kind of amnesty ahead of the Republicans taking back the House and investigating every last fucking one of them for what they did to our country. Putting masks on our children for the better part of two years and keeping them out of school and away from their peer groups was but one of many cruelties inflicted on our society by the democrats. It was all about power, and it had nothing to do with healthcare. We are going to bring every last one of them to justice if that is what it takes. It all starts in eight days. Spoiler alert: There will be no amnesty.
I saw a couple of tweets the other day about American boots on the ground in Ukraine. The funny thing is, I haven't seen or heard about this anywhere else. Is it true or not? It seems to me that this would be a pretty big story, if true, and one that would be hard to keep under wraps for very long. Our Congress has not authorized or approved going to war with Russia, so there's that. Would that stop Bumbles Biden from sending American troops to the front lines of the war in Ukraine? I think not. Leave it to this clown show of an administration to get American boys and girls killed in a conflict in a shit hole of a country where we have no vital or strategic American interest. We've sent northwards of $75 billion to Zelensky and his corrupt buddies in Ukraine to date, and that alone should be reason to impeach this fool we have in the White House. Let's hope these tweets I'm seeing are just that and nothing more.
Speaking of Bumbles Biden, did you see this idiot stumping in Florida yesterday for democrats running for office? What the hell is he doing in Florida, anyway? That state is beet-red, politically speaking, thanks to Governor DeSantis, and no amount of stumping by democrats coming in from Washington is going to change that. Maybe Biden's handlers want to see him out on the road ahead of the midterms just so they can say that he wasn't sitting on his thumbs back in Rehobeth, Deleware, while his party went down in flames in the midterms. Anyway, while addressing an audience somewhere in south Florida, Bumbles said something about talking to the man who invented insulin. Just so you know, that guy died before Joey Bumbles Biden was born. Bumbles also said something about his son dying in the war in Iraq. Nothing could be further from the truth. His son died of cancer while in a hospital in Deleware. I swear to God, the clip I saw reminded me of a demented old fool doing stand-up at his retirement home. And since when is Debbie Wasserman Schultz a Senator? She's not.
What the hell is going on in Korea? North Korea has fired a dozen or so missiles across South Korea and into the sea in the last twenty-four hours. South Korea has retaliated by firing a few of their own into the demilitarized zone. Japan has called the situation "intolerable." Bumbles Biden and his cast of fools have threatened some sort of something if North Korea proceeds with detonating a test-nuclear device. When is someone going to get on the phone with Trump to ask for his help in de-escalating the situation? Who the hell is in charge of international diplomacy in the White House anyway? Please don't tell me that Butt-Edge-Edge is in charge. That would explain everything. Maybe the North Koreans saw what we Americans all saw on the telly when Biden was wiping the spittle from his chin while spewing utter nonsense in front of a captive audience in South Florida. It is not a good look under any circumstances. It certainly does little to project the kind of strength required of a nation like ours at a moment like this. It's damn near an invitation, truth be told.
I think this Pelosi thing is not going away as much as they would like it to go away. This is one of those, where there's smoke, there's fire, type deals. I'm just not buying any of their bullshit. They want us to believe that none of what we heard in those early reports is accurate. They want us to believe that old man Pelosi wasn't having a sexual affair with a male prostitute in the early morning hours on that fateful day in San Fransisco. They want us to believe that both men were not wearing underwear when the police arrived at the Pelosi residence at 2 in the morning. They want us to think that Pelosi's paid paramour broke into the house, yet we've all seen the glass on the terrace suggesting that the window was broken from inside the house. And now, they're telling us that no one was watching the live feed at the Pelosi house when the "break-in" happened. The media can't seem to make up its mind about the intruder's political leanings and whose conspiracies he was more inclined to believe. But the FBI has all the facts now, and everything you've heard is wrong. Right.
The Supreme Court has stepped in and put the kibosh on sending Trump's tax records to Congress. Thank you! It's about time you lent a helping hand to one of the greatest presidents of our time. It's high time, too, that you're bitch-slapping those retards in the democrat party who think they can run roughshod over the rights of whoever they want. The democrats would likely use Trump's records to launch yet another one of their committees to investigate Trump and, if possible, drag him through the court system until he promises he'll not run for president again. The good news is that by the time the Supreme Court judges Trump's taxes, the republicans will be in complete control of congress, which will be the end of this nonsense. But we need to savor these little wins as much as possible since they are seemingly few and far between these days. They're not done trying to run Trump out of town on a rail, so stay tuned. Repeat after me: Trump 2024!
I couldn't bring myself to watch Bumbles Biden on the telly last night, giving his closing argument for why the American people should not vote for Republicans, and, more specifically, MAGA republicans, in next Tuesday's mid-term elections. I caught snippets here and there, which validated my thoughts about what Biden might say and how he might say it. I understand that he said nothing about the problems he and his administration have caused, such as inflation, the invasion at our southern border, and so forth. I read somewhere that Biden mentioned the word "democracy" more than twenty times and said that we were about to lose our democracy if Republicans win their races as expected. Who is this ass clown? Who the hell is he to suggest that we Americans, casting our votes as is our prerogative in this Republic of ours, are somehow not democratic if we're not voting for him and his fellow democrats instead of republicans?
The fact of the matter is, Bumbles, we're going to go out and vote to oust every last democrat running for office or re-election precisely because we want to save our democracy. Stick that in your fucking pipe and smoke it, Joey. Is it possible that the 72 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2020 will go out en-masse and vote on Election day after having their Trump victory denied thanks to the rampant and illegal skullduggery by the democrat party? You bet your ass they are. The Democrat party is still at it, don't you know. They have their Bill Clinton's and Barry Obama's out on the stump in several states, telling lies about how the republicans are planning to take away their Medicare and Social Security. It gets worse. This morning, the Grey lady (NYT) has a headline above the fold repeating the same lies about Medicare and Social Security. It just smacks of desperation and tells you that they know all too well what lies in store for them post-election.
(Heater update) I bought a little heater for the room I work in every morning. When the weather out of doors turned colder in past years, I cranked up the furnace just long enough to take off the chill. I might have had the furnace on for three hours before the missus got out of bed. I've always felt selfish for wasting money to make my life more comfortable, but heating oil was cheaper back in the day, so I never spent much time thinking about it. We usually turn our heat off overnight in the winter since we prefer sleeping in a cool room. As you can well imagine, the temperature in the house would easily get into the lower 50s by the time I got out of bed. Sitting down to work without heat of some kind was unthinkable. Now that the price of heating oil is getting crazy expensive, I've found a new fix. I bought a little Vornado space heater. I no longer have to heat the entire house just to get comfortable in my little space every morning. My momma didn't raise no damn fool!
By my calculations, at three hours a day for 30 days a month, that's the equivalent of leaving our furnace off for 80-90 hours a month, give or take. I don't know what that translates to in real savings since I don't know how many hours we run the furnace every month, but I suspect it will save us a few sheckles over the course of the winter. The first little heater I purchased, a Honewell 360, was too loud and took too long to heat up the space I work in. I promptly returned that puppy and ordered a Vornado heater from Amazon. It was a lot quieter, and it heated up my space fairly quickly. The missus was so impressed that she suggested getting another model, maybe one a little larger, to use in other rooms in the house. There is a smell of a new heater, which she just hates, so it's just a matter of time before that becomes less of an issue. It's probably the coating they put on the heater that has to burn off a bit before it no longer smells. I think we're good to go now. Oh, and there's the impact on the electric bill. Fingers crossed.
I think today is the day Elon lowers the boom for approximately half of the employees at Twitter. They are getting their walking papers, for better or worse. Some are probably happy to be leaving, seeing as Elon is not their cup of tea politically. His politics seem to be middle-of-the-road to me, but that is likely a bridge too far for many of the leftists currently employed by Twitter. Politics aside, I'm not a fan of people getting laid off. Jobs are getting scarcer and scarcer, especially in the tech sector, so that isn't going to make life any easier for the people being laid off. Does Twitter actually have that much excess in its ranks that it can afford to lose 50% of its staff? I guess we'll find out. I'm sure that Elon knows what he's doing. If it's algorithms that keep the place going, Elon has the smarts and the know-how when it comes to figuring all of that out. Doing more with less is the new mantra. Failure is not an option.
One thing I'll be looking for in the new Congress, assuming that the Republicans take back the majority in the House of Representatives, is that I'd like to see them defund the pot of money that Congress set aside in their 2021 legislation to hire and deploy 87,000 new IRS agents. You can't run around campaigning on this shit and then not do it when you get into office. That's not the way it works. I also want articles of impeachment drawn up for Bumbles and that twat who oversees our immigration laws. We now have five million illegal immigrants running around in our country doing God only knows what thanks to these two assholes. Is it me, or does the current Minority Leader of the house, McCarthy, not have what it takes to get the job done when he becomes Majority Leader? He just seems so, well, milqtoast. I want somebody in that chair who doesn't need to grow a pair to do what it takes day in and day out. I want someone with an iron fist. Anything less will just not do.
Oh, and not another fucking dime for that shithole, Ukraine. Just say "no." Let them run a few garage sales or raffles and see where that takes them. We're tired of giving money hand over fist to the criminals running Ukraine. Did I mention that there's a story out this morning in the Daily Mail that contradicts what the FBI would have us believe about what happened at the Pelosi's the night Paul Pelosi was allegedly assaulted by a Trump supporter? As you might imagine, the main street media was having none of the bullshit about Paul Pelosi and his lover having a couple of cocktails and a lover's spat in the early morning hours in San Fransico. The story was just too salacious, and, with his wife being the Speaker of the House and third in line to the presidency, it went without saying that the real story would be suppressed, downplayed, and taken off the front pages of every newspaper coast to coast by the time the morning papers rolled off the press.
So, the FBI published a press release that whitewashed the entire event. Now we're learning from the Daily Mail that Paul Pelosi answered the door himself that morning, and he gave not a hint that anything was amiss, much less letting on that he was being held captive by an alleged Trump supporter wielding a hammer. He then proceeded to walk back into the residence with the policemen walking behind him when he was ultimately struck in the head with a hammer by the "assailant". Oh, and when the police asked him if everything was okay when he first answered the door, he responded with, "It's all good" or something to that effect. Does that sound like a break-in gone bad to you? Where are all these fools on the radio shows now? They defended the Pelosi's and criticized the right-wing media for fabricating sheer nonsense for ratings when stories about men in underwear and lover's spats gone bad emerged. And now, it's crickets. I'm talking about you, Michael Smerconish. I'm talking about you, Dan Abrams.
I don't know about you, but I'm getting nervous. Election Day is just three days away now. What if the Republicans don't win both houses of Congress? What if these gubernatorial races don't pan out, and they all stay in Democratic control? We're all hearing about races in areas that Biden won by some 20 points where the republican is now favored to win. That only happens when we have a wave election. What if that wave never materializes? That's what I'm worried about. Biden is on video in just the last twenty-four hours saying that he is going to shut down every coal plant coast to coast. Pennsylvania, are you listening? Pennsylvania has the most coal plants of any state, so I hope to hell they are listening when they go to the polls to vote this coming Tuesday. I'm counting on the good people of Pennsylvania to say no mas to nutjobs like Fetterman and Shapiro, who are running for the Senate and the Governor's position, respectively.
Taking back both houses of Congress next Tuesday could go a long way toward juicing the financial markets going into year-end. The markets love gridlock. That is precisely what you get when you have one political party in the White House and a completely different party in Congress. We could see something of a rally. Really. Call it a Santa rally if you must. The bulls could take charge for the remaining sixty days of the year, and the bears would likely come out of hibernation in early 2023 before crushing the markets mid-year as part of a larger global crisis brought about by endless years of zero and even negative interest rates. Is this a good time to stick your toes in the water for those who have been sitting on the sidelines since this downturn began some eleven months ago? Do you have the stomach for it? Will you be a hero or a zero by year-end? What if the republicans don't take both houses? What then?
I noticed that MSNBC fired a talking head by the name of Tiffany Cross yesterday. I don't know Tiffany Cross from the Man in the Moon, so I can't say that it caught my attention one way or another. You never hear about these networks firing people, so I assumed that whatever she did was probably pretty darn egregious. When I finally caught up to a clip or two of the video that resulted in her release from the network, I was surprised at how foul-mouthed and despicable she came across. It made me wonder why 1) they ever hired her, and 2) why she wasn't fired sooner. She had a real hair across her ass when it came to white people. Just a real cunt. I saw and heard everything that I needed to see and hear in that short clip of one of her more tasteless rants and raves. No wonder they cut her loose. Maybe this is just the beginning of a bigger reckoning to come once the results of the red wave roll in on Tuesday. Maybe this is one of those pendulum deals where human and political sentiment, for better or worse, swings back and forth with the times.
How about this tweet from Joey Bumbles Biden: "The social media platform, Twitter, purchased by Elon Musk, spews lies across the world." Why you useless piece of shit. Twitter was your platform of choice when it came to putting out disinformation and gaslighting for consumption by American people. Now that Twitter is adding context to your tweets to prove just how much of a lying sack of shit that you are, you lash out in a predictably childish way every chance you get. I have a good mind to block your ass on Twitter but then I'd not have the chance to delight at Twitter exposing your lies everytime you open your damn mouth. I know that none of these tweets are your own since you're still looking for the men's room in the Oval office but, ecverything else being equal, the buck stops at your front door when all is said and done. I just have two words for you: Thank you, Elon Musk!
Maybe the only question I have left as I sit here just three days out from the mid-term elections is, how many and which elections are the democrats planning to steal? They can't possibly allow a republican to run the great state of New York which has become a deep blue state. That means they are likey to steal the election from Lee Zeldin. The same may be true of the gubernatorial election is Michigan, but stealing two gubernatorial elections might raise the risk of getting their hands caught in the cookie jar. They got away with stealing everything they could get their hands on in 2020, so, why push their luck here in 2022. Well, our democracy is at risk if we're to believe the words coming out of Biden's mouth. That means they're going all in with whatever it takes to make sure that they don't lose, of all things, the senate. The senate is the key that unlocks the treasury of spoils to include padding the Supreme Court, changing voting laws, adding states to the Union, and, truth be told, the sky is the limit. Only a red wave can stop the chicanery they have planned. A tsunami, God willing.
Temperatures should be in the sixties this week, so it should be a good week to get some work done around the house. The missus said something about hiring someone to take up the leaves on our property, but I told her that wasn't necessary. I'll get around to it if she can just be a little more patient. I'm still a little sore from taking a spill on my bike last week, but I'm on the mend, as they say in the movies. It's not a big job, so that's not the issue. And, I don't have far to go with the leaves. I think this is one of those "how do you eat an elephant" types of jobs. I'll be raking up smaller sections at a time, and it will take longer, but it should require less effort at the end of the day. That's how you do it.
I'm sorry to see that the great country of Brazil elected the leftist, Lula, as president over the weekend. Brazil was the one democracy left in that section of the Americas that hadn't turned into a socialist shit hole along with Venezuala and others like it. To think that this guy, Lula, was in prison for looting and pillaging his own country after a stint as president of Brazil before his prison term was terminated thanks to a left-wing Supreme Court, makes his return to the presidency even more bizarre. It was a pretty close race, so at least half of the country has no use for socialism or the rogues who are selling it to the masses. I'm not sure there isn't a lesson in there somewhere for we Americans. God knows we have socialists waiting in the wings, like Bernie Sanders and others of his ilk, who would like nothing better than to go full Venezuela here in the states. Here's what I say to that: Not on my fucking watch.
The other thing we looked at while in Walmart was bird food. The bird food I've been buying for the last few years has gone up in price like everything else these days. Add to that the fact that the birds hereabouts empty my feeder on average every five days, and it starts to get expensive. The fourteen-pound bag that I paid $17 for just a year ago now costs $24, and that's no word of a lie. I didn't even think about spending $17 for a bag of bird food back in the day. I would have put that down as a miscellaneous expenditure in the books. So, not only has the price gone up, but now, the birds are emptying the feeder faster than ever before. I don't know if that's because there are more birds or the birds that we do have are just hungrier. Maybe it says something about the upcoming winter. We compared prices while at Walmart with other comparable brands but decided to leave well enough alone. We'll stay with the brand that our birds seem to like. They deserve to be happy too. Right? It's not all about us.
This little space heater seems to be getting the job done. The temperature in this room has gone from 51 to 57 over the course of two hours. That's not bad. 51 degrees has me wanting to put on a pair of gloves. 57 degrees has me thinking that this whole space heater idea is a good one. The missus stuck her head in the room a minute or two ago and said something about the fact that she doesn't smell that new hair dryer smell anymore. We both agreed that it makes a bit too much noise, and she said something about returning the unit sooner rather than later. I'll plan to do that today. We weren't the only ones looking at space heaters while in Walmart yesterday, so it wouldn't surprise me to see their stocks somewhat depleted by the time I get to the store later today. I guess I could go to Home Depot or Lowes to see what they have in stock if Walmart doesn't have much in stock. My Monday seems to be shaping up to be a busy day.
I was happy to see General Bolduc on the telly yesterday. The General is running for the Senate here in New Hampshire to replace that no-good piece of shite, Maggie Hassan. She's voted with Bumbles Biden every step of the way, so that disqualifies her, in my humble opinion, from representing the good people of New Hampshire in Washington. The General seems to be getting the right kind of exposure, so that can't hurt his chances of beating this loser, Hassan, at the polls next week. We just need to turn out like never before. I've answered no pollsters, so I'll be one of the millions of silent voters who plan to turn up unannounced at the polls to oust these leftist bastards who have turned our great country into something barely recognizable just two years into the Biden presidency. I heard one talking head suggest that the Senate race here in New Hamshire will be one of maybe several bellwether contests, which, ultimately, should tell us everything we need to know about how the overall election is going to turn out. I would add Karoline Leavitt to that list.
What is this I'm hearing about where we have big tech firms like Twitter conspiring with the government to stifle free speech? No one doubts for a minute that the likes of Google and Twitter are on board when it comes to rearranging algorithms to make sure that people either see things that they want them to see or, conversely, to make sure that they don't see things that they don't want them to see. I'm not sure if this is related to Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter or not, but they've discovered a trove of documents that detail the relationships between government officials and Twitter management. Can you think of anything more nefarious? It's one thing to hear rumors of this sort of thing happening, and it's quite another to have the receipts of said meetings. Where do we go from here, folks? I'm glad the information is out in the open, and I'm glad Elon fired the bitch at Twitter who was at the heart of it all. Anything else we need to know before we go to the polls in 7 days to vote in the mid-term elections?
Speaking of Elon Musk, I noticed that Twitter took a candidate by the name of Mark Finchem off Twitter yesterday. Finchem is running for Secretary of State in Arizona, and, by most accounts, he's up by 5 points or so over his Democratic opponent. How do you take a candidate down off of a platform five days out from a general election? What possible rule or rules did he break that would prompt somebody at Twitter to pull the rug out from beneath his campaign? What rogue employee in the bowels of Twitter thought that he could take it upon himself or herself to do such a thing? Did they not think Elon would find out? Maybe they thought that it would take at least a week or so for to sort out, and in the meantime, Finchem's opponent would have free reign on the platform without the usual give and take we normally see between the candidates this close to an election. I think they call that an in-kind contribution.
Finchem, of course, was outraged, and rightly so. He reached out to his peeps on alternate platforms asking that someone, anyone, reach out to Elon Musk to have his account reinstated. It wasn't long before Elon weighed in with a simple, "I'll look into it." Within an hour or so, Finchem's account was reinstated, and it was game-on once again. That would have never happened in the Twitter we all knew before Elon Musk bought the joint. Finchem would have been off the platform for God only knows how long, and he probably would have lost his election. That just tells me that Musk hasn't fired nearly enough employees. He needs to get rid of the rot in the organization, even if that means firing every last fucking one of them. I was happy to see the executives get perp-walked out of the building the day Elon walked in the front door, and now the real work begins. I think Elon is the real deal. Now, he just needs to prove it. Reinstating Finchem is a good start.
There was an article in the Atlantic magazine the other day talking about how we as a society now need to take a critical look at what happened during the Covid era and, where appropriate, we need to "forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about Covid." Just so you know, this is the liberal establishment's way of admitting that they fucked things up royally back in the day, and now they're looking for some kind of amnesty ahead of the Republicans taking back the House and investigating every last fucking one of them for what they did to our country. Putting masks on our children for the better part of two years and keeping them out of school and away from their peer groups was but one of many cruelties inflicted on our society by the democrats. It was all about power, and it had nothing to do with healthcare. We are going to bring every last one of them to justice if that is what it takes. It all starts in eight days. Spoiler alert: There will be no amnesty.
I saw a couple of tweets the other day about American boots on the ground in Ukraine. The funny thing is, I haven't seen or heard about this anywhere else. Is it true or not? It seems to me that this would be a pretty big story, if true, and one that would be hard to keep under wraps for very long. Our Congress has not authorized or approved going to war with Russia, so there's that. Would that stop Bumbles Biden from sending American troops to the front lines of the war in Ukraine? I think not. Leave it to this clown show of an administration to get American boys and girls killed in a conflict in a shit hole of a country where we have no vital or strategic American interest. We've sent northwards of $75 billion to Zelensky and his corrupt buddies in Ukraine to date, and that alone should be reason to impeach this fool we have in the White House. Let's hope these tweets I'm seeing are just that and nothing more.
Speaking of Bumbles Biden, did you see this idiot stumping in Florida yesterday for democrats running for office? What the hell is he doing in Florida, anyway? That state is beet-red, politically speaking, thanks to Governor DeSantis, and no amount of stumping by democrats coming in from Washington is going to change that. Maybe Biden's handlers want to see him out on the road ahead of the midterms just so they can say that he wasn't sitting on his thumbs back in Rehobeth, Deleware, while his party went down in flames in the midterms. Anyway, while addressing an audience somewhere in south Florida, Bumbles said something about talking to the man who invented insulin. Just so you know, that guy died before Joey Bumbles Biden was born. Bumbles also said something about his son dying in the war in Iraq. Nothing could be further from the truth. His son died of cancer while in a hospital in Deleware. I swear to God, the clip I saw reminded me of a demented old fool doing stand-up at his retirement home. And since when is Debbie Wasserman Schultz a Senator? She's not.
What the hell is going on in Korea? North Korea has fired a dozen or so missiles across South Korea and into the sea in the last twenty-four hours. South Korea has retaliated by firing a few of their own into the demilitarized zone. Japan has called the situation "intolerable." Bumbles Biden and his cast of fools have threatened some sort of something if North Korea proceeds with detonating a test-nuclear device. When is someone going to get on the phone with Trump to ask for his help in de-escalating the situation? Who the hell is in charge of international diplomacy in the White House anyway? Please don't tell me that Butt-Edge-Edge is in charge. That would explain everything. Maybe the North Koreans saw what we Americans all saw on the telly when Biden was wiping the spittle from his chin while spewing utter nonsense in front of a captive audience in South Florida. It is not a good look under any circumstances. It certainly does little to project the kind of strength required of a nation like ours at a moment like this. It's damn near an invitation, truth be told.
I think this Pelosi thing is not going away as much as they would like it to go away. This is one of those, where there's smoke, there's fire, type deals. I'm just not buying any of their bullshit. They want us to believe that none of what we heard in those early reports is accurate. They want us to believe that old man Pelosi wasn't having a sexual affair with a male prostitute in the early morning hours on that fateful day in San Fransisco. They want us to believe that both men were not wearing underwear when the police arrived at the Pelosi residence at 2 in the morning. They want us to think that Pelosi's paid paramour broke into the house, yet we've all seen the glass on the terrace suggesting that the window was broken from inside the house. And now, they're telling us that no one was watching the live feed at the Pelosi house when the "break-in" happened. The media can't seem to make up its mind about the intruder's political leanings and whose conspiracies he was more inclined to believe. But the FBI has all the facts now, and everything you've heard is wrong. Right.
The Supreme Court has stepped in and put the kibosh on sending Trump's tax records to Congress. Thank you! It's about time you lent a helping hand to one of the greatest presidents of our time. It's high time, too, that you're bitch-slapping those retards in the democrat party who think they can run roughshod over the rights of whoever they want. The democrats would likely use Trump's records to launch yet another one of their committees to investigate Trump and, if possible, drag him through the court system until he promises he'll not run for president again. The good news is that by the time the Supreme Court judges Trump's taxes, the republicans will be in complete control of congress, which will be the end of this nonsense. But we need to savor these little wins as much as possible since they are seemingly few and far between these days. They're not done trying to run Trump out of town on a rail, so stay tuned. Repeat after me: Trump 2024!
I couldn't bring myself to watch Bumbles Biden on the telly last night, giving his closing argument for why the American people should not vote for Republicans, and, more specifically, MAGA republicans, in next Tuesday's mid-term elections. I caught snippets here and there, which validated my thoughts about what Biden might say and how he might say it. I understand that he said nothing about the problems he and his administration have caused, such as inflation, the invasion at our southern border, and so forth. I read somewhere that Biden mentioned the word "democracy" more than twenty times and said that we were about to lose our democracy if Republicans win their races as expected. Who is this ass clown? Who the hell is he to suggest that we Americans, casting our votes as is our prerogative in this Republic of ours, are somehow not democratic if we're not voting for him and his fellow democrats instead of republicans?
The fact of the matter is, Bumbles, we're going to go out and vote to oust every last democrat running for office or re-election precisely because we want to save our democracy. Stick that in your fucking pipe and smoke it, Joey. Is it possible that the 72 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2020 will go out en-masse and vote on Election day after having their Trump victory denied thanks to the rampant and illegal skullduggery by the democrat party? You bet your ass they are. The Democrat party is still at it, don't you know. They have their Bill Clinton's and Barry Obama's out on the stump in several states, telling lies about how the republicans are planning to take away their Medicare and Social Security. It gets worse. This morning, the Grey lady (NYT) has a headline above the fold repeating the same lies about Medicare and Social Security. It just smacks of desperation and tells you that they know all too well what lies in store for them post-election.
(Heater update) I bought a little heater for the room I work in every morning. When the weather out of doors turned colder in past years, I cranked up the furnace just long enough to take off the chill. I might have had the furnace on for three hours before the missus got out of bed. I've always felt selfish for wasting money to make my life more comfortable, but heating oil was cheaper back in the day, so I never spent much time thinking about it. We usually turn our heat off overnight in the winter since we prefer sleeping in a cool room. As you can well imagine, the temperature in the house would easily get into the lower 50s by the time I got out of bed. Sitting down to work without heat of some kind was unthinkable. Now that the price of heating oil is getting crazy expensive, I've found a new fix. I bought a little Vornado space heater. I no longer have to heat the entire house just to get comfortable in my little space every morning. My momma didn't raise no damn fool!
By my calculations, at three hours a day for 30 days a month, that's the equivalent of leaving our furnace off for 80-90 hours a month, give or take. I don't know what that translates to in real savings since I don't know how many hours we run the furnace every month, but I suspect it will save us a few sheckles over the course of the winter. The first little heater I purchased, a Honewell 360, was too loud and took too long to heat up the space I work in. I promptly returned that puppy and ordered a Vornado heater from Amazon. It was a lot quieter, and it heated up my space fairly quickly. The missus was so impressed that she suggested getting another model, maybe one a little larger, to use in other rooms in the house. There is a smell of a new heater, which she just hates, so it's just a matter of time before that becomes less of an issue. It's probably the coating they put on the heater that has to burn off a bit before it no longer smells. I think we're good to go now. Oh, and there's the impact on the electric bill. Fingers crossed.
I think today is the day Elon lowers the boom for approximately half of the employees at Twitter. They are getting their walking papers, for better or worse. Some are probably happy to be leaving, seeing as Elon is not their cup of tea politically. His politics seem to be middle-of-the-road to me, but that is likely a bridge too far for many of the leftists currently employed by Twitter. Politics aside, I'm not a fan of people getting laid off. Jobs are getting scarcer and scarcer, especially in the tech sector, so that isn't going to make life any easier for the people being laid off. Does Twitter actually have that much excess in its ranks that it can afford to lose 50% of its staff? I guess we'll find out. I'm sure that Elon knows what he's doing. If it's algorithms that keep the place going, Elon has the smarts and the know-how when it comes to figuring all of that out. Doing more with less is the new mantra. Failure is not an option.
One thing I'll be looking for in the new Congress, assuming that the Republicans take back the majority in the House of Representatives, is that I'd like to see them defund the pot of money that Congress set aside in their 2021 legislation to hire and deploy 87,000 new IRS agents. You can't run around campaigning on this shit and then not do it when you get into office. That's not the way it works. I also want articles of impeachment drawn up for Bumbles and that twat who oversees our immigration laws. We now have five million illegal immigrants running around in our country doing God only knows what thanks to these two assholes. Is it me, or does the current Minority Leader of the house, McCarthy, not have what it takes to get the job done when he becomes Majority Leader? He just seems so, well, milqtoast. I want somebody in that chair who doesn't need to grow a pair to do what it takes day in and day out. I want someone with an iron fist. Anything less will just not do.
Oh, and not another fucking dime for that shithole, Ukraine. Just say "no." Let them run a few garage sales or raffles and see where that takes them. We're tired of giving money hand over fist to the criminals running Ukraine. Did I mention that there's a story out this morning in the Daily Mail that contradicts what the FBI would have us believe about what happened at the Pelosi's the night Paul Pelosi was allegedly assaulted by a Trump supporter? As you might imagine, the main street media was having none of the bullshit about Paul Pelosi and his lover having a couple of cocktails and a lover's spat in the early morning hours in San Fransico. The story was just too salacious, and, with his wife being the Speaker of the House and third in line to the presidency, it went without saying that the real story would be suppressed, downplayed, and taken off the front pages of every newspaper coast to coast by the time the morning papers rolled off the press.
So, the FBI published a press release that whitewashed the entire event. Now we're learning from the Daily Mail that Paul Pelosi answered the door himself that morning, and he gave not a hint that anything was amiss, much less letting on that he was being held captive by an alleged Trump supporter wielding a hammer. He then proceeded to walk back into the residence with the policemen walking behind him when he was ultimately struck in the head with a hammer by the "assailant". Oh, and when the police asked him if everything was okay when he first answered the door, he responded with, "It's all good" or something to that effect. Does that sound like a break-in gone bad to you? Where are all these fools on the radio shows now? They defended the Pelosi's and criticized the right-wing media for fabricating sheer nonsense for ratings when stories about men in underwear and lover's spats gone bad emerged. And now, it's crickets. I'm talking about you, Michael Smerconish. I'm talking about you, Dan Abrams.
I don't know about you, but I'm getting nervous. Election Day is just three days away now. What if the Republicans don't win both houses of Congress? What if these gubernatorial races don't pan out, and they all stay in Democratic control? We're all hearing about races in areas that Biden won by some 20 points where the republican is now favored to win. That only happens when we have a wave election. What if that wave never materializes? That's what I'm worried about. Biden is on video in just the last twenty-four hours saying that he is going to shut down every coal plant coast to coast. Pennsylvania, are you listening? Pennsylvania has the most coal plants of any state, so I hope to hell they are listening when they go to the polls to vote this coming Tuesday. I'm counting on the good people of Pennsylvania to say no mas to nutjobs like Fetterman and Shapiro, who are running for the Senate and the Governor's position, respectively.
Taking back both houses of Congress next Tuesday could go a long way toward juicing the financial markets going into year-end. The markets love gridlock. That is precisely what you get when you have one political party in the White House and a completely different party in Congress. We could see something of a rally. Really. Call it a Santa rally if you must. The bulls could take charge for the remaining sixty days of the year, and the bears would likely come out of hibernation in early 2023 before crushing the markets mid-year as part of a larger global crisis brought about by endless years of zero and even negative interest rates. Is this a good time to stick your toes in the water for those who have been sitting on the sidelines since this downturn began some eleven months ago? Do you have the stomach for it? Will you be a hero or a zero by year-end? What if the republicans don't take both houses? What then?
I noticed that MSNBC fired a talking head by the name of Tiffany Cross yesterday. I don't know Tiffany Cross from the Man in the Moon, so I can't say that it caught my attention one way or another. You never hear about these networks firing people, so I assumed that whatever she did was probably pretty darn egregious. When I finally caught up to a clip or two of the video that resulted in her release from the network, I was surprised at how foul-mouthed and despicable she came across. It made me wonder why 1) they ever hired her, and 2) why she wasn't fired sooner. She had a real hair across her ass when it came to white people. Just a real cunt. I saw and heard everything that I needed to see and hear in that short clip of one of her more tasteless rants and raves. No wonder they cut her loose. Maybe this is just the beginning of a bigger reckoning to come once the results of the red wave roll in on Tuesday. Maybe this is one of those pendulum deals where human and political sentiment, for better or worse, swings back and forth with the times.
How about this tweet from Joey Bumbles Biden: "The social media platform, Twitter, purchased by Elon Musk, spews lies across the world." Why you useless piece of shit. Twitter was your platform of choice when it came to putting out disinformation and gaslighting for consumption by American people. Now that Twitter is adding context to your tweets to prove just how much of a lying sack of shit that you are, you lash out in a predictably childish way every chance you get. I have a good mind to block your ass on Twitter but then I'd not have the chance to delight at Twitter exposing your lies everytime you open your damn mouth. I know that none of these tweets are your own since you're still looking for the men's room in the Oval office but, ecverything else being equal, the buck stops at your front door when all is said and done. I just have two words for you: Thank you, Elon Musk!
Maybe the only question I have left as I sit here just three days out from the mid-term elections is, how many and which elections are the democrats planning to steal? They can't possibly allow a republican to run the great state of New York which has become a deep blue state. That means they are likey to steal the election from Lee Zeldin. The same may be true of the gubernatorial election is Michigan, but stealing two gubernatorial elections might raise the risk of getting their hands caught in the cookie jar. They got away with stealing everything they could get their hands on in 2020, so, why push their luck here in 2022. Well, our democracy is at risk if we're to believe the words coming out of Biden's mouth. That means they're going all in with whatever it takes to make sure that they don't lose, of all things, the senate. The senate is the key that unlocks the treasury of spoils to include padding the Supreme Court, changing voting laws, adding states to the Union, and, truth be told, the sky is the limit. Only a red wave can stop the chicanery they have planned. A tsunami, God willing.
Hammered
30/10/22 05:36
What's this I'm hearing about the 101st Airborne amassing troops in Eastern Europe? I've seen a video of them unloading this or that piece of equipment in some god-forsaken shithole in one of the countries bordering Russia. Maybe it's a training film; who the hell knows? You can bet your bottom dollar that our government wants us to see that video, and it's not for nothing. Is this a frog in the boiling water scenario? Are they trying to get us comfortable with the prospects of waging a ground war against Russia? Leave it to Bumbles Biden to get our boys killed in some territorial skirmish in which we have no business. It's just another fucking wag-the-dog bullshit brought to you by Bumbkles Biden and his democrat party. Just when you thought they hadn't done enough damage.
The mid-term elections are two weeks from tomorrow if my math is correct. We're taking back our country, or we will get started down that path. If we can put the kibosh on dollars spent to wage this war, then that would be good. That is what Congress does. Right? The president can't spend a dime. It all has to be approved by Congress before one peso gets expended. When you control the purse strings, you own it all. We'll see what backbone looks like if and when that time comes. Will the Republican party roll over like they always have done in the past? Will they be shamed into approving this or that expenditure to fund leftist causes by one of the weakest presidents in the history of our great republic?
I reached out to my peeps back home and asked how they felt about Congressman Lee Zeldin and his prospects of beating Kathy Hochel for the governorship in New York when Election Day rolls around. I haven't heard back from everybody, so that's concerning. One of my peeps said something about Zeldin being against women's rights, so I took that to be a no-vote for her. This is the power of negative ads, I suspect. If you say something often enough, people will come to believe it to be true. I'm guessing this has something to do with abortion rights. You know, my body-my choice bullshit. The Democrats have been beating that drum since the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade a few months back. Abortions are available on demand in New York, just so you know. Should I remind her of that?
It looks like we're in for a bit of rain today. Spending some time squaring things away in our garage might be a good day. I've biked the last seven or eight days, so I'll not spend a minute lamenting not getting a bike ride in. The missus will be doing her thing, so I'll have free rein to do as I please. It is something that needs to be done, so there's that. If I'm smart about it, I'll get together a few things I can bring to the town recycling center tomorrow. The weather is still warm enough this time of year, so I can get about here and there without wearing gloves to keep my hands warm. That all changes when November arrives in a week. The last thing I want is to get caught behind the eight-ball when the colder weather rolls in. It's harder to do everything when staying warm is your top priority.
My talk radio guy is talking this morning about the January 6th committee's subpoenaing of Trump. Nobody can say they didn't see this coming; some say they should have done it sooner. Trump can probably run out the clock here, assuming the Republicans take back Congress in a couple of weeks. This subject goes down a rabbit hole no matter how you slice it. Trump will never show up, and that will be the end of it. He's said something about wanting to speak to the Committee and the American people via televised hearings, but the Committee wants none of that. They will not allow Trump to expose their committee for the kangaroo court that it is. Anyway, I don't need to listen to something I know is going nowhere, so I'll spend my time putting down a few thoughts in this journal here instead.
I watched the debate last night between Governor DeSantis and Charlie Crist. It was a pretty good debate by most standards. There was plenty of give and take, and the moderator did an excellent job of asking good questions. Crist was pretty good on his feet and, of the two on the stage, I'd have to say that Crist was the more comfortable of the two candidates. That surprised me. DeSantis is fabulously successful as Governor and has a record that most politicians would love to have. He should have been uber-comfortable, but he looked a little uptight, a little defensive, and a bit thin-skinned. At one point, he referred to Crist as an "old donkey," which I thought was not a particularly good look. The "donkey" thing was a reference to his political party, so that's fine. The "old" thing was a reference to his age, which was just not very nice and probably didn't play well on the televisions across the fruited plains of Florida, where the average age of Florida's citizens is above 50.
I wondered how DeSantis would take this act of his on the road should he run for president in 2024. If he's wound a little too tight on a stage in a state where he reigns supreme, what will happen when he's out of his element? It's an Achilles heel, to be sure. One or more of his opponents will bait him, and we'll see something akin to road rage on the debate stage if he doesn't figure all of this out beforehand. Maybe that explains why he lags behind Trump considerably in the polls. Anyway, tonight's debate between Dr. Oz and Fetterman in Pennsylvania. Fetterman will have some mechanical assistance due to his recent stroke, so we'll have to see how that works out. His stroke aside, his policies are atrocious, which will only help Oz put the final nail in his coffin. What I've seen from Oz thus far tells me that he is up to the task of doing just that.
I was telling the missus last night that I can't believe that many people in Pennsylvania are willing to vote for a guy like Fetterman, who has stated publicly that he wants to release murderers from jail and legalize drugs, amongst other things. Throw in the fact that the very same guy has had a stroke, and it's pretty likely that he'll not be able to perform his duties as Senator, and his wife will more than likely be tagged to complete his six-year term, and you have a shitstorm on your hands. His wife is even more of a whack job than he is. Maybe that's what Pennsylvanians want for their next Senator. Who am I to question their political preferences? Will the debate make a difference? I think people's preferences are pretty much baked-in at this point, and early voting has already been underway for maybe a week or more. Maybe they could give two shits about Fetterman. Perhaps it's just about giving Biden one more rubber stamp.
I saw a clip on Twitter of an MSNBC person holding a town hall with 10-12 Trump supporters from Western Pennsylvania. She asked them any number of questions about January 6th and related subjects. To a person, they all pushed back against the narrative being pushed by the MSNBC person. They said that the so-called insurrection was no different than what they saw from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots month after month. Yet, not one BLM rioter had been held responsible.
In contrast, the January 6th trespassers (my word, not theirs) were being held in solitary confinement for an indeterminant amount of time and often without the benefit of bail or access to family members. I was surprised that MSNBC allowed this clip to get out of the studio. It certainly did not serve their interests well, so you have to wonder. Like their liberal partners in the media, they are all in for the liberal establishment and would rather slit their wrists before allowing a different narrative to go on air. Maybe we should give credit where credit is due?
We received no fewer than a half dozen e-mails from Mrs. G yesterday. Her facility was upgrading something, and Mrs. G's unit would be without electricity for the better part of four hours. As I sit here this morning, I'm not sure why Mrs. G felt the need to provide us with updates. I don't think she thought we were somehow concerned for her well-being during the upgrade, so there's that. From our point of view, this upgrade, or whatever they were doing, presented itself as nothing more than a slight inconvenience. When the missus spoke to her last night, Mrs. G expressed her appreciation that no fewer than a dozen or so employees of her facility stopped in during the day to make sure that she was doing okay. Was that Mrs. G's roundabout way of telling us that we should have, at a minimum, responded to her e-mails? We didn't, of course, and we didn't because we didn't think it was a big deal.
I don't know why I don't just take these things at face value. See it for what it is. See things for what they are. Mrs. G was understandably appreciative of the fact that the people who run her joint think enough of her and her fellow lodgers to check in with them when they do these kinds of things. It makes perfect sense to me. They didn't have to check in on her, so the fact that they did had to be reassuring to her and others in her facility. When you get up there in years, even the slightest change to a daily schedule can be disconcerting at best and problematic at worst. This is the kind of care and concern you would expect a halfway-decent facility to lavish on its tenants. Besides, who doesn't like to be doted on now and then when the going gets rough? Mrs. G is no exception.
I was in Walmart the other day to pick up a few things. I was looking specifically for plastic spoons. I've bought spoons there before and never thought too much of it. There was something about the price of the spoons that I was looking at that caught my attention. I'd never hesitated before when buying the 100-count box of plastic spoons, but when I noticed that Walmart wanted $7.86 for a box of the spoons, it struck me as just too expensive. Did I really need them that much? The missus said something to me recently about spoons at the Dollar store that seemed reasonably priced. Is that why I hesitated? I usually toss them in the basket when I'm there to buy them, but this time was different. Maybe this is how your garden variety consumer feels these days when they have to choose between buying a nice roast for the family and a day-old rotisserie chicken from beneath the heat lamps. I mean, who pays close to $8 for a box of 100 plastic spoons?
Did anyone see the debate in Pennsylvania between John Fetterman and Dr. Oz last night? It was less of a debate and more of a train wreck if you were honest with yourself about John Fetterman's performance. We all know that John is recovering from a stroke that he suffered some months ago, and we certainly wish him a speedy recovery, but what we saw last night was disturbing. He began the debate with this: "Goodnight, everybody." It was all downhill from there. He ended the debate by hollering across the dais at Dr. Oz while Dr. Oz was giving his closing statement, and the moderators had to remind him that it was the doctor's turn to give his closing statement. It was almost as though Fetterman wasn't clear in his mind about where he was in the debate. He'd lost his place, and he was going to get his two cents in come hell or high water.
The moderators put up a quote from Fetterman where he had called for the end of fracking in Pennsylvania back in 2018, and they asked Fetterman how that squared with his assertion during the debate that he now supports fracking. Fetterman started babbling about his support for fracking while ignoring the apparent hypocrisy pointed out by the moderators. I always felt bad for Fetterman when the moderators asked him a question and told him that he had sixty seconds. He never needed sixty seconds because his canned responses never lasted more than ten seconds.
Ten seconds was probably more than what his handlers wanted him to give. I wondered aloud during the debate as to whether or not the moderators were trying to provide Fetterman with a break by not asking him about crime in Philadelphia. Fetterman has a history of voting to release criminals from jail, so I found it astounding that they didn't ask about it. After all was said and done, the consensus was that Fetterman's family and handlers had no business letting him get on the stage with Dr. Oz. It was malpractice of the worst kind. If Dr. Oz was neck and neck with Fetterman going into the debate, no one in their right mind after the debate thought that sending John Fetterman to Washington as a Senator to represent the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was a good idea. More to the point, most observers walked away thinking that Fetterman wasn't up to the job and, perhaps more importantly, that he needed more time to recover if he were ever to recover more fully.
I tweeted something to the effect that the recent spate of debates between democrats and republicans was looking more like a replay of the Nuremberg trials than anything else. To a person, the democrats defended Joey Bumbles Biden, and, worse yet, they voted for every disaster of a policy that came out of Biden's White House. We know this about the democrats. They never break ranks. This time, we'll see many summarily tossed out of office on their ear for their political mischief. We're going to see democrats that have held office for decades packing their bags after losing to their republican challengers. And it's not just Congressmen and Senators. We're going to see democrats lose governorships in deep blue states to their republican counterparts. The repudiation of the democrats and Joe Bumbles Biden will be about as complete as we've seen in the last hundred years.
In more good news yesterday, the New York Supreme Court directed New York City to reinstate every last employee who had ever been fired due to not taking the jab. Furthermore, they instructed the City to give the impacted employees back pay. They said what we've been saying all along: The jab neither protects you from contracting the virus nor does it prevent you from transmitting it to others. That is the science, whether you choose to believe it or not. That is not what you heard from the CDC for months, so one would hope that some of these ass clowns might be held criminally responsible. What was the get-the-jab push all about? What connection, if any, is there between people who got the jab and people who died as a result of getting the jab? Every day we hear one or more stories about someone dropping dead, and you know it has something to do with the vaccine. The media may not want to make the connection, but we know better.
So, it looks like this Elon Musk thing with Twitter is going to go down. All the back and forth over these past many months was just noise. He posted a video on Twitter yesterday where he was taped carrying a sink into Twitter headquarters. And then there was something about "letting that sink in" which came from where I'm not sure. Was it a metaphor for something? I'm just a simple man, so if I'm not getting it, then it is what it is. I was happy to see him going in the company's front door that cost him some $5 billion. I like Twitter, so if Musk can tweak it around the edges and make it a better platform for free speech, then I'll be singing his praises. To the extent that he's an agent of the deep state and he's just there to do the bidding of the leftists, I'll turn a blind eye to the bullshit, much like I'm already doing these days.
Did I tell you I took a spill on my bike the other day? It was a very misty and foggy day down by the ocean, and I had difficulty seeing clearly. As if that wasn't bad enough, the state was repaving this particular section of the highway, and I was trying to stay well off to the side of the road and out of traffic. When I tried getting back on the paved section of the roadway, my tire caught the lip of the new pavement, and down I went. Thankfully, there was no traffic on the road where I fell. That might have put me in a bad spot had I fallen in front of a vehicle. I fell hard, and it was jarring. I almost felt like I had been thrown to the ground. It happened so quickly. I was fully aware of my predicament and was almost thankful that there were no witnesses. I got to my feet as quickly as I could to make sure that I was 1) capable of getting back on my feet and 2) making sure that I hadn't broken something when I fell. I scraped my knee and elbow pretty well, and I seemed to have bruised a rib or two, but I was otherwise fine. I really do need to be more careful.
I'm thinking of passing on the flu shot when I see my doctor in a few weeks. I don't trust these bastards in the medical community as far as I can throw them. I wouldn't put it past them to sneak a Covid vaccine shot in when they give me my usual annual flu shot. I think Pfizer has a dual-use jab so that it would be one stick in the arm, and I wouldn't be any the wiser. These bastards are in bed with the Biden Administration, so skullduggery is the name of the game. Everything is done under the cloak of darkness, and any financial gain goes to Big Pharma and those who enable Big Pharma (Biden.) How many fucking beach houses do Bumbles and his extended crime family need? What's next? Safe deposit boxes stuffed with cash in a safe deposit box in Switzerland? Anyway, I'll take my chances with the flu. I've had it before, and I know it's not fun, but I'll power through, as Hillary Clinton loves to say.
Trump has a rally scheduled in Pennsylvania on November 5th, just days before Election Day on November 8th. I know that Trump has endorsed Dr. Oz in the Senate race, but I'm not sure if he's endorsed the gubernatorial candidate, Doug Mastriano. It's good to see him stepping into the fray to support these two guys, and since everything is on the margins these days, every little bit helps. Oz was neck in neck with Fetterman in the polls before the crazy debate the other night, so Oz's standing in the polls might look very different when Trump arrives in town. I'm guessing better but don't quote me. It can't be any worse, right? Pennsylvania has always been Trump country, so how anyone in that state (it's a Commonwealth) can support someone like Fetterman, who advocates for open borders, releasing criminals from jail, shutting down fracking activities in the state, etc., I'll never know. It just doesn't make any sense to me.
Now we're hearing from the Secretary of State's office in Pennsylvania that the results from Election Day will likely not be available on Election night. We're also told that they mailed some 250k ballots out the door in error. I think the recipients of those ballots were ineligible to vote for one reason or another, so clearly, this is a problem. This is shaping up to be one of those stolen elections we heard so much about in 2020. They will take a tally of the Election Day votes, gauge how many votes Fetterman needs to win, and whip those ballots up out of thin air. Voila! We have a winner, they'll declare with a straight face. Maybe it won't matter if the tsunami of a red wave we're all expecting sweeps all of the republicans across our fruited plains into office. We'll have control of the Senate and the House. Read my lips: We're not tolerating stolen elections anymore, regardless of the overall outcome. Get on this and get on this now, Dr. Oz. This is your election for the taking.
I hear reports of a diesel gas shortage here and there. I think we have less than a month's supply left. What I'm not hearing are the alarm bells going off anywhere. Is this not a call to General Quarters if you've ever heard one? Everything comes to a grinding halt without diesel fuel. Someone from the Biden Administration was asked this question in a daily presser yesterday, and his response was anything but reassuring. He had no answers, of course, and only acknowledged that we had a shared responsibility to our European partners to ensure that their citizens did not suffer due to a shortage of diesel. So, it sounds like we're exporting our energy supplies to Europe while leaving our citizenry in the lurch. Who misses Trump's America First policies? Raise your fucking hands! And then this fool of a vice president in the United States goes on stage and starts talking about how she loves electric school buses. You can't make this shit up.
This is eerily reminiscent, of course, of the shortages of baby food and Tampons that we've experienced here in the United States over the last twelve months or more thanks to the ineptitude of the Biden Administration. I'm not sure if this diesel shortage thing extends to heating oil that we here in the Northeast need or not, but I don't need to tell you how catastrophic that would be if people can't heat their homes. I also don't need to remind you what this would mean to supply chains and potential food shortages. As I've said before, I'm kicking myself for not buying a cord of wood. I can heat my home with wood if push comes to shove, but I have no wood, so I'm up the fucking creek without a paddle. I should probably go to the store today to get ahead of this runaway train coming down the tracks. Do you remember how crazy it was going food shopping during the early days of Covid? This is going to be worse. Far worse. Brace yourselves.
There is such a negative vibe in the air these days. You can feel it. People are losing their asses in their 401k's, governments across the globe are threatening the use of nuclear weapons, no one is happy about what they're seeing coming out of our nation's capitol, our borders are open for all the world's desperate and often criminal elements to come into our country, our nation's judicial system has been co-opted by the Biden Administration and the democrat party, inflation is making it more and more difficult for parents to feed their families, gas prices are lower. Still, they will be going up again after the midterm elections, and nobody thinks that the Biden Administration gives a good fuck for the well-being of the American people. Our only hope is that we can take back control of our government by winning majorities in the House and the Senate ten days from now. We have to start somewhere. Right?
Did I mention that I didn't have a scratch on my new biking jacket when I fell off my bike the other day? I suffered a nasty abrasion on my elbow, but you'd never guess that by looking at the pristine condition of my coat. I must have friends in high places that I don't know about. It was more than weird. I showed the missus, and she was as mystified as was I. She turned the coat over and over, turned it inside out and outside in, and it was as good as new. I didn't know what to make of it, and I still don't. I think I looked at my jacket when I got up off the ground after the fall, and I think I remember thinking that it was all good because there wasn't so much as a scrape on my jacket. I mean, it's nothing but a light nylon jacket, so I half expected to see something, anything. Notta. I was even more surprised when I looked at the abrasion on my arm once I got my jacket off. It was a real WTF moment.
It's worth remembering in this upcoming election that any number of these republican candidates on the ballot are so-called MAGA-endorsed candidates. That is to say; they have all been endorsed by Trump even though the republican party might have chosen candidates who they thought might have had an easier chance of beating their Democratic opponents. But it gets better. Democrats got the crazy idea that voting for these so-called MAGA candidates in the primary would ensure that the democrat in the race would prevail on Election Day, so they changed their party affiliation in the primaries just long enough to cast their vote for the MAGA candidate. That calculus was largely incorrect if we're to believe the polls. Republicans look like they are on the precipice of taking the House and the Senate and probably a few governorships, too, thanks to the democrats who help put them over the top in the primaries. If it all comes to fruition, the republicans owe the democrats a debt of gratitude. Strange bedfellows, no?
I'm waking up to a cold morning here on the seacoast of New Hampshire. It's a frosty 31 degrees out-of-doors, the first morning of the Fall season, where the temperatures have fallen below freezing. I don't have the heat on in the house, although I probably should. I just put on a few more layers and hope that that will do the trick. If I could type this blog stuff while wearing gloves, I would. I do have a hat on, so that's helping a bit. I haven't looked at the forecast, but I'm guessing it will be seasonably comfortable enough to do a little work outdoors today. I have leaves to rake, and I could probably take a few things to the local recycling center. The missus is off to see a friend in Massachusetts today, so I'll be on my own. That should help me stay focused on the tasks at hand. How much I get done remains to be seen.
When I heard this story in the news about Paul Pelosi (husband of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House), I thought to myself, here's the October surprise we've all been waiting for. Paul Pelosi ended up in the hospital after being brutalized with a hammer by someone who broke into his home in a shi-shi section of SanFransicko. Nancy was in Washington, DC, at the time, so no worries there. I fully expected to hear the left-wing media roll out the narrative that White Supremacists are now attacking any of our so-called institutions in the days leading up to the mid-term election on November 8th. All they needed to prove their absurd allegations would indeed be found in the intruder's social media posts and his online historical records. An attack on the husband of the beloved Speaker of the House was an attack on Nancy herself. This should be enough to rile up the democratic base to get them to the polls and push back on the Republican Tsunami at the polls on November 8th.
It turns out that this alleged intruder was neither a Trump supporter nor a Nazi-in-waiting. I find the report that the intruder came into the Pelosi household asking where he could find "Nancy" to be a bit of a stretch. Are we to assume that the intruder, had he found her home at the time, would have beaten Nancy to within an inch of her life in much the same way that he did to her husband, Paul? I'm not so sure. I'm not even convinced that this so-called intruder was an intruder at all. Was he invited into the Pelosi home? Why did Paul Pelosi refer to him as a "friend" when he called the police sometime after 2 am? The two men were reportedly in their underwear when the police arrived. Wat? Was this a Tinder date gone wrong? Thus far, I've not seen the investigators rolling over and regurgitating the Democrat's preferred narrative. Good for them.
There are more questions than answers as I sit here some 48 hours after the incident at the Pelosi's. That's fine. These things take time to play out. If I had to guess, I'd think that Nancy wants to put the kibosh on this story. She may not want certain things in the media that would cast a sordid pall over the reputation she has spent decades constructing. She is about to lose her position as Speaker of the House and will more than likely return to live out her days with her husband in Sanfransicko. The unraveling of her husband's private life daily in the national media would be more than she could bear. It's bad enough that Paul Pelosi has a long and public history of driving while drunk, but same-sex Tinder trysts, if true, are a bird of an entirely different color. It's no wonder she's three sheets to the wind herself whenever we see her speaking in public these days. God only knows what that looks like behind closed doors.
I got back on my bike yesterday after taking a fall a few days back. I took a day or two off to give my bruised ribs a break, which was probably a good idea. Whenever the missus asks me how I'm feeling, and I think she's asking specifically about my ribs, I tell her it's all good. Healing is an incremental process, and I accept that. If it hurts today, I expect it will hurt less tomorrow, and so on and so forth. I think the missus sees this sort of thing as something you go to get fixed, like the brakes on your car. That might explain why she gets so bent out of shape at the slightest mishap or misstep. She worries that the so-called elixir she needs won't be available, and things will go from bad to worse. I've told her repeatedly that's not how it works, but she can be her worst enemy, so I'm done sounding like a broken record.
The next time the Ev man is over for a visit, we'll need to sit down and order our Thanksgiving meal from Whole Foods. We did this with Whole Foods last Thanksgiving, and it worked well. There were a few organizational glitches here and there, but we're a forgiving bunch, so we'll be back again this year. It will give the lot of us something to look forward to after a year that has been topsy-turvy. Not so much for our family, but in general, I would say. We do have a lot to be thankful for, so that is what we intend to celebrate on Thanksgiving this year. With the prices of everything being up over last year, we'll be grateful to be able to put a turkey on our table. God willing, we'll donate or two so another less fortunate family might have an equally delicious meal on Thanksgiving. How we find that less fortunate family remains to be seen.
As I close out another week in this here blog, I'll be interested to see what we have for talking-head shows this fine Sunday morning. I want to be sipping some liberal tears as they come on whining about how losing the Senate and the House is going to be the end of our democracy here in the United States. I'll be listening to hear how many times they use the word "extremists." Election Day hasn't even arrived, and they are sounding a lot like election deniers. How sweet it is. Maybe they should have listened more carefully to the millions of Trump supporters who have been talking about stolen elections since 2020. It's all coming back around to bite them in the butt, and I couldn't be happier. We still need to close the deal on Election Day or earlier if your state has early voting, so get out to the polls and let's git er done.
The mid-term elections are two weeks from tomorrow if my math is correct. We're taking back our country, or we will get started down that path. If we can put the kibosh on dollars spent to wage this war, then that would be good. That is what Congress does. Right? The president can't spend a dime. It all has to be approved by Congress before one peso gets expended. When you control the purse strings, you own it all. We'll see what backbone looks like if and when that time comes. Will the Republican party roll over like they always have done in the past? Will they be shamed into approving this or that expenditure to fund leftist causes by one of the weakest presidents in the history of our great republic?
I reached out to my peeps back home and asked how they felt about Congressman Lee Zeldin and his prospects of beating Kathy Hochel for the governorship in New York when Election Day rolls around. I haven't heard back from everybody, so that's concerning. One of my peeps said something about Zeldin being against women's rights, so I took that to be a no-vote for her. This is the power of negative ads, I suspect. If you say something often enough, people will come to believe it to be true. I'm guessing this has something to do with abortion rights. You know, my body-my choice bullshit. The Democrats have been beating that drum since the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade a few months back. Abortions are available on demand in New York, just so you know. Should I remind her of that?
It looks like we're in for a bit of rain today. Spending some time squaring things away in our garage might be a good day. I've biked the last seven or eight days, so I'll not spend a minute lamenting not getting a bike ride in. The missus will be doing her thing, so I'll have free rein to do as I please. It is something that needs to be done, so there's that. If I'm smart about it, I'll get together a few things I can bring to the town recycling center tomorrow. The weather is still warm enough this time of year, so I can get about here and there without wearing gloves to keep my hands warm. That all changes when November arrives in a week. The last thing I want is to get caught behind the eight-ball when the colder weather rolls in. It's harder to do everything when staying warm is your top priority.
My talk radio guy is talking this morning about the January 6th committee's subpoenaing of Trump. Nobody can say they didn't see this coming; some say they should have done it sooner. Trump can probably run out the clock here, assuming the Republicans take back Congress in a couple of weeks. This subject goes down a rabbit hole no matter how you slice it. Trump will never show up, and that will be the end of it. He's said something about wanting to speak to the Committee and the American people via televised hearings, but the Committee wants none of that. They will not allow Trump to expose their committee for the kangaroo court that it is. Anyway, I don't need to listen to something I know is going nowhere, so I'll spend my time putting down a few thoughts in this journal here instead.
I watched the debate last night between Governor DeSantis and Charlie Crist. It was a pretty good debate by most standards. There was plenty of give and take, and the moderator did an excellent job of asking good questions. Crist was pretty good on his feet and, of the two on the stage, I'd have to say that Crist was the more comfortable of the two candidates. That surprised me. DeSantis is fabulously successful as Governor and has a record that most politicians would love to have. He should have been uber-comfortable, but he looked a little uptight, a little defensive, and a bit thin-skinned. At one point, he referred to Crist as an "old donkey," which I thought was not a particularly good look. The "donkey" thing was a reference to his political party, so that's fine. The "old" thing was a reference to his age, which was just not very nice and probably didn't play well on the televisions across the fruited plains of Florida, where the average age of Florida's citizens is above 50.
I wondered how DeSantis would take this act of his on the road should he run for president in 2024. If he's wound a little too tight on a stage in a state where he reigns supreme, what will happen when he's out of his element? It's an Achilles heel, to be sure. One or more of his opponents will bait him, and we'll see something akin to road rage on the debate stage if he doesn't figure all of this out beforehand. Maybe that explains why he lags behind Trump considerably in the polls. Anyway, tonight's debate between Dr. Oz and Fetterman in Pennsylvania. Fetterman will have some mechanical assistance due to his recent stroke, so we'll have to see how that works out. His stroke aside, his policies are atrocious, which will only help Oz put the final nail in his coffin. What I've seen from Oz thus far tells me that he is up to the task of doing just that.
I was telling the missus last night that I can't believe that many people in Pennsylvania are willing to vote for a guy like Fetterman, who has stated publicly that he wants to release murderers from jail and legalize drugs, amongst other things. Throw in the fact that the very same guy has had a stroke, and it's pretty likely that he'll not be able to perform his duties as Senator, and his wife will more than likely be tagged to complete his six-year term, and you have a shitstorm on your hands. His wife is even more of a whack job than he is. Maybe that's what Pennsylvanians want for their next Senator. Who am I to question their political preferences? Will the debate make a difference? I think people's preferences are pretty much baked-in at this point, and early voting has already been underway for maybe a week or more. Maybe they could give two shits about Fetterman. Perhaps it's just about giving Biden one more rubber stamp.
I saw a clip on Twitter of an MSNBC person holding a town hall with 10-12 Trump supporters from Western Pennsylvania. She asked them any number of questions about January 6th and related subjects. To a person, they all pushed back against the narrative being pushed by the MSNBC person. They said that the so-called insurrection was no different than what they saw from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots month after month. Yet, not one BLM rioter had been held responsible.
In contrast, the January 6th trespassers (my word, not theirs) were being held in solitary confinement for an indeterminant amount of time and often without the benefit of bail or access to family members. I was surprised that MSNBC allowed this clip to get out of the studio. It certainly did not serve their interests well, so you have to wonder. Like their liberal partners in the media, they are all in for the liberal establishment and would rather slit their wrists before allowing a different narrative to go on air. Maybe we should give credit where credit is due?
We received no fewer than a half dozen e-mails from Mrs. G yesterday. Her facility was upgrading something, and Mrs. G's unit would be without electricity for the better part of four hours. As I sit here this morning, I'm not sure why Mrs. G felt the need to provide us with updates. I don't think she thought we were somehow concerned for her well-being during the upgrade, so there's that. From our point of view, this upgrade, or whatever they were doing, presented itself as nothing more than a slight inconvenience. When the missus spoke to her last night, Mrs. G expressed her appreciation that no fewer than a dozen or so employees of her facility stopped in during the day to make sure that she was doing okay. Was that Mrs. G's roundabout way of telling us that we should have, at a minimum, responded to her e-mails? We didn't, of course, and we didn't because we didn't think it was a big deal.
I don't know why I don't just take these things at face value. See it for what it is. See things for what they are. Mrs. G was understandably appreciative of the fact that the people who run her joint think enough of her and her fellow lodgers to check in with them when they do these kinds of things. It makes perfect sense to me. They didn't have to check in on her, so the fact that they did had to be reassuring to her and others in her facility. When you get up there in years, even the slightest change to a daily schedule can be disconcerting at best and problematic at worst. This is the kind of care and concern you would expect a halfway-decent facility to lavish on its tenants. Besides, who doesn't like to be doted on now and then when the going gets rough? Mrs. G is no exception.
I was in Walmart the other day to pick up a few things. I was looking specifically for plastic spoons. I've bought spoons there before and never thought too much of it. There was something about the price of the spoons that I was looking at that caught my attention. I'd never hesitated before when buying the 100-count box of plastic spoons, but when I noticed that Walmart wanted $7.86 for a box of the spoons, it struck me as just too expensive. Did I really need them that much? The missus said something to me recently about spoons at the Dollar store that seemed reasonably priced. Is that why I hesitated? I usually toss them in the basket when I'm there to buy them, but this time was different. Maybe this is how your garden variety consumer feels these days when they have to choose between buying a nice roast for the family and a day-old rotisserie chicken from beneath the heat lamps. I mean, who pays close to $8 for a box of 100 plastic spoons?
Did anyone see the debate in Pennsylvania between John Fetterman and Dr. Oz last night? It was less of a debate and more of a train wreck if you were honest with yourself about John Fetterman's performance. We all know that John is recovering from a stroke that he suffered some months ago, and we certainly wish him a speedy recovery, but what we saw last night was disturbing. He began the debate with this: "Goodnight, everybody." It was all downhill from there. He ended the debate by hollering across the dais at Dr. Oz while Dr. Oz was giving his closing statement, and the moderators had to remind him that it was the doctor's turn to give his closing statement. It was almost as though Fetterman wasn't clear in his mind about where he was in the debate. He'd lost his place, and he was going to get his two cents in come hell or high water.
The moderators put up a quote from Fetterman where he had called for the end of fracking in Pennsylvania back in 2018, and they asked Fetterman how that squared with his assertion during the debate that he now supports fracking. Fetterman started babbling about his support for fracking while ignoring the apparent hypocrisy pointed out by the moderators. I always felt bad for Fetterman when the moderators asked him a question and told him that he had sixty seconds. He never needed sixty seconds because his canned responses never lasted more than ten seconds.
Ten seconds was probably more than what his handlers wanted him to give. I wondered aloud during the debate as to whether or not the moderators were trying to provide Fetterman with a break by not asking him about crime in Philadelphia. Fetterman has a history of voting to release criminals from jail, so I found it astounding that they didn't ask about it. After all was said and done, the consensus was that Fetterman's family and handlers had no business letting him get on the stage with Dr. Oz. It was malpractice of the worst kind. If Dr. Oz was neck and neck with Fetterman going into the debate, no one in their right mind after the debate thought that sending John Fetterman to Washington as a Senator to represent the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was a good idea. More to the point, most observers walked away thinking that Fetterman wasn't up to the job and, perhaps more importantly, that he needed more time to recover if he were ever to recover more fully.
I tweeted something to the effect that the recent spate of debates between democrats and republicans was looking more like a replay of the Nuremberg trials than anything else. To a person, the democrats defended Joey Bumbles Biden, and, worse yet, they voted for every disaster of a policy that came out of Biden's White House. We know this about the democrats. They never break ranks. This time, we'll see many summarily tossed out of office on their ear for their political mischief. We're going to see democrats that have held office for decades packing their bags after losing to their republican challengers. And it's not just Congressmen and Senators. We're going to see democrats lose governorships in deep blue states to their republican counterparts. The repudiation of the democrats and Joe Bumbles Biden will be about as complete as we've seen in the last hundred years.
In more good news yesterday, the New York Supreme Court directed New York City to reinstate every last employee who had ever been fired due to not taking the jab. Furthermore, they instructed the City to give the impacted employees back pay. They said what we've been saying all along: The jab neither protects you from contracting the virus nor does it prevent you from transmitting it to others. That is the science, whether you choose to believe it or not. That is not what you heard from the CDC for months, so one would hope that some of these ass clowns might be held criminally responsible. What was the get-the-jab push all about? What connection, if any, is there between people who got the jab and people who died as a result of getting the jab? Every day we hear one or more stories about someone dropping dead, and you know it has something to do with the vaccine. The media may not want to make the connection, but we know better.
So, it looks like this Elon Musk thing with Twitter is going to go down. All the back and forth over these past many months was just noise. He posted a video on Twitter yesterday where he was taped carrying a sink into Twitter headquarters. And then there was something about "letting that sink in" which came from where I'm not sure. Was it a metaphor for something? I'm just a simple man, so if I'm not getting it, then it is what it is. I was happy to see him going in the company's front door that cost him some $5 billion. I like Twitter, so if Musk can tweak it around the edges and make it a better platform for free speech, then I'll be singing his praises. To the extent that he's an agent of the deep state and he's just there to do the bidding of the leftists, I'll turn a blind eye to the bullshit, much like I'm already doing these days.
Did I tell you I took a spill on my bike the other day? It was a very misty and foggy day down by the ocean, and I had difficulty seeing clearly. As if that wasn't bad enough, the state was repaving this particular section of the highway, and I was trying to stay well off to the side of the road and out of traffic. When I tried getting back on the paved section of the roadway, my tire caught the lip of the new pavement, and down I went. Thankfully, there was no traffic on the road where I fell. That might have put me in a bad spot had I fallen in front of a vehicle. I fell hard, and it was jarring. I almost felt like I had been thrown to the ground. It happened so quickly. I was fully aware of my predicament and was almost thankful that there were no witnesses. I got to my feet as quickly as I could to make sure that I was 1) capable of getting back on my feet and 2) making sure that I hadn't broken something when I fell. I scraped my knee and elbow pretty well, and I seemed to have bruised a rib or two, but I was otherwise fine. I really do need to be more careful.
I'm thinking of passing on the flu shot when I see my doctor in a few weeks. I don't trust these bastards in the medical community as far as I can throw them. I wouldn't put it past them to sneak a Covid vaccine shot in when they give me my usual annual flu shot. I think Pfizer has a dual-use jab so that it would be one stick in the arm, and I wouldn't be any the wiser. These bastards are in bed with the Biden Administration, so skullduggery is the name of the game. Everything is done under the cloak of darkness, and any financial gain goes to Big Pharma and those who enable Big Pharma (Biden.) How many fucking beach houses do Bumbles and his extended crime family need? What's next? Safe deposit boxes stuffed with cash in a safe deposit box in Switzerland? Anyway, I'll take my chances with the flu. I've had it before, and I know it's not fun, but I'll power through, as Hillary Clinton loves to say.
Trump has a rally scheduled in Pennsylvania on November 5th, just days before Election Day on November 8th. I know that Trump has endorsed Dr. Oz in the Senate race, but I'm not sure if he's endorsed the gubernatorial candidate, Doug Mastriano. It's good to see him stepping into the fray to support these two guys, and since everything is on the margins these days, every little bit helps. Oz was neck in neck with Fetterman in the polls before the crazy debate the other night, so Oz's standing in the polls might look very different when Trump arrives in town. I'm guessing better but don't quote me. It can't be any worse, right? Pennsylvania has always been Trump country, so how anyone in that state (it's a Commonwealth) can support someone like Fetterman, who advocates for open borders, releasing criminals from jail, shutting down fracking activities in the state, etc., I'll never know. It just doesn't make any sense to me.
Now we're hearing from the Secretary of State's office in Pennsylvania that the results from Election Day will likely not be available on Election night. We're also told that they mailed some 250k ballots out the door in error. I think the recipients of those ballots were ineligible to vote for one reason or another, so clearly, this is a problem. This is shaping up to be one of those stolen elections we heard so much about in 2020. They will take a tally of the Election Day votes, gauge how many votes Fetterman needs to win, and whip those ballots up out of thin air. Voila! We have a winner, they'll declare with a straight face. Maybe it won't matter if the tsunami of a red wave we're all expecting sweeps all of the republicans across our fruited plains into office. We'll have control of the Senate and the House. Read my lips: We're not tolerating stolen elections anymore, regardless of the overall outcome. Get on this and get on this now, Dr. Oz. This is your election for the taking.
I hear reports of a diesel gas shortage here and there. I think we have less than a month's supply left. What I'm not hearing are the alarm bells going off anywhere. Is this not a call to General Quarters if you've ever heard one? Everything comes to a grinding halt without diesel fuel. Someone from the Biden Administration was asked this question in a daily presser yesterday, and his response was anything but reassuring. He had no answers, of course, and only acknowledged that we had a shared responsibility to our European partners to ensure that their citizens did not suffer due to a shortage of diesel. So, it sounds like we're exporting our energy supplies to Europe while leaving our citizenry in the lurch. Who misses Trump's America First policies? Raise your fucking hands! And then this fool of a vice president in the United States goes on stage and starts talking about how she loves electric school buses. You can't make this shit up.
This is eerily reminiscent, of course, of the shortages of baby food and Tampons that we've experienced here in the United States over the last twelve months or more thanks to the ineptitude of the Biden Administration. I'm not sure if this diesel shortage thing extends to heating oil that we here in the Northeast need or not, but I don't need to tell you how catastrophic that would be if people can't heat their homes. I also don't need to remind you what this would mean to supply chains and potential food shortages. As I've said before, I'm kicking myself for not buying a cord of wood. I can heat my home with wood if push comes to shove, but I have no wood, so I'm up the fucking creek without a paddle. I should probably go to the store today to get ahead of this runaway train coming down the tracks. Do you remember how crazy it was going food shopping during the early days of Covid? This is going to be worse. Far worse. Brace yourselves.
There is such a negative vibe in the air these days. You can feel it. People are losing their asses in their 401k's, governments across the globe are threatening the use of nuclear weapons, no one is happy about what they're seeing coming out of our nation's capitol, our borders are open for all the world's desperate and often criminal elements to come into our country, our nation's judicial system has been co-opted by the Biden Administration and the democrat party, inflation is making it more and more difficult for parents to feed their families, gas prices are lower. Still, they will be going up again after the midterm elections, and nobody thinks that the Biden Administration gives a good fuck for the well-being of the American people. Our only hope is that we can take back control of our government by winning majorities in the House and the Senate ten days from now. We have to start somewhere. Right?
Did I mention that I didn't have a scratch on my new biking jacket when I fell off my bike the other day? I suffered a nasty abrasion on my elbow, but you'd never guess that by looking at the pristine condition of my coat. I must have friends in high places that I don't know about. It was more than weird. I showed the missus, and she was as mystified as was I. She turned the coat over and over, turned it inside out and outside in, and it was as good as new. I didn't know what to make of it, and I still don't. I think I looked at my jacket when I got up off the ground after the fall, and I think I remember thinking that it was all good because there wasn't so much as a scrape on my jacket. I mean, it's nothing but a light nylon jacket, so I half expected to see something, anything. Notta. I was even more surprised when I looked at the abrasion on my arm once I got my jacket off. It was a real WTF moment.
It's worth remembering in this upcoming election that any number of these republican candidates on the ballot are so-called MAGA-endorsed candidates. That is to say; they have all been endorsed by Trump even though the republican party might have chosen candidates who they thought might have had an easier chance of beating their Democratic opponents. But it gets better. Democrats got the crazy idea that voting for these so-called MAGA candidates in the primary would ensure that the democrat in the race would prevail on Election Day, so they changed their party affiliation in the primaries just long enough to cast their vote for the MAGA candidate. That calculus was largely incorrect if we're to believe the polls. Republicans look like they are on the precipice of taking the House and the Senate and probably a few governorships, too, thanks to the democrats who help put them over the top in the primaries. If it all comes to fruition, the republicans owe the democrats a debt of gratitude. Strange bedfellows, no?
I'm waking up to a cold morning here on the seacoast of New Hampshire. It's a frosty 31 degrees out-of-doors, the first morning of the Fall season, where the temperatures have fallen below freezing. I don't have the heat on in the house, although I probably should. I just put on a few more layers and hope that that will do the trick. If I could type this blog stuff while wearing gloves, I would. I do have a hat on, so that's helping a bit. I haven't looked at the forecast, but I'm guessing it will be seasonably comfortable enough to do a little work outdoors today. I have leaves to rake, and I could probably take a few things to the local recycling center. The missus is off to see a friend in Massachusetts today, so I'll be on my own. That should help me stay focused on the tasks at hand. How much I get done remains to be seen.
When I heard this story in the news about Paul Pelosi (husband of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House), I thought to myself, here's the October surprise we've all been waiting for. Paul Pelosi ended up in the hospital after being brutalized with a hammer by someone who broke into his home in a shi-shi section of SanFransicko. Nancy was in Washington, DC, at the time, so no worries there. I fully expected to hear the left-wing media roll out the narrative that White Supremacists are now attacking any of our so-called institutions in the days leading up to the mid-term election on November 8th. All they needed to prove their absurd allegations would indeed be found in the intruder's social media posts and his online historical records. An attack on the husband of the beloved Speaker of the House was an attack on Nancy herself. This should be enough to rile up the democratic base to get them to the polls and push back on the Republican Tsunami at the polls on November 8th.
It turns out that this alleged intruder was neither a Trump supporter nor a Nazi-in-waiting. I find the report that the intruder came into the Pelosi household asking where he could find "Nancy" to be a bit of a stretch. Are we to assume that the intruder, had he found her home at the time, would have beaten Nancy to within an inch of her life in much the same way that he did to her husband, Paul? I'm not so sure. I'm not even convinced that this so-called intruder was an intruder at all. Was he invited into the Pelosi home? Why did Paul Pelosi refer to him as a "friend" when he called the police sometime after 2 am? The two men were reportedly in their underwear when the police arrived. Wat? Was this a Tinder date gone wrong? Thus far, I've not seen the investigators rolling over and regurgitating the Democrat's preferred narrative. Good for them.
There are more questions than answers as I sit here some 48 hours after the incident at the Pelosi's. That's fine. These things take time to play out. If I had to guess, I'd think that Nancy wants to put the kibosh on this story. She may not want certain things in the media that would cast a sordid pall over the reputation she has spent decades constructing. She is about to lose her position as Speaker of the House and will more than likely return to live out her days with her husband in Sanfransicko. The unraveling of her husband's private life daily in the national media would be more than she could bear. It's bad enough that Paul Pelosi has a long and public history of driving while drunk, but same-sex Tinder trysts, if true, are a bird of an entirely different color. It's no wonder she's three sheets to the wind herself whenever we see her speaking in public these days. God only knows what that looks like behind closed doors.
I got back on my bike yesterday after taking a fall a few days back. I took a day or two off to give my bruised ribs a break, which was probably a good idea. Whenever the missus asks me how I'm feeling, and I think she's asking specifically about my ribs, I tell her it's all good. Healing is an incremental process, and I accept that. If it hurts today, I expect it will hurt less tomorrow, and so on and so forth. I think the missus sees this sort of thing as something you go to get fixed, like the brakes on your car. That might explain why she gets so bent out of shape at the slightest mishap or misstep. She worries that the so-called elixir she needs won't be available, and things will go from bad to worse. I've told her repeatedly that's not how it works, but she can be her worst enemy, so I'm done sounding like a broken record.
The next time the Ev man is over for a visit, we'll need to sit down and order our Thanksgiving meal from Whole Foods. We did this with Whole Foods last Thanksgiving, and it worked well. There were a few organizational glitches here and there, but we're a forgiving bunch, so we'll be back again this year. It will give the lot of us something to look forward to after a year that has been topsy-turvy. Not so much for our family, but in general, I would say. We do have a lot to be thankful for, so that is what we intend to celebrate on Thanksgiving this year. With the prices of everything being up over last year, we'll be grateful to be able to put a turkey on our table. God willing, we'll donate or two so another less fortunate family might have an equally delicious meal on Thanksgiving. How we find that less fortunate family remains to be seen.
As I close out another week in this here blog, I'll be interested to see what we have for talking-head shows this fine Sunday morning. I want to be sipping some liberal tears as they come on whining about how losing the Senate and the House is going to be the end of our democracy here in the United States. I'll be listening to hear how many times they use the word "extremists." Election Day hasn't even arrived, and they are sounding a lot like election deniers. How sweet it is. Maybe they should have listened more carefully to the millions of Trump supporters who have been talking about stolen elections since 2020. It's all coming back around to bite them in the butt, and I couldn't be happier. We still need to close the deal on Election Day or earlier if your state has early voting, so get out to the polls and let's git er done.
Game On
23/10/22 07:06
I finally got around to ordering a new biking jacket. My other jacket is so old that I can't even remember when or where I bought it. Maybe it was a gift. Anyway, I was looking around on the internet, and I came across a website that had a few jackets that seemed to be something that might work for me. I don't understand why so many of these jackets have all the pockets on the back of the jacket. You can't even reach into them without taking the damn thing off first. The one I ordered has pockets in the rear as well, but it also has one up front that is easily accessible. I ordered a size or two up since biking in the winter requires multiple layers. I can always return it for something smaller if need be.
One can't wake up these days without seeing a headline about Russia and Ukraine. In Russia, it's all about finding conscripts wherever they can to send to the front in the war with Ukraine. These new conscripts become nothing more than cannon fodder, so you can understand their reluctance. What do you do when you run out of fighting-age men who are willing to go into Ukraine to fight what appears to be an uphill battle if the news reports we see here in the West are true? I don't think there was anybody on the planet who saw Ukraine still standing and standing strong this many months after they were invaded by Russia. Clearly, someone miscalculated. Why that someone is still in charge is a good question.
When all else fails, invite the Iranians in to assist, right? I figured the Chinese would join the fight before the Iranians did, but I was wrong. The stories in the news this morning are about the Iranian drones that are battering cities in Ukraine. They are apparently getting around whatever defenses Ukraine has against such things, so that can't be good. Is this one of those deals where you have some pimple-faced teenager sitting in a bunker in Russia while directing these drones to their targets? I suppose they could just as easily be sitting in Iran doing the same thing. Isn't technology great? And, if they can drop bombs, they can just as easily drop tactical nuclear devices on unsuspecting populations. I'm also not hearing much about the territories recently appropriated by Russia. I thought an attack on the territories was an attack on Mother Russia. No?
Mrs. G was telling us over the weekend that she is now planning to vote for one of two democratic congressmen here in New Hampshire who had paid a visit to her facility while stumping for votes. What the hell, Mrs. G! I thought she was a republican, but, as I sit here thinking about it, she was probably swayed by this nice-looking young man who came on bended knee asking for her vote. He could have been a fucking Martian, truth be told. He showed up, and his counterpart from the republican party did not. I don't think that she was feeling let down by the fact that one of them didn't show up, but she was more than willing to give her vote to the fucking wolf of a demon-crat who showed up in sheep's clothing. I have no words. I'll see if I can't sway her one way or the other between now and Election Day. I still have a few cards to play.
It is really hard to tell how all of these Senate races are going to shake out. I'd hate to think that at the end of the day, we end up with what we have today, which is a 50-50 Senate. The democrats likely already have a plan to steal one or more of the really close races, so we'll need to watch for that. If they plan to back up a truck full of fake ballots to the polling place in the middle of the night, how the hell do you put a stop to that? You simply don't have the time and resources to get over the considerable number of hurdles required before the "winning" nominee is seated and sworn in. On the other hand, if we see a tsunami of Republican and independent voters show up on Election Day, it will be game-over for the swinish dems.
If there is a bellwether state that tells us anything on Election night, it may be the senate seat in Oregon. Or, it could be the senate seat in Nevada. I think Oregon hasn't had a Republican senator in like forever. In Nevada, the current senator is a Latino. If they send her packing, that is going to tell us a lot about how the Latinos have turned their backs on the Democrats for their policies regarding open borders, their failures to stop the flow of fentanyl, their malfeasance when it comes to the economy, and the list goes on and on. We also know that many of the polls out there are out there to suppress votes or, in other cases, to get voters to stay home on Election night. If we do see a red wave, a lot of these close races that are a point or two apart should collapse like a cheap suit with the Republican emerging as the victor. Sweet!
I've already told the missus that it could be a late night for me on Election Day. So much so, in fact, that I urged her to take the following day off just in the event that I keep her up all night. I think she's open to the idea, so that's a good thing. She's not as political as I am, so I'm not expecting her to stay up all night with me. I'm telling you right now, though, if it looks like it's going to be a bad night for the republicans, I'll be going to bed early. Fuck it. I'll not be witness to the gloating of the party that got us to where we are today. And, if that happens, the democrats might well go full fuck-fest on the country with their new "mandate." The people voted, they'll tell us, so they must want more of what we've already done. That will be their battle cry for the next two years as we go into the 2024 presidential election cycle. I just don't know what more there is to do when you've done all you can. Pray?
I was busy as a one-armed paper hanger yesterday, I got a lot done, and I'm feeling good about it. Just stuff around the house, really, but stuff that needed to be done. You know, like putting up storm doors, cleaning bedroom windows, filling and hanging bird feeders, and shit like that. I have a room off our garage that needs tending, so maybe I'll get to that today, and maybe I won't. It's still a little too early to uproot everything in our garden and cut down the usual array of grasses that we have growing hereabouts, so I'll put that on the calendar for later this month or maybe in early November. If the weather cooperates, I might just wash our car. It didn't take the local bird population long to see that we'd filled our bird feeder for the first time in the last three months. Like us, they have a winter to prepare for as well.
I was listening to one of my usual talk shows yesterday, and the host had a guest author on his show who referred to Herschel Walker (Georgia's Republican Senatorial candidate) as "imbecilic." There was zero pushback from the host who, were I to guess, would have objected to that word in some way, shape, or form. He did not, and that made him complicit in what I took to be rhetoric that one uses when they go into the gutter with their speech or actions. I found the word he used so distasteful and disprespectful that it took me by surprise. It was seemingly tantamount to calling Mr. Walker a "dumb nigger." The fact that it's still on my mind this morning should tell you something. It just didn't sit right with me when he said it, and it still doesn't. Herschel is no Mensa member, but he also doesn't pretend to be. I watched him in a televised forum with Hannity last night, and he did just fine. I would welcome him as Georgia's next Senator. I think I'm not alone.
It looks like that clown show of a cyborg, Fetterman, is starting to lose ground to Dr. Oz in the Pennsylvanian Senate race. What the hell is that hump on the back of Fetterman's neck anyway? Did they plant some kind of mechanical device in there to help him process language in the wake of his having suffered a stroke a couple of months back? He's a freak show of a man to begin with, and the lump on the back of his neck is not helping his image. When you see clips on the telly of Fetterman speaking, maybe it's just me, but I'm always asking myself the question, is this particular clip pre or post-stroke? I wouldn't blame his campaign for trying to put a little lipstick on this pig, but you know what they say: You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. I think the good people of Pennsylvania are on to him and can now more easily imagine Oz as their Senator than maybe they could before. That's a testament to Dr. Oz's herculean efforts to win over the hearts and minds of Pennsylvanians.
And, I have to say, is Fetterman's wife the scariest fuck of all or what? I can understand her wanting to come to her husband's side in his time of need, but she is not a good look for the campaign. She actually went after a reporter the other day whose comments about her husband, while unkind at first blush, were actually on point. Maybe she thought that going after the reporter would somehow reignite the magic that their campaign once enjoyed and who doesn't appreciate a woman coming to her husband's side when he is being ostensibly maligned? Unfortunately, she came across as unfiltered and just mean to the bone. You can tell that she feels it all slipping away, and they were just so fucking close to pulling it off. She was going to be the wife of a senator, come hell or high water. If only he hadn't stroked out. The ultimate irony is that her husband's opponent and the likely winner of the senate seat in Pennsylvania come Election Day is a world-renowned heart surgeon. Boom!
Speaking of scary, did you see the video of Jill Biden at the Phillies game in Philadelphia over the weekend? Maybe it was some other game in Philadelphia. Not sure. Anyway, Jill Biden was with a few other people in the middle of the field at the beginning of the game to celebrate I'm not sure what. They were clapping and singing away when the fans in the stands, some 75,000 of them, started singing, "fuck Joe Biden, fuck Joe Biden." It was glorious. She and her entourage just kept doing what they were doing, but I'm quite sure she heard the crowd's raucous rant. She knows all too well how much most Americans hate Joe Biden and, by extension, her. They don't like and will never tolerate politicians who steal presidential elections. The American people are especially intolerant of election thieves who proceed to run our country into the toilet once inaugurated. There is a limit to what they are willing to endure.
If the democrats really wanted to win the upcoming mid-term elections, you would think that they might want to have a word with the leftist fruitcakes that are putting on drag shows for children coast-to-coast. I know, I know. Who in their right mind thinks that drag shows for children is a good idea? I'm not sure that the shows aren't billed as adult entertainment, but they show their hand when they are quick to add that children of all ages are invited to attend as long as they have adult supervision. I mean, talk about explicit. The show I was watching on the telly last night featured highlights of one of these shows just to show how sick they are. Most of the language and video was blurred out because it wouldn't pass muster with the censors. But it's okay for children? This is just one more reminder of what the progressive leftists have done to our country and our culture since Joe Biden stole the presidency in 2020. Parents are having none of it, and rightly so.
I'm not precisely sure what the producers of these drag shows are trying to accomplish. I stared into the blank stares of the mothers sitting in the audience, and they might as well have been attending a birthday party with their children at a local Chuckie Cheese. I saw no signs of rejection or indignation, and one or two of the mothers who did look away here and there were probably looking after their children who had wandered off. I couldn't help but wonder how seeing adults behaving in this overtly sexualized way would affect a young child's mind. Would he or she accept this as normal and look to imitate the behavior in the schoolyard or while playing with friends? There is a reason you don't give pornography to children, or even teenagers, for that matter, so why should this be any different? Then you have the sexually sordid books that are being introduced to children in elementary school these days, and you can see a pattern emerging. It's a sickness brought to you by today's democrat party.
I'll ask the missus to break out her lentil soup recipe. It's time. Summer is over, and it's time to get in shape for the long winter ahead. I may or may not have some extra snow-blowing to do, so I'll want to make sure I'm in shape should that come to pass. I'll need to eat fewer carbs and more protein. I'll need to eat less candy and more fruit. I think I'm in a good place when it comes to getting exercise but lifting weights here and there wouldn't hurt. It's all about resisting and pushing back on old habits that were front and center this past summer. If I'm smart, I'll walk over to my refrigerator when I get up from my chair here, and I'll throw away any mayonnaise and butter that I have left over. The missus barely uses either, so she'll not miss them. She asked me the other day how much I weighed. That's her way of saying it's time. Isn't that what I said? Don't get me wrong. I'm happy to make the sacrifices. I'll be even happier if I lose the weight I want to lose. Maybe, more importantly, I'll lose my desire for the things that I shouldn't be eating. God willing.
I was telling the missus last night that instead of piling blankets on top of ourselves every night just to stay warm, we should just buy a down comforter. The blankets are so heavy sometimes that it's a bit of a chore to turn over if that is what one is inclined to do during the night. They actually sell weighted blankets here and there because there's something to be said for having a heavy blanket on you at night, but there is probably also such a thing as having too many blankets on top of you. We're now used to having a lot of blankets on us, and I worry that having nothing more than a down comforter on top of us will not get the job done. We'll be warm enough, but will we be snuggly warm? You know, snug as a bug in a rug? Sorry, don't mean to go full Dr. Seuss on you, but this blanket thing is real. It's all about improving one's life one day at a time. Tomorrow, it will be something else. But, today, we're talking blankets and comforters. Let's see what L.L. Bean has on sale.
If either Dr. Oz or Mastriano don't win their races for the Senate and the Governorship in Pennsylvania, respectively, it won't be because Sean Hannity didn't do his job trying to get them across the finish line. Oh, and you can add Hershel Walker in his bid for the Georgian Senate seat to that list as well. Hannity has been doing live town halls all this week on his prime-time show on FOX with the candidates. I might have liked to see a little more audience participation, but he only had an hour with the candidates, so I think there simply wasn't enough time. I have to say, all the candidates did a great job. Walker was surprisingly conversant on the issues of interest to Georgians, Oz demonstrated that he had an excellent understanding of the multitude of issues facing Pennsylvanians, from Oxycontin to fracking, and Hannity gave them sufficient time to air their thoughts.
I thought there was an equal time sort of thing with the networks where if Hannity gives these republicans x number of hours, he has to provide democrats with an equal amount of time. Maybe it's considered a political contribution by FOX, and that wouldn't include an equal-time provision. Whatever. Speaking of surprises, I was a little surprised to hear the term "carbon footprint" come out of Oz's mouth last night while on stage. Isn't that part and parcel of the vernacular used by liberals when espousing the benefits of a zero-carbon environment? Maybe this is one of the concerns that I've been hearing from conservatives when it comes to Dr. Oz. Is he, or is he not a true conservative? Is he the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing? Tell me he's not going to vote with the damn democrats from time to time if he gets to the Senate. He's got a lot to prove to a lot of folks if and when he gets there, so, for one, I'll be watching. My idea of climate change is what I see every day when I get out of bed. Oh, look, honey, the sun is out today. That's a nice change from the cloudiness of the last few days.
The missus asked me why Hannity wasn't doing a town hall with Don Bolduc, the fellow from our state looking to replace the democratic senator, Maggie Hassan. I told her that I wasn't sure. I'm not even sure that he doesn't have a town hall planned with Bolduc. I will say that most senate races seem to be pretty close, but I'm not sure that's true of the Hassan-Bolduc race here in my state. Hassan is allegedly ahead by maybe a good few percent, so that may explain why Hannity isn't coming to town anytime soon. I would also say that Hassan has been considered one of the more vulnerable senators when all of this began, so if Bolduc can't capitalize on that, then it might well say something about Bolduc as the candidate. If we do see a red wave, it could sweep in all of the republicans running, including Bolduc. Hassan has voted with Bumbles close to 100% of the time, so she deserves to lose her seat based on the damage that Biden's policies have inflicted on our state and others across the fruited plains.
There does seem to be desperation in the air if you listen to various radio and television outlets that spew liberal progressive nonsense. It reminds me of the panic that the liberals had when Trump won back in 2016. They thought that Hillary would be president for four years, and that would give them another four years to build on the leftist agenda started by Obama during his eight-year term. The finger-pointing and back-biting is just incredible. They thought they had this thing wrapped up when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v Wade. They were going to keep the House and Senate, and the women of America would carry them across the finish line by going to the polls in droves to tell the politicians to keep their hands off their bodies. My body, my choice! Abortion is the hill they would die on. It just so happens that the American people have other concerns that have nothing to do with killing babies.
There is another issue coming to the fore just in time for the upcoming midterms. It looks to me like the Biden Administration is getting ready to add the Covid vaccine to the list of vaccines that are required of every school-age child in America. In other words, if your child doesn't get the jab, they can't get into any school in the land. Can these ass clowns in the Biden Administration get any more devious or conniving? We're talking about a vaccine here that won't prevent you from contracting the virus, and it sure as hell won't prevent you from transmitting the virus to someone else. I thought they were all about following the science. I guess that's true until they have a different agenda, whatever the hell that is. Maybe it's big pharma lining the pockets of the people making these dictums. Maybe it's the Communist Chinese being in bed, as they are, with the Bidens and the 10% for the big guy stuff, who the hell knows?
This has to be stopped, and it has to be stopped now. I love this as an issue for the republicans to run on. Who can't relate to keeping your children safe and away from things that can potentially harm them? The risk-reward calculus favors not giving this vaccine to anyone under a certain age. You read accounts in the newspapers every day about young people dying without any obvious cause. The unspoken truth is that most, if not all, of these deaths, are in young people who have received one or more jabs. Jabs that were most likely required by their employers or institutions in order to stay employed, etc. None of the articles written even hint at the jab being a contributing factor to the untimely death. This is the power of big pharma. Mr. and Mrs. Senator, if you promise parents that you will not condone or allow this in your state, the election will be yours for the asking. Florida is ahead of the curve on this issue. Good for them.
My biking coat arrived in the mail yesterday. At first blush, it seemed okay. I liked the color, and the material seemed like it would provide the necessary warmth in the coming colder months here in the Northeast. It wasn't long before I was finding things that I didn't think I could live with longer term. I was pleased that the jacket had a nice little zippered pocket in the upper part of the front of the jacket, but I quickly discovered that the pocket was so small that its utility was questionable at best. When I went to zipper up the main zipper on the jacket, I found that the zip thingy was on the left-hand side of the coat. It felt so weird just trying to get my hands in a position to zip the coat that I wasn't sure that I was going to be able to do it. And then there were the sleeves. They were way too long, but I convinced myself that I could just roll up the excess material, and it wouldn't be any great shakes. I'm not even going to try it on again this morning. There are simply too many hurdles to get over were I to keep this coat. Too many things to remind me that it's not something that I'm wanting to lament or regret were I not to send it back. So, back she goes.
I was telling the missus that I feel bad for Liz Truss. Ms. Truss was the Prime Minister of Great Britain for maybe 45 days. She set the record for the PM with the shortest term in the history of Great Britain. I don't follow politics across the pond, generally speaking, but ever since Brexit, I've become somewhat more attuned to the ebbs and flows of their politics. Ms. Truss was the last PM to shake the hand of the Queen before death ended the Queen's 70-plus year of reign. Nobody knew how competent or incompetent Ms. Truss would be once in office, but everything seemed to turn to shit in a hurry under her leadership, so that only hastened her demise. Was it merely a matter of her political party cutting its losses? Probably. I liked what I saw in Ms. Truss, at least initially. She had what I thought to be a "grab them by the balls" attitude that doesn't look good on most women, but she wore it like a badge of honor. It's just too bad we never got to see what she was really capable of doing.
Why is Bumbles Biden sticking his nose where it doesn't belong again? I'm seeing a headline here and there about the Biden Administration's questioning Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. Elon has his fingers in a number of pies, from flying satellites over Ukraine to his more recent interest in purchasing the major social media platform, Twitter. Oh, did I mention that he is the CEO and founder of Tesla? Anyway, what Bumbles is trying to do here is to slow down Elon's closing of the Twitter deal just long enough to keep it in the hands of Biden's leftists until after the election. That will give the Bidenista's the time they need to influence as many democrats as they can to get to the polls and vote for his party come November 8th. Power has its advantages, and if you wield it properly, it can be as effective as you need it to be. Make no mistake about it. These social media platforms, from Twitter to Facebook and Instagram, just to name a few, are working overtime on behalf of their democrat overlords to sway this election in their direction.
I wonder how the financial markets are going to fare today. If the past few Fridays are any indication, the market should end up in the red today. I'm seeing something about option expirations potentially being a driver today, but I'm not sure how all of that works, so we'll leave that there. Bonds have been going vertical as of late, so that can't be good for equities. Right? The yield on the ten-year Treasury has gone from 2-something percent twelve months ago to 4-something percent just yesterday. Why would you take a risk on equities with a potential 20% downside when you can get a guaranteed 4 percent something return on your Treasuries? Oddly enough, equities are holding their own, meaning that they're not necessarily going gangbusters, but they are also not going into the proverbial dumpster. We've seen an orderly decline in the equities market since the beginning of the year, and, if you're to put any stock whatsoever in the VIX, it looks like we're in for more of the same in this inflationary bear market we're in. Cash is king?
There is a so-called "bust" component to bear markets should it come to that, and maybe housing is the canary in the coal mine that will get that party started. We've seen mortgage rates go from 2% to 7% in the space of twelve months. Who the hell is going to buy a home with a mortgage rate that high? You'll pay more for your home, and you'll get less house for your money. If you are currently in a home and paying a 2-plus percent mortgage, why would you trade that in for a higher mortgage? With fewer homes selling, that results in layoffs of realtors, mortgage brokers, and everyone else right down the line. With fewer homes changing hands, businesses like Home Depot and Lowes take it on the chin. If they are selling fewer washing machines, that affects manufacturers like Whirlpool and others. With interest rates going up thanks to the Federal Reserve's mismanagement, people are less inclined to add unnecessary purchases to their credit cards. You see where I'm going with all of this. Anyway, just keep an eye on housing. It could be instructive.
Bumbles Biden traveled to Pennsylvania yesterday to raise money for the struggling "Fetterman for Senate" campaign. I caught a few video snippets of Biden and Fetterman meeting up on the tarmac, and it wasn't pretty. Fetterman really does look like that character in the movie, Shrek. He was a hulk of a man standing aside a frail and failing Bumbles Biden and a few other "dignitaries" on the tarmac. They showed Bumbles shaking Fetterman's hand, and it appeared that Bumbles said something out of earshot of the microphones, but there were no words coming out of Fetterman's mouth. He was likely incapable of processing the moment, and, if I had to guess, I would say that he had been practicing these very simplistic gestures in order to put a good face on what was a veritable shit show going on just beneath the surface. Biden knows a vacant look when he sees one since he sees that very same look looking back at him in the mirror every morning. I mean, who doesn't say something to the president of the United States when you are face-to-face with the man who has come to town to show his support for your candidacy?
Meighan McCain tweeted yesterday that she had never been to a rally where the candidate never spoke a word. McCain is the long-deceased John McCain's daughter and, if I'm not mistaken, a republican. I'm not sure why she would be at a John Fetterman campaign, but that's a story for another day. Maybe someone made the observation, and she was just repeating it. But, this is where we are with the Fetterman race. What the hell is he going to do in his upcoming debate if he can't even get words out while speaking to the President of the United States? Will he be afforded a device or two to help him process what he's hearing? How will he formulate his responses if he can't manage to organize his thoughts? How will we know that the responses we do get from him aren't the responses from the man behind the curtain making his very appearance on the stage possible? It smacks of deception and skullduggery. I'd have more respect for the man if he canceled the debate outright.
I'm running a little longer than usual this week with this here blog post. There's a lot going on, I suppose. One thing I did not have on my bingo card was having Tudor Dixon winning the gubenatorial race in Michigan. We ain't there yet, folks, but that race is now neck-in-neck so it may well tip to Tudor if we see that red wave we've all been talking about. Wouldn't that be fucking great! Then, if Zeldin wins the New York gubenatorial race, that will be two blue state strongholds turned red. I think the gubenatorial race in Oregon is in play as well. Oregon has had a democratic governor for the past 50 years give or take. Holy shite, boys and girls! We are on the precipice of taking it all back. We are going to spank the democrats and spank them hard. Now, all we have to do is show up. At the polls, I mean. Let's fucking do this!
One can't wake up these days without seeing a headline about Russia and Ukraine. In Russia, it's all about finding conscripts wherever they can to send to the front in the war with Ukraine. These new conscripts become nothing more than cannon fodder, so you can understand their reluctance. What do you do when you run out of fighting-age men who are willing to go into Ukraine to fight what appears to be an uphill battle if the news reports we see here in the West are true? I don't think there was anybody on the planet who saw Ukraine still standing and standing strong this many months after they were invaded by Russia. Clearly, someone miscalculated. Why that someone is still in charge is a good question.
When all else fails, invite the Iranians in to assist, right? I figured the Chinese would join the fight before the Iranians did, but I was wrong. The stories in the news this morning are about the Iranian drones that are battering cities in Ukraine. They are apparently getting around whatever defenses Ukraine has against such things, so that can't be good. Is this one of those deals where you have some pimple-faced teenager sitting in a bunker in Russia while directing these drones to their targets? I suppose they could just as easily be sitting in Iran doing the same thing. Isn't technology great? And, if they can drop bombs, they can just as easily drop tactical nuclear devices on unsuspecting populations. I'm also not hearing much about the territories recently appropriated by Russia. I thought an attack on the territories was an attack on Mother Russia. No?
Mrs. G was telling us over the weekend that she is now planning to vote for one of two democratic congressmen here in New Hampshire who had paid a visit to her facility while stumping for votes. What the hell, Mrs. G! I thought she was a republican, but, as I sit here thinking about it, she was probably swayed by this nice-looking young man who came on bended knee asking for her vote. He could have been a fucking Martian, truth be told. He showed up, and his counterpart from the republican party did not. I don't think that she was feeling let down by the fact that one of them didn't show up, but she was more than willing to give her vote to the fucking wolf of a demon-crat who showed up in sheep's clothing. I have no words. I'll see if I can't sway her one way or the other between now and Election Day. I still have a few cards to play.
It is really hard to tell how all of these Senate races are going to shake out. I'd hate to think that at the end of the day, we end up with what we have today, which is a 50-50 Senate. The democrats likely already have a plan to steal one or more of the really close races, so we'll need to watch for that. If they plan to back up a truck full of fake ballots to the polling place in the middle of the night, how the hell do you put a stop to that? You simply don't have the time and resources to get over the considerable number of hurdles required before the "winning" nominee is seated and sworn in. On the other hand, if we see a tsunami of Republican and independent voters show up on Election Day, it will be game-over for the swinish dems.
If there is a bellwether state that tells us anything on Election night, it may be the senate seat in Oregon. Or, it could be the senate seat in Nevada. I think Oregon hasn't had a Republican senator in like forever. In Nevada, the current senator is a Latino. If they send her packing, that is going to tell us a lot about how the Latinos have turned their backs on the Democrats for their policies regarding open borders, their failures to stop the flow of fentanyl, their malfeasance when it comes to the economy, and the list goes on and on. We also know that many of the polls out there are out there to suppress votes or, in other cases, to get voters to stay home on Election night. If we do see a red wave, a lot of these close races that are a point or two apart should collapse like a cheap suit with the Republican emerging as the victor. Sweet!
I've already told the missus that it could be a late night for me on Election Day. So much so, in fact, that I urged her to take the following day off just in the event that I keep her up all night. I think she's open to the idea, so that's a good thing. She's not as political as I am, so I'm not expecting her to stay up all night with me. I'm telling you right now, though, if it looks like it's going to be a bad night for the republicans, I'll be going to bed early. Fuck it. I'll not be witness to the gloating of the party that got us to where we are today. And, if that happens, the democrats might well go full fuck-fest on the country with their new "mandate." The people voted, they'll tell us, so they must want more of what we've already done. That will be their battle cry for the next two years as we go into the 2024 presidential election cycle. I just don't know what more there is to do when you've done all you can. Pray?
I was busy as a one-armed paper hanger yesterday, I got a lot done, and I'm feeling good about it. Just stuff around the house, really, but stuff that needed to be done. You know, like putting up storm doors, cleaning bedroom windows, filling and hanging bird feeders, and shit like that. I have a room off our garage that needs tending, so maybe I'll get to that today, and maybe I won't. It's still a little too early to uproot everything in our garden and cut down the usual array of grasses that we have growing hereabouts, so I'll put that on the calendar for later this month or maybe in early November. If the weather cooperates, I might just wash our car. It didn't take the local bird population long to see that we'd filled our bird feeder for the first time in the last three months. Like us, they have a winter to prepare for as well.
I was listening to one of my usual talk shows yesterday, and the host had a guest author on his show who referred to Herschel Walker (Georgia's Republican Senatorial candidate) as "imbecilic." There was zero pushback from the host who, were I to guess, would have objected to that word in some way, shape, or form. He did not, and that made him complicit in what I took to be rhetoric that one uses when they go into the gutter with their speech or actions. I found the word he used so distasteful and disprespectful that it took me by surprise. It was seemingly tantamount to calling Mr. Walker a "dumb nigger." The fact that it's still on my mind this morning should tell you something. It just didn't sit right with me when he said it, and it still doesn't. Herschel is no Mensa member, but he also doesn't pretend to be. I watched him in a televised forum with Hannity last night, and he did just fine. I would welcome him as Georgia's next Senator. I think I'm not alone.
It looks like that clown show of a cyborg, Fetterman, is starting to lose ground to Dr. Oz in the Pennsylvanian Senate race. What the hell is that hump on the back of Fetterman's neck anyway? Did they plant some kind of mechanical device in there to help him process language in the wake of his having suffered a stroke a couple of months back? He's a freak show of a man to begin with, and the lump on the back of his neck is not helping his image. When you see clips on the telly of Fetterman speaking, maybe it's just me, but I'm always asking myself the question, is this particular clip pre or post-stroke? I wouldn't blame his campaign for trying to put a little lipstick on this pig, but you know what they say: You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. I think the good people of Pennsylvania are on to him and can now more easily imagine Oz as their Senator than maybe they could before. That's a testament to Dr. Oz's herculean efforts to win over the hearts and minds of Pennsylvanians.
And, I have to say, is Fetterman's wife the scariest fuck of all or what? I can understand her wanting to come to her husband's side in his time of need, but she is not a good look for the campaign. She actually went after a reporter the other day whose comments about her husband, while unkind at first blush, were actually on point. Maybe she thought that going after the reporter would somehow reignite the magic that their campaign once enjoyed and who doesn't appreciate a woman coming to her husband's side when he is being ostensibly maligned? Unfortunately, she came across as unfiltered and just mean to the bone. You can tell that she feels it all slipping away, and they were just so fucking close to pulling it off. She was going to be the wife of a senator, come hell or high water. If only he hadn't stroked out. The ultimate irony is that her husband's opponent and the likely winner of the senate seat in Pennsylvania come Election Day is a world-renowned heart surgeon. Boom!
Speaking of scary, did you see the video of Jill Biden at the Phillies game in Philadelphia over the weekend? Maybe it was some other game in Philadelphia. Not sure. Anyway, Jill Biden was with a few other people in the middle of the field at the beginning of the game to celebrate I'm not sure what. They were clapping and singing away when the fans in the stands, some 75,000 of them, started singing, "fuck Joe Biden, fuck Joe Biden." It was glorious. She and her entourage just kept doing what they were doing, but I'm quite sure she heard the crowd's raucous rant. She knows all too well how much most Americans hate Joe Biden and, by extension, her. They don't like and will never tolerate politicians who steal presidential elections. The American people are especially intolerant of election thieves who proceed to run our country into the toilet once inaugurated. There is a limit to what they are willing to endure.
If the democrats really wanted to win the upcoming mid-term elections, you would think that they might want to have a word with the leftist fruitcakes that are putting on drag shows for children coast-to-coast. I know, I know. Who in their right mind thinks that drag shows for children is a good idea? I'm not sure that the shows aren't billed as adult entertainment, but they show their hand when they are quick to add that children of all ages are invited to attend as long as they have adult supervision. I mean, talk about explicit. The show I was watching on the telly last night featured highlights of one of these shows just to show how sick they are. Most of the language and video was blurred out because it wouldn't pass muster with the censors. But it's okay for children? This is just one more reminder of what the progressive leftists have done to our country and our culture since Joe Biden stole the presidency in 2020. Parents are having none of it, and rightly so.
I'm not precisely sure what the producers of these drag shows are trying to accomplish. I stared into the blank stares of the mothers sitting in the audience, and they might as well have been attending a birthday party with their children at a local Chuckie Cheese. I saw no signs of rejection or indignation, and one or two of the mothers who did look away here and there were probably looking after their children who had wandered off. I couldn't help but wonder how seeing adults behaving in this overtly sexualized way would affect a young child's mind. Would he or she accept this as normal and look to imitate the behavior in the schoolyard or while playing with friends? There is a reason you don't give pornography to children, or even teenagers, for that matter, so why should this be any different? Then you have the sexually sordid books that are being introduced to children in elementary school these days, and you can see a pattern emerging. It's a sickness brought to you by today's democrat party.
I'll ask the missus to break out her lentil soup recipe. It's time. Summer is over, and it's time to get in shape for the long winter ahead. I may or may not have some extra snow-blowing to do, so I'll want to make sure I'm in shape should that come to pass. I'll need to eat fewer carbs and more protein. I'll need to eat less candy and more fruit. I think I'm in a good place when it comes to getting exercise but lifting weights here and there wouldn't hurt. It's all about resisting and pushing back on old habits that were front and center this past summer. If I'm smart, I'll walk over to my refrigerator when I get up from my chair here, and I'll throw away any mayonnaise and butter that I have left over. The missus barely uses either, so she'll not miss them. She asked me the other day how much I weighed. That's her way of saying it's time. Isn't that what I said? Don't get me wrong. I'm happy to make the sacrifices. I'll be even happier if I lose the weight I want to lose. Maybe, more importantly, I'll lose my desire for the things that I shouldn't be eating. God willing.
I was telling the missus last night that instead of piling blankets on top of ourselves every night just to stay warm, we should just buy a down comforter. The blankets are so heavy sometimes that it's a bit of a chore to turn over if that is what one is inclined to do during the night. They actually sell weighted blankets here and there because there's something to be said for having a heavy blanket on you at night, but there is probably also such a thing as having too many blankets on top of you. We're now used to having a lot of blankets on us, and I worry that having nothing more than a down comforter on top of us will not get the job done. We'll be warm enough, but will we be snuggly warm? You know, snug as a bug in a rug? Sorry, don't mean to go full Dr. Seuss on you, but this blanket thing is real. It's all about improving one's life one day at a time. Tomorrow, it will be something else. But, today, we're talking blankets and comforters. Let's see what L.L. Bean has on sale.
If either Dr. Oz or Mastriano don't win their races for the Senate and the Governorship in Pennsylvania, respectively, it won't be because Sean Hannity didn't do his job trying to get them across the finish line. Oh, and you can add Hershel Walker in his bid for the Georgian Senate seat to that list as well. Hannity has been doing live town halls all this week on his prime-time show on FOX with the candidates. I might have liked to see a little more audience participation, but he only had an hour with the candidates, so I think there simply wasn't enough time. I have to say, all the candidates did a great job. Walker was surprisingly conversant on the issues of interest to Georgians, Oz demonstrated that he had an excellent understanding of the multitude of issues facing Pennsylvanians, from Oxycontin to fracking, and Hannity gave them sufficient time to air their thoughts.
I thought there was an equal time sort of thing with the networks where if Hannity gives these republicans x number of hours, he has to provide democrats with an equal amount of time. Maybe it's considered a political contribution by FOX, and that wouldn't include an equal-time provision. Whatever. Speaking of surprises, I was a little surprised to hear the term "carbon footprint" come out of Oz's mouth last night while on stage. Isn't that part and parcel of the vernacular used by liberals when espousing the benefits of a zero-carbon environment? Maybe this is one of the concerns that I've been hearing from conservatives when it comes to Dr. Oz. Is he, or is he not a true conservative? Is he the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing? Tell me he's not going to vote with the damn democrats from time to time if he gets to the Senate. He's got a lot to prove to a lot of folks if and when he gets there, so, for one, I'll be watching. My idea of climate change is what I see every day when I get out of bed. Oh, look, honey, the sun is out today. That's a nice change from the cloudiness of the last few days.
The missus asked me why Hannity wasn't doing a town hall with Don Bolduc, the fellow from our state looking to replace the democratic senator, Maggie Hassan. I told her that I wasn't sure. I'm not even sure that he doesn't have a town hall planned with Bolduc. I will say that most senate races seem to be pretty close, but I'm not sure that's true of the Hassan-Bolduc race here in my state. Hassan is allegedly ahead by maybe a good few percent, so that may explain why Hannity isn't coming to town anytime soon. I would also say that Hassan has been considered one of the more vulnerable senators when all of this began, so if Bolduc can't capitalize on that, then it might well say something about Bolduc as the candidate. If we do see a red wave, it could sweep in all of the republicans running, including Bolduc. Hassan has voted with Bumbles close to 100% of the time, so she deserves to lose her seat based on the damage that Biden's policies have inflicted on our state and others across the fruited plains.
There does seem to be desperation in the air if you listen to various radio and television outlets that spew liberal progressive nonsense. It reminds me of the panic that the liberals had when Trump won back in 2016. They thought that Hillary would be president for four years, and that would give them another four years to build on the leftist agenda started by Obama during his eight-year term. The finger-pointing and back-biting is just incredible. They thought they had this thing wrapped up when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v Wade. They were going to keep the House and Senate, and the women of America would carry them across the finish line by going to the polls in droves to tell the politicians to keep their hands off their bodies. My body, my choice! Abortion is the hill they would die on. It just so happens that the American people have other concerns that have nothing to do with killing babies.
There is another issue coming to the fore just in time for the upcoming midterms. It looks to me like the Biden Administration is getting ready to add the Covid vaccine to the list of vaccines that are required of every school-age child in America. In other words, if your child doesn't get the jab, they can't get into any school in the land. Can these ass clowns in the Biden Administration get any more devious or conniving? We're talking about a vaccine here that won't prevent you from contracting the virus, and it sure as hell won't prevent you from transmitting the virus to someone else. I thought they were all about following the science. I guess that's true until they have a different agenda, whatever the hell that is. Maybe it's big pharma lining the pockets of the people making these dictums. Maybe it's the Communist Chinese being in bed, as they are, with the Bidens and the 10% for the big guy stuff, who the hell knows?
This has to be stopped, and it has to be stopped now. I love this as an issue for the republicans to run on. Who can't relate to keeping your children safe and away from things that can potentially harm them? The risk-reward calculus favors not giving this vaccine to anyone under a certain age. You read accounts in the newspapers every day about young people dying without any obvious cause. The unspoken truth is that most, if not all, of these deaths, are in young people who have received one or more jabs. Jabs that were most likely required by their employers or institutions in order to stay employed, etc. None of the articles written even hint at the jab being a contributing factor to the untimely death. This is the power of big pharma. Mr. and Mrs. Senator, if you promise parents that you will not condone or allow this in your state, the election will be yours for the asking. Florida is ahead of the curve on this issue. Good for them.
My biking coat arrived in the mail yesterday. At first blush, it seemed okay. I liked the color, and the material seemed like it would provide the necessary warmth in the coming colder months here in the Northeast. It wasn't long before I was finding things that I didn't think I could live with longer term. I was pleased that the jacket had a nice little zippered pocket in the upper part of the front of the jacket, but I quickly discovered that the pocket was so small that its utility was questionable at best. When I went to zipper up the main zipper on the jacket, I found that the zip thingy was on the left-hand side of the coat. It felt so weird just trying to get my hands in a position to zip the coat that I wasn't sure that I was going to be able to do it. And then there were the sleeves. They were way too long, but I convinced myself that I could just roll up the excess material, and it wouldn't be any great shakes. I'm not even going to try it on again this morning. There are simply too many hurdles to get over were I to keep this coat. Too many things to remind me that it's not something that I'm wanting to lament or regret were I not to send it back. So, back she goes.
I was telling the missus that I feel bad for Liz Truss. Ms. Truss was the Prime Minister of Great Britain for maybe 45 days. She set the record for the PM with the shortest term in the history of Great Britain. I don't follow politics across the pond, generally speaking, but ever since Brexit, I've become somewhat more attuned to the ebbs and flows of their politics. Ms. Truss was the last PM to shake the hand of the Queen before death ended the Queen's 70-plus year of reign. Nobody knew how competent or incompetent Ms. Truss would be once in office, but everything seemed to turn to shit in a hurry under her leadership, so that only hastened her demise. Was it merely a matter of her political party cutting its losses? Probably. I liked what I saw in Ms. Truss, at least initially. She had what I thought to be a "grab them by the balls" attitude that doesn't look good on most women, but she wore it like a badge of honor. It's just too bad we never got to see what she was really capable of doing.
Why is Bumbles Biden sticking his nose where it doesn't belong again? I'm seeing a headline here and there about the Biden Administration's questioning Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. Elon has his fingers in a number of pies, from flying satellites over Ukraine to his more recent interest in purchasing the major social media platform, Twitter. Oh, did I mention that he is the CEO and founder of Tesla? Anyway, what Bumbles is trying to do here is to slow down Elon's closing of the Twitter deal just long enough to keep it in the hands of Biden's leftists until after the election. That will give the Bidenista's the time they need to influence as many democrats as they can to get to the polls and vote for his party come November 8th. Power has its advantages, and if you wield it properly, it can be as effective as you need it to be. Make no mistake about it. These social media platforms, from Twitter to Facebook and Instagram, just to name a few, are working overtime on behalf of their democrat overlords to sway this election in their direction.
I wonder how the financial markets are going to fare today. If the past few Fridays are any indication, the market should end up in the red today. I'm seeing something about option expirations potentially being a driver today, but I'm not sure how all of that works, so we'll leave that there. Bonds have been going vertical as of late, so that can't be good for equities. Right? The yield on the ten-year Treasury has gone from 2-something percent twelve months ago to 4-something percent just yesterday. Why would you take a risk on equities with a potential 20% downside when you can get a guaranteed 4 percent something return on your Treasuries? Oddly enough, equities are holding their own, meaning that they're not necessarily going gangbusters, but they are also not going into the proverbial dumpster. We've seen an orderly decline in the equities market since the beginning of the year, and, if you're to put any stock whatsoever in the VIX, it looks like we're in for more of the same in this inflationary bear market we're in. Cash is king?
There is a so-called "bust" component to bear markets should it come to that, and maybe housing is the canary in the coal mine that will get that party started. We've seen mortgage rates go from 2% to 7% in the space of twelve months. Who the hell is going to buy a home with a mortgage rate that high? You'll pay more for your home, and you'll get less house for your money. If you are currently in a home and paying a 2-plus percent mortgage, why would you trade that in for a higher mortgage? With fewer homes selling, that results in layoffs of realtors, mortgage brokers, and everyone else right down the line. With fewer homes changing hands, businesses like Home Depot and Lowes take it on the chin. If they are selling fewer washing machines, that affects manufacturers like Whirlpool and others. With interest rates going up thanks to the Federal Reserve's mismanagement, people are less inclined to add unnecessary purchases to their credit cards. You see where I'm going with all of this. Anyway, just keep an eye on housing. It could be instructive.
Bumbles Biden traveled to Pennsylvania yesterday to raise money for the struggling "Fetterman for Senate" campaign. I caught a few video snippets of Biden and Fetterman meeting up on the tarmac, and it wasn't pretty. Fetterman really does look like that character in the movie, Shrek. He was a hulk of a man standing aside a frail and failing Bumbles Biden and a few other "dignitaries" on the tarmac. They showed Bumbles shaking Fetterman's hand, and it appeared that Bumbles said something out of earshot of the microphones, but there were no words coming out of Fetterman's mouth. He was likely incapable of processing the moment, and, if I had to guess, I would say that he had been practicing these very simplistic gestures in order to put a good face on what was a veritable shit show going on just beneath the surface. Biden knows a vacant look when he sees one since he sees that very same look looking back at him in the mirror every morning. I mean, who doesn't say something to the president of the United States when you are face-to-face with the man who has come to town to show his support for your candidacy?
Meighan McCain tweeted yesterday that she had never been to a rally where the candidate never spoke a word. McCain is the long-deceased John McCain's daughter and, if I'm not mistaken, a republican. I'm not sure why she would be at a John Fetterman campaign, but that's a story for another day. Maybe someone made the observation, and she was just repeating it. But, this is where we are with the Fetterman race. What the hell is he going to do in his upcoming debate if he can't even get words out while speaking to the President of the United States? Will he be afforded a device or two to help him process what he's hearing? How will he formulate his responses if he can't manage to organize his thoughts? How will we know that the responses we do get from him aren't the responses from the man behind the curtain making his very appearance on the stage possible? It smacks of deception and skullduggery. I'd have more respect for the man if he canceled the debate outright.
I'm running a little longer than usual this week with this here blog post. There's a lot going on, I suppose. One thing I did not have on my bingo card was having Tudor Dixon winning the gubenatorial race in Michigan. We ain't there yet, folks, but that race is now neck-in-neck so it may well tip to Tudor if we see that red wave we've all been talking about. Wouldn't that be fucking great! Then, if Zeldin wins the New York gubenatorial race, that will be two blue state strongholds turned red. I think the gubenatorial race in Oregon is in play as well. Oregon has had a democratic governor for the past 50 years give or take. Holy shite, boys and girls! We are on the precipice of taking it all back. We are going to spank the democrats and spank them hard. Now, all we have to do is show up. At the polls, I mean. Let's fucking do this!
Clown Show
16/10/22 06:57
Election deniers! Election deniers! The libs make me sick. You'd think that they never denied one or more election outcomes. They sure as hell denied that Trump won in 2016. They've been denying elections for years. But, now, when the republicans say that an election was stolen, we're roundly criticized and taken to task for denying the outcome of an election. You want to hear someone deny the outcome of an election? Wait until we take back the House and Senate in a few weeks. They'll be crying like stuck pigs. Oh, and there is no fucking way on God's green earth that Joey Bumbles Biden got 81 million votes in 2020.
I was listening to some clown on the radio yesterday lamenting the fact that republicans were pouring money hand over fist into Secretary of State races countrywide. "My God, these election deniers will be in a position to run and decide elections," he said. It's as though if you are a Secretary of State, you actually get to decide such things. Is this what the democrats have been doing all along? Is this how they've been stealing elections and guaranteeing outcomes for their political party? Does this come even close to explaining why some states have an absolute stranglehold on elections? I think that is what they are saying. Republicans winning these positions, assuming that happens, will now guarantee free and fair elections.
I caught a few minutes of this democrat stooge running for governor in Arizona yesterday, one Katie Hobbs, and I swear to God that she was about as empty a suit as I've ever seen run for office like forever. Calling her a moonbat doesn't even come close to describing what I was watching on the telly. I wouldn't hire her to be my damn babysitter, much less turn over the keys of the state to her. She was everything that everyone despises when they think of what the democrat party has become: Vacuous, woke, evasive, radical, simple-minded, power-hungry, ideology-driven, and racist to the bone. Everything is about equity, diversity, and inclusion. It's in-your-face insane and over-the-top nonsense. These people have no business in positions of power. I was thinking to myself, who in their right mind would vote for this claptrap of a candidate?
The missus spent the better part of the day yesterday in the kitchen making a nice corn chowder. It was labor intensive, and I think she dirtied every last pot and pan we own in the process. She made it from scratch, as they say. She bought the ears of corn, steamed the ears of corn, stripped the corn kernels from the cob, and boiled the corn cobs for a good hour which gave her a nice stock. She had a bag of small potatoes which she then peeled, which I've told her a thousand times don't need to be peeled, and added a few other ingredients to the broth before finishing up. We debated as to what milk we would add to the pot, and we settled on a 2% variety. I prefer a creamy consistency, but that is not what we ended up with when all was said and done.
It ended up a little on the watery side, and I mentioned to the missus that adding a little cornstarch might have given it a bit more body. I think she took my comments as constructive criticism, but one can never tell about these sorts of things. I was also a little surprised that the flavor was a little bit flat, considering all the ingredients that went into the chowder. I secretly added a little all-spice to my portion when she wasn't looking, and it livened it up a little. The actual corn that went into the chowder was, of course, delicious. It came right off the cob, so why wouldn't it be? Right? And, there is something warm and comforting about the combination of potatoes and corn on a cool Fall day, so there's that. With most of the stock consumed, I suggested to the missus that we buy a bag of frozen corn and that we buy a nice piece of fish to add to the leftover broth, and we'll be ready to party hearty once again. Nice.
I'm waking up this morning to all kinds of tweets about the Ruskies and their all-out assault on Ukraine. There was something about missiles flying over Moldovia or some such backwater country. I don't think Moldovia is a member of NATO, so maybe it doesn't matter one way or another. Might it drag Moldovia into the conflict? Would it matter? Then there was something about one of the Russian missiles striking the German embassy in Kyiv. I thought that all of these embassies were evacuated when the war started in earnest. Oh, right. The Ukrainians were wanting to invite them all back so they could say that they were holding up just fine in the face of the aggression being waged by the Ruskies. What Zelensky was really doing was bringing everyone back to the embassies so that, God forbid, the Ruskies would bomb the embassies, and then he'd have all of NATO getting in on the action. He's a sly mother fucker, he is.
I suppose it's time to start thinking about squaring away our back deck and putting things away for the winter. I should do this stuff while it's still warm outside. It will just be more painful if I wait to do it until the really cold weather comes. We're a few weeks away from that eventuality, so I might just wait now for a spell of warmer weather when I can take care of everything in one fell swoop. I have storm doors to put on, air conditioners to take down, air conditioners to cover, gutters to clean, leaves to rake, deck furniture to put away, and maybe a few other things that I'm not thinking of at the moment. The leaves from our red maples are dropping more and more by the day, and I'm wondering if mowing them instead of raking them might work better this year. Mulching is good for the lawn. Right? It will make for fewer leaves to rake and drag across the street in weeks to come. We'll have to see how that works out.
I'm still kicking myself for not buying a cord of wood for the wood stove. Temperatures are easily into the thirties here and there during the early morning hours, and, although it's not as cold indoors, it's still chilly enough that we're tempted to turn on the heat just to take the chill off. I talked to the missus about buying some kind of space heater which she can use without having to turn the heat on in the entire house just so she can stay warm while sitting at the computer. You read all these stories about homes burning to the ground because of poorly grounded or misused space heaters, and it's enough to give you pause. I still think it's not a bad idea, so we'll see if the idea gets some traction as we get a bit deeper into Fall here in the Northeast. Oh, and I'll need to get out the snow blowers to make sure that they are in good working order for the first snowfall whenever that comes along.
I mentioned something to my neighbor a few months ago about helping her out with snow removal this coming winter since she was in the planning stages of getting a knee replacement. The knee replacement has come and gone, and I see her getting along seemingly well and maybe even better than expected. That is to say, she's up and walking her dog these days without the use of a cane or whatever. It leaves me wondering what help she might still need this winter with snow removal, my offer aside, and she's not mentioned anything, so am I still on the hook or what? I've always done her driveway since that is a one-and-done, and then I'm back home in maybe twenty minutes from beginning to end. The extra work I offered to do involved clearing a path out to her composter and maybe a bit of a path on her property so she can walk her dog without having to take him out on the heavily sanded or salted road in front of our homes.
She hired a local lad to do her lawn over the course of the summer. I'm sure she was more than happy to pay him a few sheckles so she could spare the wear and tear on her bad knee prior to it being replaced. I'm just thinking out loud here, but what if, what if, she paid that very same lad a few sheckles to come and clear the paths that I offered to do for free? I wonder what, if anything, she still thinks of the offer that I made. I don't charge her for my services, so it might behoove her not to take advantage of my better nature and maybe walk back any expectations she might have of me doing more than I usually do. She's said nothing, so I'm thinking that she still expects me to follow through on the offer I tendered. I worry a little bit that the extra work might be too much for me, and then what? Is this a concern that I should share with her? It won't do either of us any good if I collapse on her front lawn in the middle of a Nor'easter in the middle of January.
Do you think we'll see an October surprise this year? I'm referring to what we've come to expect just ahead of a major election that may or may not change the trajectory of certain races. Some October surprises are manufactured, and, as such, we might learn something new about a candidate that we didn't otherwise know. These so-called revelations are not typically something that favors said candidate. Remember that tape and video about Trump a week or two from the 2016 presidential election where he said something about "grabbing them by the "pussy"? Someone had that tape all along and only released it when they thought it might have the most impact. That's a good example of an October surprise. Not all October surprises are manufactured, and maybe it's something as simple as an offhanded comment that derails a candidate. There's a lot at stake in these upcoming midterms, so I'm expecting the unexpected. I'm guessing it will be of the "manufactured" variety.
I've always liked Tulsi Gabbard. She's the congressman from Hawaii whose term ended in 2021. She's easy on the eyes, so let's just get that out there upfront. The missus reminded me that she ran for president on the democrat ticket back in 2019. Once I saw the clips, I recalled quite clearly a few of her more impactful comments when she was on the stage debating her Democratic opponents. She's good on her feet and smart as a whip. Her party embraced her early on, but that all changed when she took positions that were not in line with those of her party. Fast forward to yesterday when she announced that she was leaving the Democrat party. It made perfect sense to me, and the only question I had was why she didn't leave her party sooner. She's a maverick in every sense of the word, so it will be interesting to see where she goes from here. She said nothing about her future plans, but I wouldn't mind, and this is just me, seeing her run as Trump's VP in 2024. Women like Tulsi Gabbard don't just go away.
I saw some footage of a John Fetterman interview with someone from MSNBC yesterday, and it struck me as odd. Why would a left-wing outlet like MSNBC, who just incidentally would love to see someone like Fetterman win the Pennsylvania Senate seat up for grabs in November, not only talk disparagingly about Fetterman's shortcomings in the wake of his recent stroke but also have him on camera reading the questions on a computer screen that had been posed to him by the interviewer? His cognitive impairment is such that he can't process verbal communications and, as such, requires that they be converted to text so he can more fully understand the questions being posed to him before formulating his responses. It was all so contrived. Too contrived, if you ask me. This is all about lowering expectations for the debate he has planned with OZ later this month. It's a godamn scam, and MSNBC ought to be ashamed of itself for its complicity in the scam. These are the kinds of political hijinks that voters find so reprehensible, and I hope he's held to account by the voters.
It's now come out that the Pfizer MRNA vaccine was never intended to stop transmission of the Covid virus. They have an executive from Pfizer on the record saying as much. Where was this person three or more years ago when everybody on the fucking planet was being forced to take the vaccine to protect grandma and grandpa from contracting the virus? People were losing their jobs and their livelihoods because they refused to take the jab. It never had anything to do with preventing transmission, and this asshole from Pfizer knew it and said nothing. How much do you want to bet that Fauci knew it and said nothing? We shut down the fucking country, and still, crickets from Pfizer on the transmissibility issue. There was simply too much money on the table, and we had too many politicians willing to take that money. If this so-called vaccine doesn't stop people from transmitting or contracting the virus, what the hell are we talking about here? It's all coming out. It makes me sick.
I was telling the missus last night that we need to start thinking differently about our choices for the Senate in the upcoming mid-term elections. She thinks Dr. Oz is a nut job so let's use him as an example. It isn't about Dr. Oz and how the missus or others might feel about his being a loon. I disagree with her assessment, by the way, but that's neither here nor there. The point is that we republicans don't take back the Senate unless we hold our collective noses and vote for these candidates, come hell or high water. The same can be said for Herschel Walker in the Georgia Senate race. You may disagree with his stance on abortion, and you may even disagree with how he handled the abortion issue within his own family, but voting for his opponent or not voting at all could mean the difference between taking back the Senate and not taking the Senate back. The good news is that, should we take the Senate back, we'll have enough MAGA senators in the well of the Senate to oust McConnell as Majority Leader. I think the missus agrees with me. It's hard to tell sometimes.
I'm a little worried about the Ev man. He doesn't seem quite like himself lately. That's my spidey sense talking, but it's pretty reliable, so I think I may be on to something. I'll give him a call today and see if I can't lend him a helping hand one way or another just to get him over the hump. Maybe that means helping him tidy up his place. If I'm right about what I'm seeing, he could probably use a hand with the dishes or whatever. He's probably let things go maybe a little too far. If it's catching up on things, I can help with that. More often than not, he's receptive to offers that he knows will help when not accepting the offer means going further and further down the proverbial rabbit hole. He knows and maybe appreciates the fact that I'm all business and totally non-judgemental when I do show up on his doorstep. I do what I can. Sometimes it's enough, and sometimes it's not. Just file this under, "every little bit helps."
I'm going to have something of an abbreviated session this morning because I need to work with the missus to get a friend of hers reconnected to the internet. This friend of hers lives about an hour south of here, so we'll be doing this over the phone. It seems like an equipment failure since both he and his wife have no internet access. He is on a PC with Windows 2007, and she has a Macbook of some kind. They have Xfinity as their internet carrier, and Xfinity has a few online tools that we can use to troubleshoot this issue. If I'm not mistaken, this friend of hers has a dual-use Modem/router. If I can reboot it remotely, we might be able to narrow down the issues. If it's an equipment issue, then Xfinity will have to pay them a visit and replace said device or devices. This is going to take some time, but her friend has a couple of appointments, so I'm not sure how much we'll get done in the time that we do have. Is it possible that someone inadvertently unplugged something with their feet beneath the desk? Indeed.
The CPI data is coming out at 8:30 am, so we'll see how that plays out in the financial markets. We could see major moves either up or down depending on the numbers, but that will probably have little to no impact on the planned interest rate hikes ostensibly already scheduled by the Fed. The markets have been on a decidedly downward trajectory in the past few months, so getting more of the same if we get a "bad" CPI number shouldn't surprise anyone. A rip higher is possible if we get a good number, but this is not how bear markets end, so people should keep that in mind. In other words, don't throw all of your sheckles into the market, thinking that the bulls have returned. It's never that simple. Will the CPI numbers be fudged because of the upcoming mid-term elections? I'd like to think not, but politics being the bloodsport that it is, it wouldn't be the first time someone put their fingers on the scale at the last minute to help someone out. And, more than likely, it won't be the last.
The missus and I went to Whole Foods in Portsmouth yesterday. We weren't looking for anything in particular, but we hadn't been there in a while, so thought it might be nice to stop in. The first thing I noticed when we arrived was that their parking lot was half empty. That's never a good sign when we're talking about a high-end food store like Whole Foods. It's good for shoppers who don't like crowds when they shop, but it's not so good for people who are concerned about the financial well-being of their favorite food store. Maybe it's just a sign of the times. You know, people living from paycheck to paycheck and all the rest. Their deli section was completely shut down, which seemed to me to be yet another indication that business was slow and getting slower. They also have a hot table section of sorts where you can buy things like mac and cheese by the pound. It was oddly in need of replenishing, but it looked like they were disinclined to do so. There were just two of eight registers open.
I don't know why I'm so attuned to things that are so-called economically sensitive. I'm the guy who sees heavy traffic on a day when the stock market is rallying, and I'm thinking that the traffic has something to do with the fact that people are out and about because of the wealth effect that people feel when stocks are going up. The converse is true as well. When the stock market is declining, as it has been this year, people are less likely to be out and about, so I would expect to see fewer and fewer people going to places like restaurants, etc. People, and let's just call them consumers, are not out doing what consumers are supposed to do: Spend money. So, I was not surprised to see that downtown Portsmouth was quiet and maybe quieter than one might otherwise expect in the middle of October. Gas prices are also inching up again, so that's not helping. If there's a case to be made for turning this ship of ours around, I'm all ears.
It's now come out that Joey Bumbles Biden asked that the Saudis delay their cuts in oil production for six weeks in order to keep gas prices low here in the states, or at least until the mid-term elections have gone by the boards here in the United States. What? Tell me that that isn't exactly what they impeached Trump for when Trump told the Ukrainians that he'd approve certain military hardware if they could see their way to providing Trump with information on the Biden Crime Family. We're talking quid pro quo here, folks. Forget the stupid fist bump and all the nonsense that the Biden-friendly media is feeding you. That fucking stooge of a president was asking a foreign government to collaborate in a scheme to sway an election in our country. Is that not the very definition of treason? This is what the democrats accuse the Ruskies of every four years when it looks like the Republicans are on track to win. Well, you are going to get your comeuppance, Bumbles. The Republicans are going to impeach your sorry ass, and it can't happen soon enough for my tastes.
One of these days, I'm going to upgrade our television. We have an old Sony that we bought, I don't know how long ago, for maybe two thousand bucks. It was the bee's knees back then. It wasn't a Plasma television, but maybe it was the next best thing. Since then, we've seen generational changes in television technology, such as 4k, 8k, and all the rest. The prices have come down, and the quality has gone up. It's a buyer's market. The China's, the South Korea's, and the Japan's can't turn them out fast enough. But our television works just fine, so there's not much of a need to go out and buy a new one. Truth be told, I'm not sure that I can tell the difference between a 4k and an 8k or whatever. I have a discriminating eye, but when it comes to parsing pixels, I'm an average Joe at best. I'll get around to upgrading one of these days, and I'll convince myself that my new television is better than my old television, but the truth will likely lie somewhere in between the two. Maybe there's something to be said for upgrading just for the sake of upgrading. Stay tuned.
Speaking of giving two shits, I could give two shits about the January 6th Committee. I thought they would just have their last meeting, and that would be the end of it. I was wrong. They had their last meeting, but they couldn't help but want to make an even further spectacle of themselves by subpoenaing President Trump. Is it their hope that they can convince just enough of their rabid leftist followers to get out to vote, so the democrats don't lose the House majority on November 8th? Are they thinking that this wet dream of theirs of getting Trump to testify under oath on national television will help them turn out just enough of their rabid fans to keep Pelosi in power as Speaker of the House? It smacks of desperation, but then again, they are a desperate group. Trump shouldn't agree to any of this, and when the republicans take back the House in January 2023, the January 6th Committee will be no longer.
Oh, right. About that CPI data. It came in hotter than expected. Futures were down like crazy in the hour before the financial markets opened here in the US. That is what you would expect to see when bad news crosses the wire. Not sure why, but the markets rallied throughout the day and ended up in the up 2-3% range in all indices by the end of the day. It was a total contrarian view. The market, or at least the Dow, had been down some 5k points in the last thirteen days or so maybe things were just oversold. It's that reversion to the mean thing again. If you were a trader, you had to be pulling your hair out. I mean, who even knows where to begin trading these wacky markets? Was this the bottom that everyone has been looking for? Was it time to push all of your chips into the middle of the table and hope for the best? The very next day, all indices gave back their gains from the previous day. On the week, the NASDAQ was down some 3%. Pissah.
More locally, I'm a big fan of Karoline Leavitt, who is running against that pansy, Chris Pappas, for the congressional seat here in District one in New Hampshire. She was Tucker (FOX) last night talking about parents' rights and the fact that some local school systems here in New Hampshire are not informing parents when their school-age children are raising issues related to gender, sexuality, and some such. The problem is, some judges are supporting the school systems over the parents. Are parents' right's not paramount when it comes to these types of issues? Of course, they are, and any judges and school officials who believe differently ought to be frog-marched out of their respective classrooms and courtrooms. Glen Youngkin won the governorship of Virginia on these very same issues, and Ms. Leavitt can do the same here in New Hampshire when it comes to turning over the congressional seat. God willing, of course.
Wherever I look on social media these days, I'm seeing Ms. Leavitt at this or that forum talking about the issues of the day, and this is what it takes if you want to go to Washington to represent your constituents. Getting national exposure by going on shows like Tucker (FOX) can't hurt, and I appreciate Tucker giving Ms. Leavitt the bandwidth to do her thing. She'd be one of some 500 congressmen, but we republicans need to take every last fucking seat available if we're to take back the House in November. We can't take any seats for granted, and that's why it's so important to get on shows like Tucker in addition to crisscrossing the district day in and day out, stumping for votes. We can pray for a red wave, or better yet a tsunami, on Election day, but it's important to dot all of our I's and cross all of our T's in the meantime just in case we end up with a garden variety turnout. Is that even possible in this day and age with Bumbles sitting in the Oval Office? As for General Bolduc, copy and paste.
I'm hearing good things about Hershel Walker's Senatorial debate last night with that leftist, Reverend Warnock. I don't know Warnock from the man in the moon, but I figured that if he's been delivering sermons for the better part of his life before winning the Georgia senate seat, he was probably pretty good on his feet. I certainly didn't want to see him slicing and dicing my man, Herschel, and, from what I'm hearing and seeing in the wake of the debate, that did not happen. I think Herschel held his own, and that's great. Maybe expectations were so low that all he had to do was show up, and he'd have the proverbial participation trophy at the end of the night. We'll see what, if anything, this does to boost his favorability/unfavorability ratings. That could take a few days to shake out, so be patient. The more I think about it, Herschel could end up being the dark horse candidate of the 2022 midterms. Wouldn't that be something?
What is this I'm hearing about Elon Musk and the Starlink terminals? I think that's what they call them. Apparently, he's been footing the bill all along for putting these so-called satellites in orbit that give the Ukrainians internet access across the fruited plains in Ukraine. It's allowed the Ukrainians to wage a more effective and deadly war against the Ruskies, so that's a good thing. Now, Elon is requesting that the Pentagon foot the bill for providing ongoing satellite service. He's not looking for reimbursement of monies already spent, so that seems reasonable. Why would the Pentagon even have to think twice about this request from Elon? The fools in Washington have given Ukraine north of $75 billion of our tax dollars to date, but that's an issue for another day. Do not get me going. And, the Justice Department just announced that they are investigating Elon having something to do with his purchase of Twitter. Let me guess. They will promise not to prosecute Elon if he continues to self-fund the Starlink program. I hope he tells them to go fuck themselves. Oh, and unless someone ponies up some cold hard cash for the satellites, I'm outta here. Good stuff.
Is there any significance to Xi being elected to another term as President of China? That happened today so I guess we'll see what it all means. Reports have it that he said something to the effect that China will not hesitate to use force to accomplish their objectives. I'm paraphrasing, of course. It sounds like China is delighted with the result of their takeover of Hong Kong as well and, if I'm not mistaken, Xi said something about unifying Taiwan with mainland China. While his remarks about Taiwan were not unexpected, the good people of Tawian can't be happy about what this may mean for their tiny island short term. Loosely translated, I think Xi's comments could be interpreted as follows: "Game on", as it relates to Taiwan. Meanwhile, Bumbles Biden is off on one of his daily jaunts where he plans to pick up an ice cream cone. I'll have two scoops, dearie. His sycophantic followers follow him around while screaming from the sidelines, "What's your favorite flavor ice cream," Mr President? "What's your favorite flavor?"
Maybe he was in the ice cream shop and maybe he wasn't when he leaned into the ear of a prepubescent girl the other day while putting his hand on her shoulder and muttering for all the world to hear something about her not dating until she was thirty-years old. When is this going to stop? Why can't this old fool keep his hands off young girls? One tweet I read on Twitter suggested that at 18 seconds into the creature feature, and yes, that is what we all saw, you could actually see him sniffing the young child's hair. It gives credence to every other story and picture we've seen over the years about this creep's perverted predilictions when it comes to children. And yes, you can include the story from his daughter's diary about "taking showers with dad." Yet, 80 million people voted to install him as president of our great country. Or, did they?
I was listening to some clown on the radio yesterday lamenting the fact that republicans were pouring money hand over fist into Secretary of State races countrywide. "My God, these election deniers will be in a position to run and decide elections," he said. It's as though if you are a Secretary of State, you actually get to decide such things. Is this what the democrats have been doing all along? Is this how they've been stealing elections and guaranteeing outcomes for their political party? Does this come even close to explaining why some states have an absolute stranglehold on elections? I think that is what they are saying. Republicans winning these positions, assuming that happens, will now guarantee free and fair elections.
I caught a few minutes of this democrat stooge running for governor in Arizona yesterday, one Katie Hobbs, and I swear to God that she was about as empty a suit as I've ever seen run for office like forever. Calling her a moonbat doesn't even come close to describing what I was watching on the telly. I wouldn't hire her to be my damn babysitter, much less turn over the keys of the state to her. She was everything that everyone despises when they think of what the democrat party has become: Vacuous, woke, evasive, radical, simple-minded, power-hungry, ideology-driven, and racist to the bone. Everything is about equity, diversity, and inclusion. It's in-your-face insane and over-the-top nonsense. These people have no business in positions of power. I was thinking to myself, who in their right mind would vote for this claptrap of a candidate?
The missus spent the better part of the day yesterday in the kitchen making a nice corn chowder. It was labor intensive, and I think she dirtied every last pot and pan we own in the process. She made it from scratch, as they say. She bought the ears of corn, steamed the ears of corn, stripped the corn kernels from the cob, and boiled the corn cobs for a good hour which gave her a nice stock. She had a bag of small potatoes which she then peeled, which I've told her a thousand times don't need to be peeled, and added a few other ingredients to the broth before finishing up. We debated as to what milk we would add to the pot, and we settled on a 2% variety. I prefer a creamy consistency, but that is not what we ended up with when all was said and done.
It ended up a little on the watery side, and I mentioned to the missus that adding a little cornstarch might have given it a bit more body. I think she took my comments as constructive criticism, but one can never tell about these sorts of things. I was also a little surprised that the flavor was a little bit flat, considering all the ingredients that went into the chowder. I secretly added a little all-spice to my portion when she wasn't looking, and it livened it up a little. The actual corn that went into the chowder was, of course, delicious. It came right off the cob, so why wouldn't it be? Right? And, there is something warm and comforting about the combination of potatoes and corn on a cool Fall day, so there's that. With most of the stock consumed, I suggested to the missus that we buy a bag of frozen corn and that we buy a nice piece of fish to add to the leftover broth, and we'll be ready to party hearty once again. Nice.
I'm waking up this morning to all kinds of tweets about the Ruskies and their all-out assault on Ukraine. There was something about missiles flying over Moldovia or some such backwater country. I don't think Moldovia is a member of NATO, so maybe it doesn't matter one way or another. Might it drag Moldovia into the conflict? Would it matter? Then there was something about one of the Russian missiles striking the German embassy in Kyiv. I thought that all of these embassies were evacuated when the war started in earnest. Oh, right. The Ukrainians were wanting to invite them all back so they could say that they were holding up just fine in the face of the aggression being waged by the Ruskies. What Zelensky was really doing was bringing everyone back to the embassies so that, God forbid, the Ruskies would bomb the embassies, and then he'd have all of NATO getting in on the action. He's a sly mother fucker, he is.
I suppose it's time to start thinking about squaring away our back deck and putting things away for the winter. I should do this stuff while it's still warm outside. It will just be more painful if I wait to do it until the really cold weather comes. We're a few weeks away from that eventuality, so I might just wait now for a spell of warmer weather when I can take care of everything in one fell swoop. I have storm doors to put on, air conditioners to take down, air conditioners to cover, gutters to clean, leaves to rake, deck furniture to put away, and maybe a few other things that I'm not thinking of at the moment. The leaves from our red maples are dropping more and more by the day, and I'm wondering if mowing them instead of raking them might work better this year. Mulching is good for the lawn. Right? It will make for fewer leaves to rake and drag across the street in weeks to come. We'll have to see how that works out.
I'm still kicking myself for not buying a cord of wood for the wood stove. Temperatures are easily into the thirties here and there during the early morning hours, and, although it's not as cold indoors, it's still chilly enough that we're tempted to turn on the heat just to take the chill off. I talked to the missus about buying some kind of space heater which she can use without having to turn the heat on in the entire house just so she can stay warm while sitting at the computer. You read all these stories about homes burning to the ground because of poorly grounded or misused space heaters, and it's enough to give you pause. I still think it's not a bad idea, so we'll see if the idea gets some traction as we get a bit deeper into Fall here in the Northeast. Oh, and I'll need to get out the snow blowers to make sure that they are in good working order for the first snowfall whenever that comes along.
I mentioned something to my neighbor a few months ago about helping her out with snow removal this coming winter since she was in the planning stages of getting a knee replacement. The knee replacement has come and gone, and I see her getting along seemingly well and maybe even better than expected. That is to say, she's up and walking her dog these days without the use of a cane or whatever. It leaves me wondering what help she might still need this winter with snow removal, my offer aside, and she's not mentioned anything, so am I still on the hook or what? I've always done her driveway since that is a one-and-done, and then I'm back home in maybe twenty minutes from beginning to end. The extra work I offered to do involved clearing a path out to her composter and maybe a bit of a path on her property so she can walk her dog without having to take him out on the heavily sanded or salted road in front of our homes.
She hired a local lad to do her lawn over the course of the summer. I'm sure she was more than happy to pay him a few sheckles so she could spare the wear and tear on her bad knee prior to it being replaced. I'm just thinking out loud here, but what if, what if, she paid that very same lad a few sheckles to come and clear the paths that I offered to do for free? I wonder what, if anything, she still thinks of the offer that I made. I don't charge her for my services, so it might behoove her not to take advantage of my better nature and maybe walk back any expectations she might have of me doing more than I usually do. She's said nothing, so I'm thinking that she still expects me to follow through on the offer I tendered. I worry a little bit that the extra work might be too much for me, and then what? Is this a concern that I should share with her? It won't do either of us any good if I collapse on her front lawn in the middle of a Nor'easter in the middle of January.
Do you think we'll see an October surprise this year? I'm referring to what we've come to expect just ahead of a major election that may or may not change the trajectory of certain races. Some October surprises are manufactured, and, as such, we might learn something new about a candidate that we didn't otherwise know. These so-called revelations are not typically something that favors said candidate. Remember that tape and video about Trump a week or two from the 2016 presidential election where he said something about "grabbing them by the "pussy"? Someone had that tape all along and only released it when they thought it might have the most impact. That's a good example of an October surprise. Not all October surprises are manufactured, and maybe it's something as simple as an offhanded comment that derails a candidate. There's a lot at stake in these upcoming midterms, so I'm expecting the unexpected. I'm guessing it will be of the "manufactured" variety.
I've always liked Tulsi Gabbard. She's the congressman from Hawaii whose term ended in 2021. She's easy on the eyes, so let's just get that out there upfront. The missus reminded me that she ran for president on the democrat ticket back in 2019. Once I saw the clips, I recalled quite clearly a few of her more impactful comments when she was on the stage debating her Democratic opponents. She's good on her feet and smart as a whip. Her party embraced her early on, but that all changed when she took positions that were not in line with those of her party. Fast forward to yesterday when she announced that she was leaving the Democrat party. It made perfect sense to me, and the only question I had was why she didn't leave her party sooner. She's a maverick in every sense of the word, so it will be interesting to see where she goes from here. She said nothing about her future plans, but I wouldn't mind, and this is just me, seeing her run as Trump's VP in 2024. Women like Tulsi Gabbard don't just go away.
I saw some footage of a John Fetterman interview with someone from MSNBC yesterday, and it struck me as odd. Why would a left-wing outlet like MSNBC, who just incidentally would love to see someone like Fetterman win the Pennsylvania Senate seat up for grabs in November, not only talk disparagingly about Fetterman's shortcomings in the wake of his recent stroke but also have him on camera reading the questions on a computer screen that had been posed to him by the interviewer? His cognitive impairment is such that he can't process verbal communications and, as such, requires that they be converted to text so he can more fully understand the questions being posed to him before formulating his responses. It was all so contrived. Too contrived, if you ask me. This is all about lowering expectations for the debate he has planned with OZ later this month. It's a godamn scam, and MSNBC ought to be ashamed of itself for its complicity in the scam. These are the kinds of political hijinks that voters find so reprehensible, and I hope he's held to account by the voters.
It's now come out that the Pfizer MRNA vaccine was never intended to stop transmission of the Covid virus. They have an executive from Pfizer on the record saying as much. Where was this person three or more years ago when everybody on the fucking planet was being forced to take the vaccine to protect grandma and grandpa from contracting the virus? People were losing their jobs and their livelihoods because they refused to take the jab. It never had anything to do with preventing transmission, and this asshole from Pfizer knew it and said nothing. How much do you want to bet that Fauci knew it and said nothing? We shut down the fucking country, and still, crickets from Pfizer on the transmissibility issue. There was simply too much money on the table, and we had too many politicians willing to take that money. If this so-called vaccine doesn't stop people from transmitting or contracting the virus, what the hell are we talking about here? It's all coming out. It makes me sick.
I was telling the missus last night that we need to start thinking differently about our choices for the Senate in the upcoming mid-term elections. She thinks Dr. Oz is a nut job so let's use him as an example. It isn't about Dr. Oz and how the missus or others might feel about his being a loon. I disagree with her assessment, by the way, but that's neither here nor there. The point is that we republicans don't take back the Senate unless we hold our collective noses and vote for these candidates, come hell or high water. The same can be said for Herschel Walker in the Georgia Senate race. You may disagree with his stance on abortion, and you may even disagree with how he handled the abortion issue within his own family, but voting for his opponent or not voting at all could mean the difference between taking back the Senate and not taking the Senate back. The good news is that, should we take the Senate back, we'll have enough MAGA senators in the well of the Senate to oust McConnell as Majority Leader. I think the missus agrees with me. It's hard to tell sometimes.
I'm a little worried about the Ev man. He doesn't seem quite like himself lately. That's my spidey sense talking, but it's pretty reliable, so I think I may be on to something. I'll give him a call today and see if I can't lend him a helping hand one way or another just to get him over the hump. Maybe that means helping him tidy up his place. If I'm right about what I'm seeing, he could probably use a hand with the dishes or whatever. He's probably let things go maybe a little too far. If it's catching up on things, I can help with that. More often than not, he's receptive to offers that he knows will help when not accepting the offer means going further and further down the proverbial rabbit hole. He knows and maybe appreciates the fact that I'm all business and totally non-judgemental when I do show up on his doorstep. I do what I can. Sometimes it's enough, and sometimes it's not. Just file this under, "every little bit helps."
I'm going to have something of an abbreviated session this morning because I need to work with the missus to get a friend of hers reconnected to the internet. This friend of hers lives about an hour south of here, so we'll be doing this over the phone. It seems like an equipment failure since both he and his wife have no internet access. He is on a PC with Windows 2007, and she has a Macbook of some kind. They have Xfinity as their internet carrier, and Xfinity has a few online tools that we can use to troubleshoot this issue. If I'm not mistaken, this friend of hers has a dual-use Modem/router. If I can reboot it remotely, we might be able to narrow down the issues. If it's an equipment issue, then Xfinity will have to pay them a visit and replace said device or devices. This is going to take some time, but her friend has a couple of appointments, so I'm not sure how much we'll get done in the time that we do have. Is it possible that someone inadvertently unplugged something with their feet beneath the desk? Indeed.
The CPI data is coming out at 8:30 am, so we'll see how that plays out in the financial markets. We could see major moves either up or down depending on the numbers, but that will probably have little to no impact on the planned interest rate hikes ostensibly already scheduled by the Fed. The markets have been on a decidedly downward trajectory in the past few months, so getting more of the same if we get a "bad" CPI number shouldn't surprise anyone. A rip higher is possible if we get a good number, but this is not how bear markets end, so people should keep that in mind. In other words, don't throw all of your sheckles into the market, thinking that the bulls have returned. It's never that simple. Will the CPI numbers be fudged because of the upcoming mid-term elections? I'd like to think not, but politics being the bloodsport that it is, it wouldn't be the first time someone put their fingers on the scale at the last minute to help someone out. And, more than likely, it won't be the last.
The missus and I went to Whole Foods in Portsmouth yesterday. We weren't looking for anything in particular, but we hadn't been there in a while, so thought it might be nice to stop in. The first thing I noticed when we arrived was that their parking lot was half empty. That's never a good sign when we're talking about a high-end food store like Whole Foods. It's good for shoppers who don't like crowds when they shop, but it's not so good for people who are concerned about the financial well-being of their favorite food store. Maybe it's just a sign of the times. You know, people living from paycheck to paycheck and all the rest. Their deli section was completely shut down, which seemed to me to be yet another indication that business was slow and getting slower. They also have a hot table section of sorts where you can buy things like mac and cheese by the pound. It was oddly in need of replenishing, but it looked like they were disinclined to do so. There were just two of eight registers open.
I don't know why I'm so attuned to things that are so-called economically sensitive. I'm the guy who sees heavy traffic on a day when the stock market is rallying, and I'm thinking that the traffic has something to do with the fact that people are out and about because of the wealth effect that people feel when stocks are going up. The converse is true as well. When the stock market is declining, as it has been this year, people are less likely to be out and about, so I would expect to see fewer and fewer people going to places like restaurants, etc. People, and let's just call them consumers, are not out doing what consumers are supposed to do: Spend money. So, I was not surprised to see that downtown Portsmouth was quiet and maybe quieter than one might otherwise expect in the middle of October. Gas prices are also inching up again, so that's not helping. If there's a case to be made for turning this ship of ours around, I'm all ears.
It's now come out that Joey Bumbles Biden asked that the Saudis delay their cuts in oil production for six weeks in order to keep gas prices low here in the states, or at least until the mid-term elections have gone by the boards here in the United States. What? Tell me that that isn't exactly what they impeached Trump for when Trump told the Ukrainians that he'd approve certain military hardware if they could see their way to providing Trump with information on the Biden Crime Family. We're talking quid pro quo here, folks. Forget the stupid fist bump and all the nonsense that the Biden-friendly media is feeding you. That fucking stooge of a president was asking a foreign government to collaborate in a scheme to sway an election in our country. Is that not the very definition of treason? This is what the democrats accuse the Ruskies of every four years when it looks like the Republicans are on track to win. Well, you are going to get your comeuppance, Bumbles. The Republicans are going to impeach your sorry ass, and it can't happen soon enough for my tastes.
One of these days, I'm going to upgrade our television. We have an old Sony that we bought, I don't know how long ago, for maybe two thousand bucks. It was the bee's knees back then. It wasn't a Plasma television, but maybe it was the next best thing. Since then, we've seen generational changes in television technology, such as 4k, 8k, and all the rest. The prices have come down, and the quality has gone up. It's a buyer's market. The China's, the South Korea's, and the Japan's can't turn them out fast enough. But our television works just fine, so there's not much of a need to go out and buy a new one. Truth be told, I'm not sure that I can tell the difference between a 4k and an 8k or whatever. I have a discriminating eye, but when it comes to parsing pixels, I'm an average Joe at best. I'll get around to upgrading one of these days, and I'll convince myself that my new television is better than my old television, but the truth will likely lie somewhere in between the two. Maybe there's something to be said for upgrading just for the sake of upgrading. Stay tuned.
Speaking of giving two shits, I could give two shits about the January 6th Committee. I thought they would just have their last meeting, and that would be the end of it. I was wrong. They had their last meeting, but they couldn't help but want to make an even further spectacle of themselves by subpoenaing President Trump. Is it their hope that they can convince just enough of their rabid leftist followers to get out to vote, so the democrats don't lose the House majority on November 8th? Are they thinking that this wet dream of theirs of getting Trump to testify under oath on national television will help them turn out just enough of their rabid fans to keep Pelosi in power as Speaker of the House? It smacks of desperation, but then again, they are a desperate group. Trump shouldn't agree to any of this, and when the republicans take back the House in January 2023, the January 6th Committee will be no longer.
Oh, right. About that CPI data. It came in hotter than expected. Futures were down like crazy in the hour before the financial markets opened here in the US. That is what you would expect to see when bad news crosses the wire. Not sure why, but the markets rallied throughout the day and ended up in the up 2-3% range in all indices by the end of the day. It was a total contrarian view. The market, or at least the Dow, had been down some 5k points in the last thirteen days or so maybe things were just oversold. It's that reversion to the mean thing again. If you were a trader, you had to be pulling your hair out. I mean, who even knows where to begin trading these wacky markets? Was this the bottom that everyone has been looking for? Was it time to push all of your chips into the middle of the table and hope for the best? The very next day, all indices gave back their gains from the previous day. On the week, the NASDAQ was down some 3%. Pissah.
More locally, I'm a big fan of Karoline Leavitt, who is running against that pansy, Chris Pappas, for the congressional seat here in District one in New Hampshire. She was Tucker (FOX) last night talking about parents' rights and the fact that some local school systems here in New Hampshire are not informing parents when their school-age children are raising issues related to gender, sexuality, and some such. The problem is, some judges are supporting the school systems over the parents. Are parents' right's not paramount when it comes to these types of issues? Of course, they are, and any judges and school officials who believe differently ought to be frog-marched out of their respective classrooms and courtrooms. Glen Youngkin won the governorship of Virginia on these very same issues, and Ms. Leavitt can do the same here in New Hampshire when it comes to turning over the congressional seat. God willing, of course.
Wherever I look on social media these days, I'm seeing Ms. Leavitt at this or that forum talking about the issues of the day, and this is what it takes if you want to go to Washington to represent your constituents. Getting national exposure by going on shows like Tucker (FOX) can't hurt, and I appreciate Tucker giving Ms. Leavitt the bandwidth to do her thing. She'd be one of some 500 congressmen, but we republicans need to take every last fucking seat available if we're to take back the House in November. We can't take any seats for granted, and that's why it's so important to get on shows like Tucker in addition to crisscrossing the district day in and day out, stumping for votes. We can pray for a red wave, or better yet a tsunami, on Election day, but it's important to dot all of our I's and cross all of our T's in the meantime just in case we end up with a garden variety turnout. Is that even possible in this day and age with Bumbles sitting in the Oval Office? As for General Bolduc, copy and paste.
I'm hearing good things about Hershel Walker's Senatorial debate last night with that leftist, Reverend Warnock. I don't know Warnock from the man in the moon, but I figured that if he's been delivering sermons for the better part of his life before winning the Georgia senate seat, he was probably pretty good on his feet. I certainly didn't want to see him slicing and dicing my man, Herschel, and, from what I'm hearing and seeing in the wake of the debate, that did not happen. I think Herschel held his own, and that's great. Maybe expectations were so low that all he had to do was show up, and he'd have the proverbial participation trophy at the end of the night. We'll see what, if anything, this does to boost his favorability/unfavorability ratings. That could take a few days to shake out, so be patient. The more I think about it, Herschel could end up being the dark horse candidate of the 2022 midterms. Wouldn't that be something?
What is this I'm hearing about Elon Musk and the Starlink terminals? I think that's what they call them. Apparently, he's been footing the bill all along for putting these so-called satellites in orbit that give the Ukrainians internet access across the fruited plains in Ukraine. It's allowed the Ukrainians to wage a more effective and deadly war against the Ruskies, so that's a good thing. Now, Elon is requesting that the Pentagon foot the bill for providing ongoing satellite service. He's not looking for reimbursement of monies already spent, so that seems reasonable. Why would the Pentagon even have to think twice about this request from Elon? The fools in Washington have given Ukraine north of $75 billion of our tax dollars to date, but that's an issue for another day. Do not get me going. And, the Justice Department just announced that they are investigating Elon having something to do with his purchase of Twitter. Let me guess. They will promise not to prosecute Elon if he continues to self-fund the Starlink program. I hope he tells them to go fuck themselves. Oh, and unless someone ponies up some cold hard cash for the satellites, I'm outta here. Good stuff.
Is there any significance to Xi being elected to another term as President of China? That happened today so I guess we'll see what it all means. Reports have it that he said something to the effect that China will not hesitate to use force to accomplish their objectives. I'm paraphrasing, of course. It sounds like China is delighted with the result of their takeover of Hong Kong as well and, if I'm not mistaken, Xi said something about unifying Taiwan with mainland China. While his remarks about Taiwan were not unexpected, the good people of Tawian can't be happy about what this may mean for their tiny island short term. Loosely translated, I think Xi's comments could be interpreted as follows: "Game on", as it relates to Taiwan. Meanwhile, Bumbles Biden is off on one of his daily jaunts where he plans to pick up an ice cream cone. I'll have two scoops, dearie. His sycophantic followers follow him around while screaming from the sidelines, "What's your favorite flavor ice cream," Mr President? "What's your favorite flavor?"
Maybe he was in the ice cream shop and maybe he wasn't when he leaned into the ear of a prepubescent girl the other day while putting his hand on her shoulder and muttering for all the world to hear something about her not dating until she was thirty-years old. When is this going to stop? Why can't this old fool keep his hands off young girls? One tweet I read on Twitter suggested that at 18 seconds into the creature feature, and yes, that is what we all saw, you could actually see him sniffing the young child's hair. It gives credence to every other story and picture we've seen over the years about this creep's perverted predilictions when it comes to children. And yes, you can include the story from his daughter's diary about "taking showers with dad." Yet, 80 million people voted to install him as president of our great country. Or, did they?
Defcon One
09/10/22 07:09
We've got ourselves a new week, folks! Word has it this morning that Putin has unleashed one of his nuclear-powered subs into the Baltic Sea. This baby is apparently capable of sending out drones that can create tsunamis of radiation on unsuspecting populations. I guess what I'm saying is that if this madness persists, and I'm talking about all of the hysterics about nuclear war that we hear coming out of countries around the world, we might well not be around to see how the rest of this week plays out.
Just give Vlad the fucking area in Ukraine that he's already annexed and call it a day. With Zelensky getting $10 billion a week from the fool we have in the White House, does he really have any incentive to call it a day or anything of the sort? Does any of this have anything to do with Hunter Biden and his relationship with Burisma, the oil and gas conglomerate? Can we get a little more clarification on the "10% for the big guy" thing?
I saw a map in an online newspaper yesterday showing the vulnerable targets in the United States should one or more nuclear devices come ashore. Thank the baby Jesus that none of those areas include my hometown. I guess we're good to go. One thing the article didn't mention is that we have both a nuclear power plant as well as a naval shipyard within a stone's throw of my backyard. That puts me and the fam at ground zero. We would be target numero uno. So, we're not good to go?
With any luck, we'd have time to pack our bags and get out the front door if any of the other sites listed in the article were nuked first. We'll have to discuss exit plans at dinner sometime soon but, be rest assured, we won't be the only ones heading for the hills when the shit hits the fan. That reminds me. I should start stocking up on dried foods and such. I don't want to be the last customer walking through their door when the bombs drop out of the sky.
The destruction of the Nordstream pipeline certainly did little to de-escalate the pitched battle we find ourselves in. I think it was Chuck Schumer who said, "they have 6 ways to Sunday to get back at you." Schumer's reference had to do with Trump and Intelligence agencies but it could just as easily apply to Putin. Does anyone think that Putin is just going to look the other way when one or more countries in the West destroy his country's pipeline?
As I sit here this morning, countries across the world are sending out naval and aerial reinforcements to ensure that their vital assets are protected in the event Putin decides to respond in a commensurate fashion. I think there are communication lines sitting on the floor of the ocean that link the United States with Europe and beyond that would be likely targets. Knowing that we have a soft underbelly when and where it comes to our electronic infrastructure, you have to ask yourself the question, why would we take out the Nordstream, knowing full well that we and our European counterparts are equally vulnerable?
I also have zero interest in seeing my loved ones sent off to fight Joey Bumble's Biden's war in some far-off land should it come to that. I'll not have our nation's sons and daughters camping out on the front lines as cannon fodder in some Eastern European shithole while Joey and his crack-addicted son, along with his wife with the fishnet stockings, eat caviar and sip wine in the bunker beneath the White House. It's possible that once the nuclear bombs start to fly, we'll no longer be in a position to fight anything resembling a conventional war. For all intents and purposes, that fucking horse will have left the barn.
I'm beginning to understand how the Russian conscripts and their extended families feel about being drafted into what could end up being a nuclear holocaust inside a country like Ukraine that most people can't find on a map. Is any of this starting to make any sense? Oh, and if anyone is even thinking of resisting the draft by being a conscientious objector, think again. You saw what they did to trespassers on that fateful day, January 6th, 2020. They are all still sitting in solitary confinement without bail or the ability to see their loved ones some 2 years later. This is Joe Biden's America. Don't you fucking forget it.
What the hell is the little rocket man doing sending ballistic missiles over Japan? I'm talking about that Kim guy in North Korea. So, out of the blue last night, we get the news that North Korea sent a missile across Japan and into the Pacific Ocean. Sirens across Tokyo and other cities blared in Japan, warning people to seek shelter as the missile traversed the island of Japan. This isn't the first time that the North Koreans have put missiles in the air, but it's been a while since they sent one over the island of Japan. There was really no rhyme or reason to expect that North Korea was up to anything of the sort, so, as they say, this came out of the blue. It was followed by the usual condemnations, but I think it ends there. Maybe, with all of the talk about nuclear wars breaking out, little rocket man wanted to add his two cents. Who knows?
I need to make a checklist of political candidates that I'll want to follow on Election day in November. If this election goes the way I think it's going to go, I think we're going to see any number of surprises, and I want to see if I can't track them. Once we republicans have the majority in the House of Representatives, I'll want to see just how large that majority ends up being before I don my party hat. I probably won't need a list for the Senate since there are fewer races to track, and the minute one side or the other declares victory, it will be the proverbial shot heard around the world. I suppose if the democrats hold the majority in the House, that would be big news too. I'm just not expecting that to happen.
When it comes to individual races, I want both Dr. Oz and Mastriano to win their senate and gubernatorial races in Pennsylvania, respectively. I also want to see Hassan (Senate) and Pappas (Rep) lose their races here in New Hampshire. Oh, and if Zeldin can beat Hochul in the gubernatorial race in New York, that would be welcome news. New York has moved too far to the left in recent years, and we need that pendulum to swing back the other way. This one talk show guy that I listen to in Pennsylvania, who leans left in his politics, was fairly certain early on that both Oz and Mastriano would lose to their Democratic opponents. As of yesterday, he's now talking about Pennsylvania having a long history of ticket-splitting. You know, they elect a republican senator and a Democratic governor or vice versa. He sees the Oz race tightening considerably and is now seemingly willing to concede that Oz has a fighting chance, if not better. He is still of the opinion that Mastriano is too far right and off-the-charts nuts and will likely lose his race. I'm not so sure.
Mrs. G was talking about one of her investments the other day, and she lamented the fact that it has not done well over time. She's now more interested in selling that particular investment and trading it in for something that provides a bit of a shelter in the storm, as it were. Welcome to the bear market of 2022, Mrs. G. I suggested that she consider holding off on that trade until we see if we can't recoup some of her losses if and when we see another countertrend rally emerge. We're overdue, I said. I can't guarantee it, but we've seen some fairly dramatic declines since the last countertrend rally, so it's more likely than not that we'll see another one of unknown price and time sometime soon. I don't give financial advice, as a rule, so she is welcome to do as she pleases. That said, characteristics of bear markets being what they are, countertrend rallies are a thing. The problem is, and it's true of both highs and lows in the market, when the time comes to buy or sell, you probably won't want to.
There is nothing more despicable than the politician who plays the Equity card when the very discussion of the Equity card makes zero sense. I'm talking about Kamala Harris's comments recently about making sure that the marginalized communities, and more specifically, the marginalized communities of color, are the first to receive federal relief funds in the wake of hurricane Ian slamming southern Florida. She's the Vice President for chrissakes. Does she realize that she represents all Americans be they rich or poor? Does she have the presence of mind to know that when she makes comments like that, that she is doing to marginalized white communities that which she is accusing white communities of doing to communities of color? Let's call her comments what they are: racist.
I know we have a bewildered and senile Commander-in-Chief sitting in the White House, but this stooge of a racist Vice President could be a real problem were she to assume the presidency. Biden can't even read the teleprompter anymore, so that moment may well be upon us in short order. If you love her shit-eating grins that stretch from ear to ear, or you love the way she cackles when she laughs, or maybe you like her pronouns, you're going to be balls-to-the-walls in love with her when she takes over as president. She is better suited to be president of the local chapter of the NAACP in Detroit than she is president of the United States, but that's just my opinion. Did I mention that she garnered just 3% when she competed in the presidential primaries? We all know that the only reason that Biden took her on as VP was because he needed an insurance policy. Who would throw him out of office knowing that she stood in the wings with all of her so-called baggage?
Why am I just hearing about this now? You're telling me that the Chinese have opened up any number of police stations in cities across our great country? What the fuck are we talking about here? Who the hell invited them into our country, much less into our towns and cities, to set up shop? I don't care who the hell they think they're entitled to police, be they Chinese citizens or whatever. They want some say in what their citizens do while within the borders of our great country, they can go through their consulates like everyone else. Just who the hell do they think they are? If I had to guess, I'd say that the Bidens greased the skids for their compatriots in the Chinese Communist Party to get this done. And where the hell are the republicans while all of this is going on? When is someone going to speak up? Don't tell me that they've been bought off too. Close these damn police stations down, and do it now!
The more I think about it, the more I think that the democrats have the republicans over a barrel when it comes to Putin and the Ruskies. You'd think that any reasonable person seeing what I'm seeing with our countries going down the road to a nuclear confrontation with the Russians over the proxy war that we're waging in Ukraine, would just stop for a moment and ask the obvious question: Why are we going to war and facing the threat of a nuclear disaster on our soil over some shithole of a country in Eastern Europe?
The short answer to that question is that you can't ask that question without being labeled a Putin sympathizer. Now that the Russians have invaded Ukraine doing anything but taking Putin to task over the invasion is tantamount to political suicide. I think there are a few brave republicans in Congress who would rather see federal dollars going to the homeless or some such cause rather than to Ukraine, but it's far short of the chorus that we should be hearing.
Funny thing is, I don't hear anyone asking the people running for office here in the US what their position is on what we're doing in our proxy war with Russia. You'd think that the democrats would want an issue that they call their own. They don't have much else to tout, so why not, right? It would be to their advantage to get their opponents on the record as opposing our involvement in the conflict in Ukraine. That would all be true were there some consensus about our involvement in the conflict, but I'm not sure that there is a consensus.
I saw a poll the other day that said maybe half of the American public approves of what we're doing in Ukraine, but I suspect that's probably a propaganda poll designed and pushed out by our illustrious Intelligence Agencies to hoodwink the American people at the behest of the Biden Administration. What's even more suspicious and maybe more alarming is the fact that nobody, and I mean nobody, is making the slightest effort to lower the temperature. Will anything change once we take back the House and the Senate? Who will stand up to the groupspeak and craziness coming out of our nation's capitol?
Now that the Biden Administration has squandered roughly half of the oil that we have in our Strategic Oil Reserve just to lower prices at the pump in the weeks leading up to the mid-term elections, they were relying on OPEC to continue pumping at current rates, which would keep prices on a downward trajectory for the foreseeable future. Biden's democrats are facing enough headwinds going into the mid-term elections, and bringing down prices at the pump was a critical component of mitigating what was likely to be a disaster come election day.
Were republicans to take both the House and the Senate, it would represent a potentially fatal blow to Biden's agenda. He can still issue executive actions until the cows come home, but they are easily overturned by the courts. There is only one problem. OPEC is now telling Biden to fuck off. They actually doubled the amount of oil they were planning to cut back on. It was tantamount to giving Joey Bumbles Biden the big middle finger. OPEC's announcement did not go down well with the Bidenistas. It was a good day for the rest of us. Well, until we have to start paying higher prices at the pump, that is.
It's not good for those of us who want to pay less at the pump, obviously, but it is good for those of us who want to see the Bidenistas brought to their knees. Who doesn't want to see these mother fuckers in Washington humbled and disgraced over what they've done to our great country after being in office for not even two years? Steve Bannon was right when he said that "Elections have consequences and stolen elections have catastrophic consequences.' I'm sitting here feeling just a little thankful that I bought into a deal for our home heating oil this coming winter, knowing what I know about where oil prices are headed now. This is not going to help with our fight against inflation, so there's that too. It's just a shit show. Every day Joey Bumbles Biden is in office is worse than the day before. When America is on the ropes because of our failed leadership, the rest of the world suffers along with us.
Bumbles was speaking at some democrat fundraiser a couple of nights ago, and he let the cat out of the bag, He said, and I'm paraphrasing here, we're closer now to a nuclear conflict with Russia than we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis. What are we talking about here, Bumbles? How did we ever get to this place? I'm also hearing that they are stepping up the production of certain medicines that one would only ever need in the case of a nuclear detonation. I'm sure they aren't getting those drugs ready for use by the general public. They are, of course, for the elite and their spawn. When the shit hits the fan, and I'm speaking speculatively here, the elite will be tucked away in their bunkers while the rest of us are, well, what's left of the rest of us anyway, will be who knows where.
Wouldn't I love a mean tweet about right now? The media excoriated Trump day in and day out about his relationship with the Russians when all Trump wanted to do was to improve relations with every world leader around the globe. Everything he did was done in the interest of improving relationships around the world, and the democrats and their propagandists were having none of it. It was a non-stop blood lust by the democrats and the media against everything Trump was trying to accomplish. By demonizing everything Trump trumpeted, they effectively vilified the likes of Putin in Russia, Little Rocket Man in North Korea, and the Saudis in the Middle East. Not that some of the aforementioned groups aren't bad to the bone, but there was something to be said back in the day for wanting to make things better. And, of course, none of what we're seeing in the world today with Bumbles in the White House was even close to happening with Trump as President.
Back in the day during the Cuban Missile Crisis (60's), when the President of the United States spoke to the public about the dangers of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union, every child in every elementary school coast to coast was given instructions on how to duck and cover in order to survive a nuclear holocaust. It was preposterous, of course, and as I sit here thinking about it now, it was probably just a coping mechanism of sorts that children could use to ward off the anxiety that children were feeling at the time. Parents back in those days may not have been vocalizing their fears, but children are more often than not more often clued into non-verbal cues than they are verbal cues. Anyway, this dickwad of a president of ours makes these comments at a fundraiser within the last twenty-four hours, the press dutifully reports those comments, and I'm not sure anybody cares.
Is there one world leader stepping up and demanding that Bumbles retract his radical rhetoric about the likelihood of nuclear war? No. Are Biden's comments appearing on the front of every tabloid coast-to-coast this morning? No. I'm not even sure if I could google Biden's comments with any success. Does that mean that he never made those comments? No. Have Bumble's comments been ghosted because everyone knows that Bumbles can't tie his own shoes so any comments about nuclear attacks should be discussed in the same light? That is to say, not at all. They are fine repeating his lies about everything else so why not just put his comments out there and let the chips fall where they may? They won't do that because it would cast their fearless leader as an even more demented version of the president they already know to be over-the-top senile.
The problem is, and this is me speaking, this nutty fuck has his fingers on the nuclear codes, and there isn't a damn thing that any of us can do about it. While the media hasn't covered Bumble's comments in the printed press, you can bet your bottom dollar that Vladamir Putin has gotten wind of them. He has to be thinking to himself that something preemptive might be in order if he and his fellow Ruskies are to survive.
There may have been a time when Bumble's comments might have been construed as those coming from someone crazy as a fox, but those days are over. Everyone knows Bumbles is about as demented a loon as you can get, and there is no need to second guess a word coming out of his mouth. It is what it is. It's an overt threat to use nuclear weapons against your geopolitical foe or foes. Zelensky has to be creaming his shorts. He would give his left nut to see someone, anyone, launch a nuclear missile into Russian territory. He could give a flying fuck if the world melts down around him. It's true.
It's been another weird week in the financial markets. We saw a 2-day rally on Monday and Tuesday of this week, which saw returns in the major indices of around 5-6%. If you've been losing your ass in the markets going back to January, you were happy to see something resembling a relief rally, however short. It's a start, right? You have to start somewhere. The market didn't do much on Wednesday and Thursday, seemingly waiting for the employment number to come out on Friday before making another move one way or the other. With the NASDAQ down more than 30% YTD, how much worse could it get, right? Well, for those folks looking for the Fed to pivot and take a break from raising interest rates based on the employment data, they were sadly disappointed when the employment numbers came in stronger than expected. The NASDAQ dropped another four percent. The S&P dropped another three percent.
The missus and I drove up to the Kittery malls yesterday, where the missus was looking to take advantage of the sales on the long holiday weekend. We got there well ahead of the rush, and we went our separate ways once inside the store. I was looking for some biking gear but found nothing of interest. If I had to guess, I'd say that the area dedicated to cycling was now more dedicated to winter sports and less to biking. I didn't need a new pair of biking shorts, and the shirts that hung on the rack wouldn't have fit me even if I felt like buying an extra shirt. I will say that this was probably one of the better-stocked stores that I've been in as of late, not that I'm out and about shopping a lot, mind you. It also struck me that they had a pretty good selection of just about everything, including guns and novelty sweatshirts.
I think there is such a thing as having too much inventory. There were places in the store where the racks were so stacked with merchandise that it was hard to get in between the racks to see if there was something you might be interested in. I didn't mention this to the missus, but I was having a real problem with sensory overload. I think I actually got lost at one point. I knew if I kept pushing past this and that rack, I'd see something resembling an exit sooner or later. I was never close to calling 911, but I will admit to feeling more than my share of anxiety. After about ten minutes of walking in circles in one of the less congested sections of the store, I decided that I'd had enough. The store was getting busier by the minute, and that was my cue to find the missus and make plans to leave the premises either together or separately. The missus never did find what she was looking for, so there's that. Color me surprised.
There were quite a lot of stores in this stretch of malls that we visited that had either closed up shop or had possibly never opened once they were built. I know that sounds odd, knowing what I've said about how busy the store was that we visited, but it's true. Maybe they built too many stores, and the vendors they anticipated coming to town never came to town for whatever reason. If what we saw was some indication of where the economy is going, God help us all. This mall area I'm talking about stretches on for a good quarter to half a mile or more with maybe hundreds of stores, so it's perhaps something of a veritable canary in the coal mine when it comes to the economy. Maybe, just maybe, there's a correlation between the number of shuttered stores in Kittery, Maine, and the decline in the stock market that we've seen going back to January.
Is it me, or are the democrats really concerned about not losing a senate seat to Herschel Walker in Georgia? Herschel is the storied running back and Heisman trophy winner born and bred in Georgia. He's Georgia's son if Georgia ever had a son. Herschel is also running for the US Senate seat on the Republican ticket. That is a direct threat to the democrats, and were they to lose that seat to Walker, it could mean that the Republicans take the majority in the Senate starting in January 2023. The democrats are pulling every last sleazy trick they have up their sleeves in order to stop Walker's seemingly unstoppable succession to the senate seat. We'll see how far they go with these allegations of Herschel paying for an abortion when he professes to be pro-life, but I'm guessing it's all going to seem so desperate to those people who love Herschel to the bone. And, they do.
When Herschel says that he loves his family, the people in Georgia who know and love Herschel know exactly what he means. They are a forgiving lot, and they have loved Herschel from day one. Even today, some twenty years out from his glory days on the gridiron, you can see the sparkle in his eyes, and he is still running with that ball under his arm toward the end zone, whatever that end zone looks like. The good people of Georgia have his back. They've always had his back, and no amount of skullduggery and malfeasance by the democrats is going to change that. That isn't going to stop the democrats from trying to bring him down, but Herschel is used to people trying to bring him down, and he has built his reputation on stiff-arming every last fucking one of them on his way to the goal. The good people of Georgia know a winner when they see one, and they've seen plenty of Herschel over the years. They know he's not perfect, but who amongst us is? We'll cross the finish line with Herschel on Election Day, and the people of Georgia will stand and applaud him just like they always have.
What is all of this business about Kanye West? Or, should I say, Ye. He was on with Tucker last week, and he made a few interesting comments about this and that. I don't really know this guy, nor do I know what his claim to fame is. If he's a performer of sorts, I've not seen his performances. I think he's a rapper, if I'm not mistaken. He made several references to other rappers like Ice Tea, but I wouldn't know their music either. That's just not my thing. I didn't hear this part of the interview, but I understand he was especially critical of the Kushners. I'm familiar with Jerod Kushner, who married Trump's daughter, and I know he had something to do with negotiating the Abraham Accords, but I was a little surprised to hear that Ye thought Jerod did what he in negotiating the Accords not for Trump (And America) but rather to line his own pockets.
Ye was seemingly feeding into some of the more odious stereotypes of the Jewish people, which I found to be most unbecoming. I wondered if Tucker even saw this coming. If what Ye was saying is true about Kushner, Kushner probably wouldn't be the first person in any Administration going back to the days of George Washington who wasn't looking out for his own interests while doing his job. Ye seemed to be intimating that Kushner was a money grubber, so to speak, and I'm aware of at least one deal that came about after the Accords were signed off on, where Kushner received an investment of billion dollars or more from the Saudi's. That doesn't make him a money grubber, per se, but he did benefit from the deal, so you could rightly accuse him of being an opportunist. It's the kind of thing you hate to see in Washington. That said, I think that Washington is awash in dirty money from places like Communist China. It's the veritable mother's milk of politics, dirty as it is.
It made me wonder if what I was hearing from Ye wasn't a little like the pot calling the kettle black. The guy is a billionaire, so I'm guessing he didn't make his billions without looking the other way on one or more occasions when it benefitted him to do so. No, it seemed like Ye had an axe to grind when it came to Kushner. Maybe it was more about what Kushner was doing at Trump's expense, and America's expense quite frankly, that Ye found so distasteful. Maybe what he was saying was that Kushner had an opportunity to advance Trump's agenda and America's agenda, but that agenda fell short not because of what Trump wasn't able to accomplish, but rather because of Kushner's personal desire to enrich himself at Trump's expense. That would be truly unforgivable were it true. Trump was Kushner's son-in-law, for chrissakes. Who does that?
I'm sorry I couldn't stay awake to watch Trump's rally in Nevada last night. I've seen one clip this morning on Twitter where Trump was going after Biden for not doing more to negotiate some way out of this mess with Russia and Ukraine. There were several cautionary comments about the dereliction of not pursuing negotiations knowing full well what the end result of a nuclear conflict would look like. Trump is right, of course. No one in the Biden Administration is doing a damn thing to take down the temperature. If anything, they continue to make matters worse through their very actions.
I think we're well past the point where anyone thinks this is a proxy war between NATO and Russia. Trump is nothing if not prescient about such matters. We hope he's wrong this time, of course, but taking our chances with a demented and likely senile president who is about to lose both houses of Congress in less than four weeks is maybe asking too much. If Biden thinks that getting America into war with Russia would enhance his standing ahead of the elections, don't think for a minute that he wouldn't do it. Like he said the other day, nobody fucks with the Bidens. This is what we're dealing with. God help us all.
Just give Vlad the fucking area in Ukraine that he's already annexed and call it a day. With Zelensky getting $10 billion a week from the fool we have in the White House, does he really have any incentive to call it a day or anything of the sort? Does any of this have anything to do with Hunter Biden and his relationship with Burisma, the oil and gas conglomerate? Can we get a little more clarification on the "10% for the big guy" thing?
I saw a map in an online newspaper yesterday showing the vulnerable targets in the United States should one or more nuclear devices come ashore. Thank the baby Jesus that none of those areas include my hometown. I guess we're good to go. One thing the article didn't mention is that we have both a nuclear power plant as well as a naval shipyard within a stone's throw of my backyard. That puts me and the fam at ground zero. We would be target numero uno. So, we're not good to go?
With any luck, we'd have time to pack our bags and get out the front door if any of the other sites listed in the article were nuked first. We'll have to discuss exit plans at dinner sometime soon but, be rest assured, we won't be the only ones heading for the hills when the shit hits the fan. That reminds me. I should start stocking up on dried foods and such. I don't want to be the last customer walking through their door when the bombs drop out of the sky.
The destruction of the Nordstream pipeline certainly did little to de-escalate the pitched battle we find ourselves in. I think it was Chuck Schumer who said, "they have 6 ways to Sunday to get back at you." Schumer's reference had to do with Trump and Intelligence agencies but it could just as easily apply to Putin. Does anyone think that Putin is just going to look the other way when one or more countries in the West destroy his country's pipeline?
As I sit here this morning, countries across the world are sending out naval and aerial reinforcements to ensure that their vital assets are protected in the event Putin decides to respond in a commensurate fashion. I think there are communication lines sitting on the floor of the ocean that link the United States with Europe and beyond that would be likely targets. Knowing that we have a soft underbelly when and where it comes to our electronic infrastructure, you have to ask yourself the question, why would we take out the Nordstream, knowing full well that we and our European counterparts are equally vulnerable?
I also have zero interest in seeing my loved ones sent off to fight Joey Bumble's Biden's war in some far-off land should it come to that. I'll not have our nation's sons and daughters camping out on the front lines as cannon fodder in some Eastern European shithole while Joey and his crack-addicted son, along with his wife with the fishnet stockings, eat caviar and sip wine in the bunker beneath the White House. It's possible that once the nuclear bombs start to fly, we'll no longer be in a position to fight anything resembling a conventional war. For all intents and purposes, that fucking horse will have left the barn.
I'm beginning to understand how the Russian conscripts and their extended families feel about being drafted into what could end up being a nuclear holocaust inside a country like Ukraine that most people can't find on a map. Is any of this starting to make any sense? Oh, and if anyone is even thinking of resisting the draft by being a conscientious objector, think again. You saw what they did to trespassers on that fateful day, January 6th, 2020. They are all still sitting in solitary confinement without bail or the ability to see their loved ones some 2 years later. This is Joe Biden's America. Don't you fucking forget it.
What the hell is the little rocket man doing sending ballistic missiles over Japan? I'm talking about that Kim guy in North Korea. So, out of the blue last night, we get the news that North Korea sent a missile across Japan and into the Pacific Ocean. Sirens across Tokyo and other cities blared in Japan, warning people to seek shelter as the missile traversed the island of Japan. This isn't the first time that the North Koreans have put missiles in the air, but it's been a while since they sent one over the island of Japan. There was really no rhyme or reason to expect that North Korea was up to anything of the sort, so, as they say, this came out of the blue. It was followed by the usual condemnations, but I think it ends there. Maybe, with all of the talk about nuclear wars breaking out, little rocket man wanted to add his two cents. Who knows?
I need to make a checklist of political candidates that I'll want to follow on Election day in November. If this election goes the way I think it's going to go, I think we're going to see any number of surprises, and I want to see if I can't track them. Once we republicans have the majority in the House of Representatives, I'll want to see just how large that majority ends up being before I don my party hat. I probably won't need a list for the Senate since there are fewer races to track, and the minute one side or the other declares victory, it will be the proverbial shot heard around the world. I suppose if the democrats hold the majority in the House, that would be big news too. I'm just not expecting that to happen.
When it comes to individual races, I want both Dr. Oz and Mastriano to win their senate and gubernatorial races in Pennsylvania, respectively. I also want to see Hassan (Senate) and Pappas (Rep) lose their races here in New Hampshire. Oh, and if Zeldin can beat Hochul in the gubernatorial race in New York, that would be welcome news. New York has moved too far to the left in recent years, and we need that pendulum to swing back the other way. This one talk show guy that I listen to in Pennsylvania, who leans left in his politics, was fairly certain early on that both Oz and Mastriano would lose to their Democratic opponents. As of yesterday, he's now talking about Pennsylvania having a long history of ticket-splitting. You know, they elect a republican senator and a Democratic governor or vice versa. He sees the Oz race tightening considerably and is now seemingly willing to concede that Oz has a fighting chance, if not better. He is still of the opinion that Mastriano is too far right and off-the-charts nuts and will likely lose his race. I'm not so sure.
Mrs. G was talking about one of her investments the other day, and she lamented the fact that it has not done well over time. She's now more interested in selling that particular investment and trading it in for something that provides a bit of a shelter in the storm, as it were. Welcome to the bear market of 2022, Mrs. G. I suggested that she consider holding off on that trade until we see if we can't recoup some of her losses if and when we see another countertrend rally emerge. We're overdue, I said. I can't guarantee it, but we've seen some fairly dramatic declines since the last countertrend rally, so it's more likely than not that we'll see another one of unknown price and time sometime soon. I don't give financial advice, as a rule, so she is welcome to do as she pleases. That said, characteristics of bear markets being what they are, countertrend rallies are a thing. The problem is, and it's true of both highs and lows in the market, when the time comes to buy or sell, you probably won't want to.
There is nothing more despicable than the politician who plays the Equity card when the very discussion of the Equity card makes zero sense. I'm talking about Kamala Harris's comments recently about making sure that the marginalized communities, and more specifically, the marginalized communities of color, are the first to receive federal relief funds in the wake of hurricane Ian slamming southern Florida. She's the Vice President for chrissakes. Does she realize that she represents all Americans be they rich or poor? Does she have the presence of mind to know that when she makes comments like that, that she is doing to marginalized white communities that which she is accusing white communities of doing to communities of color? Let's call her comments what they are: racist.
I know we have a bewildered and senile Commander-in-Chief sitting in the White House, but this stooge of a racist Vice President could be a real problem were she to assume the presidency. Biden can't even read the teleprompter anymore, so that moment may well be upon us in short order. If you love her shit-eating grins that stretch from ear to ear, or you love the way she cackles when she laughs, or maybe you like her pronouns, you're going to be balls-to-the-walls in love with her when she takes over as president. She is better suited to be president of the local chapter of the NAACP in Detroit than she is president of the United States, but that's just my opinion. Did I mention that she garnered just 3% when she competed in the presidential primaries? We all know that the only reason that Biden took her on as VP was because he needed an insurance policy. Who would throw him out of office knowing that she stood in the wings with all of her so-called baggage?
Why am I just hearing about this now? You're telling me that the Chinese have opened up any number of police stations in cities across our great country? What the fuck are we talking about here? Who the hell invited them into our country, much less into our towns and cities, to set up shop? I don't care who the hell they think they're entitled to police, be they Chinese citizens or whatever. They want some say in what their citizens do while within the borders of our great country, they can go through their consulates like everyone else. Just who the hell do they think they are? If I had to guess, I'd say that the Bidens greased the skids for their compatriots in the Chinese Communist Party to get this done. And where the hell are the republicans while all of this is going on? When is someone going to speak up? Don't tell me that they've been bought off too. Close these damn police stations down, and do it now!
The more I think about it, the more I think that the democrats have the republicans over a barrel when it comes to Putin and the Ruskies. You'd think that any reasonable person seeing what I'm seeing with our countries going down the road to a nuclear confrontation with the Russians over the proxy war that we're waging in Ukraine, would just stop for a moment and ask the obvious question: Why are we going to war and facing the threat of a nuclear disaster on our soil over some shithole of a country in Eastern Europe?
The short answer to that question is that you can't ask that question without being labeled a Putin sympathizer. Now that the Russians have invaded Ukraine doing anything but taking Putin to task over the invasion is tantamount to political suicide. I think there are a few brave republicans in Congress who would rather see federal dollars going to the homeless or some such cause rather than to Ukraine, but it's far short of the chorus that we should be hearing.
Funny thing is, I don't hear anyone asking the people running for office here in the US what their position is on what we're doing in our proxy war with Russia. You'd think that the democrats would want an issue that they call their own. They don't have much else to tout, so why not, right? It would be to their advantage to get their opponents on the record as opposing our involvement in the conflict in Ukraine. That would all be true were there some consensus about our involvement in the conflict, but I'm not sure that there is a consensus.
I saw a poll the other day that said maybe half of the American public approves of what we're doing in Ukraine, but I suspect that's probably a propaganda poll designed and pushed out by our illustrious Intelligence Agencies to hoodwink the American people at the behest of the Biden Administration. What's even more suspicious and maybe more alarming is the fact that nobody, and I mean nobody, is making the slightest effort to lower the temperature. Will anything change once we take back the House and the Senate? Who will stand up to the groupspeak and craziness coming out of our nation's capitol?
Now that the Biden Administration has squandered roughly half of the oil that we have in our Strategic Oil Reserve just to lower prices at the pump in the weeks leading up to the mid-term elections, they were relying on OPEC to continue pumping at current rates, which would keep prices on a downward trajectory for the foreseeable future. Biden's democrats are facing enough headwinds going into the mid-term elections, and bringing down prices at the pump was a critical component of mitigating what was likely to be a disaster come election day.
Were republicans to take both the House and the Senate, it would represent a potentially fatal blow to Biden's agenda. He can still issue executive actions until the cows come home, but they are easily overturned by the courts. There is only one problem. OPEC is now telling Biden to fuck off. They actually doubled the amount of oil they were planning to cut back on. It was tantamount to giving Joey Bumbles Biden the big middle finger. OPEC's announcement did not go down well with the Bidenistas. It was a good day for the rest of us. Well, until we have to start paying higher prices at the pump, that is.
It's not good for those of us who want to pay less at the pump, obviously, but it is good for those of us who want to see the Bidenistas brought to their knees. Who doesn't want to see these mother fuckers in Washington humbled and disgraced over what they've done to our great country after being in office for not even two years? Steve Bannon was right when he said that "Elections have consequences and stolen elections have catastrophic consequences.' I'm sitting here feeling just a little thankful that I bought into a deal for our home heating oil this coming winter, knowing what I know about where oil prices are headed now. This is not going to help with our fight against inflation, so there's that too. It's just a shit show. Every day Joey Bumbles Biden is in office is worse than the day before. When America is on the ropes because of our failed leadership, the rest of the world suffers along with us.
Bumbles was speaking at some democrat fundraiser a couple of nights ago, and he let the cat out of the bag, He said, and I'm paraphrasing here, we're closer now to a nuclear conflict with Russia than we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis. What are we talking about here, Bumbles? How did we ever get to this place? I'm also hearing that they are stepping up the production of certain medicines that one would only ever need in the case of a nuclear detonation. I'm sure they aren't getting those drugs ready for use by the general public. They are, of course, for the elite and their spawn. When the shit hits the fan, and I'm speaking speculatively here, the elite will be tucked away in their bunkers while the rest of us are, well, what's left of the rest of us anyway, will be who knows where.
Wouldn't I love a mean tweet about right now? The media excoriated Trump day in and day out about his relationship with the Russians when all Trump wanted to do was to improve relations with every world leader around the globe. Everything he did was done in the interest of improving relationships around the world, and the democrats and their propagandists were having none of it. It was a non-stop blood lust by the democrats and the media against everything Trump was trying to accomplish. By demonizing everything Trump trumpeted, they effectively vilified the likes of Putin in Russia, Little Rocket Man in North Korea, and the Saudis in the Middle East. Not that some of the aforementioned groups aren't bad to the bone, but there was something to be said back in the day for wanting to make things better. And, of course, none of what we're seeing in the world today with Bumbles in the White House was even close to happening with Trump as President.
Back in the day during the Cuban Missile Crisis (60's), when the President of the United States spoke to the public about the dangers of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union, every child in every elementary school coast to coast was given instructions on how to duck and cover in order to survive a nuclear holocaust. It was preposterous, of course, and as I sit here thinking about it now, it was probably just a coping mechanism of sorts that children could use to ward off the anxiety that children were feeling at the time. Parents back in those days may not have been vocalizing their fears, but children are more often than not more often clued into non-verbal cues than they are verbal cues. Anyway, this dickwad of a president of ours makes these comments at a fundraiser within the last twenty-four hours, the press dutifully reports those comments, and I'm not sure anybody cares.
Is there one world leader stepping up and demanding that Bumbles retract his radical rhetoric about the likelihood of nuclear war? No. Are Biden's comments appearing on the front of every tabloid coast-to-coast this morning? No. I'm not even sure if I could google Biden's comments with any success. Does that mean that he never made those comments? No. Have Bumble's comments been ghosted because everyone knows that Bumbles can't tie his own shoes so any comments about nuclear attacks should be discussed in the same light? That is to say, not at all. They are fine repeating his lies about everything else so why not just put his comments out there and let the chips fall where they may? They won't do that because it would cast their fearless leader as an even more demented version of the president they already know to be over-the-top senile.
The problem is, and this is me speaking, this nutty fuck has his fingers on the nuclear codes, and there isn't a damn thing that any of us can do about it. While the media hasn't covered Bumble's comments in the printed press, you can bet your bottom dollar that Vladamir Putin has gotten wind of them. He has to be thinking to himself that something preemptive might be in order if he and his fellow Ruskies are to survive.
There may have been a time when Bumble's comments might have been construed as those coming from someone crazy as a fox, but those days are over. Everyone knows Bumbles is about as demented a loon as you can get, and there is no need to second guess a word coming out of his mouth. It is what it is. It's an overt threat to use nuclear weapons against your geopolitical foe or foes. Zelensky has to be creaming his shorts. He would give his left nut to see someone, anyone, launch a nuclear missile into Russian territory. He could give a flying fuck if the world melts down around him. It's true.
It's been another weird week in the financial markets. We saw a 2-day rally on Monday and Tuesday of this week, which saw returns in the major indices of around 5-6%. If you've been losing your ass in the markets going back to January, you were happy to see something resembling a relief rally, however short. It's a start, right? You have to start somewhere. The market didn't do much on Wednesday and Thursday, seemingly waiting for the employment number to come out on Friday before making another move one way or the other. With the NASDAQ down more than 30% YTD, how much worse could it get, right? Well, for those folks looking for the Fed to pivot and take a break from raising interest rates based on the employment data, they were sadly disappointed when the employment numbers came in stronger than expected. The NASDAQ dropped another four percent. The S&P dropped another three percent.
The missus and I drove up to the Kittery malls yesterday, where the missus was looking to take advantage of the sales on the long holiday weekend. We got there well ahead of the rush, and we went our separate ways once inside the store. I was looking for some biking gear but found nothing of interest. If I had to guess, I'd say that the area dedicated to cycling was now more dedicated to winter sports and less to biking. I didn't need a new pair of biking shorts, and the shirts that hung on the rack wouldn't have fit me even if I felt like buying an extra shirt. I will say that this was probably one of the better-stocked stores that I've been in as of late, not that I'm out and about shopping a lot, mind you. It also struck me that they had a pretty good selection of just about everything, including guns and novelty sweatshirts.
I think there is such a thing as having too much inventory. There were places in the store where the racks were so stacked with merchandise that it was hard to get in between the racks to see if there was something you might be interested in. I didn't mention this to the missus, but I was having a real problem with sensory overload. I think I actually got lost at one point. I knew if I kept pushing past this and that rack, I'd see something resembling an exit sooner or later. I was never close to calling 911, but I will admit to feeling more than my share of anxiety. After about ten minutes of walking in circles in one of the less congested sections of the store, I decided that I'd had enough. The store was getting busier by the minute, and that was my cue to find the missus and make plans to leave the premises either together or separately. The missus never did find what she was looking for, so there's that. Color me surprised.
There were quite a lot of stores in this stretch of malls that we visited that had either closed up shop or had possibly never opened once they were built. I know that sounds odd, knowing what I've said about how busy the store was that we visited, but it's true. Maybe they built too many stores, and the vendors they anticipated coming to town never came to town for whatever reason. If what we saw was some indication of where the economy is going, God help us all. This mall area I'm talking about stretches on for a good quarter to half a mile or more with maybe hundreds of stores, so it's perhaps something of a veritable canary in the coal mine when it comes to the economy. Maybe, just maybe, there's a correlation between the number of shuttered stores in Kittery, Maine, and the decline in the stock market that we've seen going back to January.
Is it me, or are the democrats really concerned about not losing a senate seat to Herschel Walker in Georgia? Herschel is the storied running back and Heisman trophy winner born and bred in Georgia. He's Georgia's son if Georgia ever had a son. Herschel is also running for the US Senate seat on the Republican ticket. That is a direct threat to the democrats, and were they to lose that seat to Walker, it could mean that the Republicans take the majority in the Senate starting in January 2023. The democrats are pulling every last sleazy trick they have up their sleeves in order to stop Walker's seemingly unstoppable succession to the senate seat. We'll see how far they go with these allegations of Herschel paying for an abortion when he professes to be pro-life, but I'm guessing it's all going to seem so desperate to those people who love Herschel to the bone. And, they do.
When Herschel says that he loves his family, the people in Georgia who know and love Herschel know exactly what he means. They are a forgiving lot, and they have loved Herschel from day one. Even today, some twenty years out from his glory days on the gridiron, you can see the sparkle in his eyes, and he is still running with that ball under his arm toward the end zone, whatever that end zone looks like. The good people of Georgia have his back. They've always had his back, and no amount of skullduggery and malfeasance by the democrats is going to change that. That isn't going to stop the democrats from trying to bring him down, but Herschel is used to people trying to bring him down, and he has built his reputation on stiff-arming every last fucking one of them on his way to the goal. The good people of Georgia know a winner when they see one, and they've seen plenty of Herschel over the years. They know he's not perfect, but who amongst us is? We'll cross the finish line with Herschel on Election Day, and the people of Georgia will stand and applaud him just like they always have.
What is all of this business about Kanye West? Or, should I say, Ye. He was on with Tucker last week, and he made a few interesting comments about this and that. I don't really know this guy, nor do I know what his claim to fame is. If he's a performer of sorts, I've not seen his performances. I think he's a rapper, if I'm not mistaken. He made several references to other rappers like Ice Tea, but I wouldn't know their music either. That's just not my thing. I didn't hear this part of the interview, but I understand he was especially critical of the Kushners. I'm familiar with Jerod Kushner, who married Trump's daughter, and I know he had something to do with negotiating the Abraham Accords, but I was a little surprised to hear that Ye thought Jerod did what he in negotiating the Accords not for Trump (And America) but rather to line his own pockets.
Ye was seemingly feeding into some of the more odious stereotypes of the Jewish people, which I found to be most unbecoming. I wondered if Tucker even saw this coming. If what Ye was saying is true about Kushner, Kushner probably wouldn't be the first person in any Administration going back to the days of George Washington who wasn't looking out for his own interests while doing his job. Ye seemed to be intimating that Kushner was a money grubber, so to speak, and I'm aware of at least one deal that came about after the Accords were signed off on, where Kushner received an investment of billion dollars or more from the Saudi's. That doesn't make him a money grubber, per se, but he did benefit from the deal, so you could rightly accuse him of being an opportunist. It's the kind of thing you hate to see in Washington. That said, I think that Washington is awash in dirty money from places like Communist China. It's the veritable mother's milk of politics, dirty as it is.
It made me wonder if what I was hearing from Ye wasn't a little like the pot calling the kettle black. The guy is a billionaire, so I'm guessing he didn't make his billions without looking the other way on one or more occasions when it benefitted him to do so. No, it seemed like Ye had an axe to grind when it came to Kushner. Maybe it was more about what Kushner was doing at Trump's expense, and America's expense quite frankly, that Ye found so distasteful. Maybe what he was saying was that Kushner had an opportunity to advance Trump's agenda and America's agenda, but that agenda fell short not because of what Trump wasn't able to accomplish, but rather because of Kushner's personal desire to enrich himself at Trump's expense. That would be truly unforgivable were it true. Trump was Kushner's son-in-law, for chrissakes. Who does that?
I'm sorry I couldn't stay awake to watch Trump's rally in Nevada last night. I've seen one clip this morning on Twitter where Trump was going after Biden for not doing more to negotiate some way out of this mess with Russia and Ukraine. There were several cautionary comments about the dereliction of not pursuing negotiations knowing full well what the end result of a nuclear conflict would look like. Trump is right, of course. No one in the Biden Administration is doing a damn thing to take down the temperature. If anything, they continue to make matters worse through their very actions.
I think we're well past the point where anyone thinks this is a proxy war between NATO and Russia. Trump is nothing if not prescient about such matters. We hope he's wrong this time, of course, but taking our chances with a demented and likely senile president who is about to lose both houses of Congress in less than four weeks is maybe asking too much. If Biden thinks that getting America into war with Russia would enhance his standing ahead of the elections, don't think for a minute that he wouldn't do it. Like he said the other day, nobody fucks with the Bidens. This is what we're dealing with. God help us all.
Taking Stock
02/10/22 07:04
She won! Well, her party won anyway. I'm referring to Georgia Meloni and the political party in Italy that will soon elect her as the next Prime Minister of Italy. I think that's the way it works in their parliamentary system. You should hear the left-wing news outlets like CNN. They use adjectives like hard right, extremist, fascist, and right-wing to describe Georgia Meloni. This is what they do. She is, of course, nothing of the kind as far as I know. She believes in the sanctity of life, orderly immigration, the family, God-given genders, and other things that most people consider normal or sane. This, of course, triggers the left, and the fact that she is not a globalist and Climate Change nutjob has many of them losing their bloody minds. Good for her.
The Ev man stopped by yesterday. He gave me a hand with cleaning our refrigerator, or rather he helped me suss out the particulars on YouTube, so I knew precisely how to do what I wanted to do. I had removed most drawers and shelves the previous day and had them out on the driveway, where I washed them out and left them to dry before putting them back in their rightful places. It was mostly easy peasy except for one shelf, which did not lend itself to being removed easily. Everything else was sparkling clean when all was said and done before the Ev man showed up, except that one shelf stood out like a sore thumb. I certainly appreciated his help in getting everything sorted, and I think he felt good about being able to lend his old man a hand. Who doesn't like feeling useful?
I dropped off my 2000 Volvo at the European Auto shop here in town last night. If you recall, I arrived home last week after running a couple of errands, and I just happened to notice that I had a platter-sized puddle of oil beneath my car. I couldn't see where the leak was coming from, although I suspected that the nut on the bottom of the oil pan might have come loose somehow. It was also possible that the oil filter had come loose, and I witnessed the resulting spillage.
A more dire view might have been a blown gasket where the expense of having it fixed would be cost-prohibitive. I added oil to the top of the dipstick and watched to see if the newly added oil might leak out as readily as I put it in, but none of that happened. I checked the nut on the oil pan, which was also snug. Let's hope the fellas at European Auto can make heads or tails of it. It's all about not having to worry about having the car break down when I'm out and about. Fingers crossed.
I can't wait to listen to the War Room radio show this morning with Steve Bannon. Bannon was Trump's Campaign Manager in Trump's 2016 run for the presidency, and he now does a morning radio show on all things political and geopolitical. He's the original populist and nationalist, so he's had a lot to say about political events around the globe, and he's been a huge fan of Georgia Meloni and others like the Brazilian president, whose name escapes me at the moment.
He's got this countdown thing he's doing to the mid-term elections where he feels that he's done his part, and now, if the plan is executed correctly, the Republicans will win 100 seats for a hundred years. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point. He also believes that Trump will return to the White House for his third term in 2024, and winning back the House and Senate in 2024 will lay the groundwork for Trump's return. If I had to guess, I'd say Steve will be over the moon about Meloni's win in Italy.
I've got a little food shopping this morning, and then I'll drive to Exeter a little after noon to meet up with the Ev man at the Town Hall, where we'll renew his car registration. Maybe I'll hear back from the fellas at European by then on my Volvo, and perhaps I won't. I'd like to know sooner rather than later that the problem is easily fixed and inexpensive to fix when all is said and done. I've still got the outstanding issue with getting the Ev man's inspection sticker, but the "Check Engine" light problem seems more challenging to diagnose than usual, so it could be a while before all of that gets sorted. Are we having fun yet? Oh, and on top of that, the British pound dropped like a rock against the US dollar overnight, so time will tell if that will affect our stock or bond market here in the States. Did I mention that the Moscow stock market was down some 11% as of an hour ago or so? What the hell is that all about?
How about those political polls? Do you believe any of them? Some are what they refer to as suppression polls. They are designed to get people to stay home on election day. If your candidate looks like they will get a shellacking on election day, why bother voting for them? Right? Other polls oversample democrats to give democrats what appears to be an edge. If you are a democrat, you will want to hire a Democratic polling group to do your polling. They will get you the numbers you want, whether right or wrong. One thing the pollsters say this time is that MAGA voters are a silent majority. What Republican in their right mind would pick up the phone, come out as a Trump supporter, and run the risk of having the FBI show up at your door in a predawn raid? This is Biden's America.
It was so funny. The Ev man was standing at the window at the Exeter Town Hall yesterday when the clerk asked him to sign a car registration form in three different places. He looked at her and, with a straight face, asked if she had a clean pen he could use to sign the form. She rolled her eyes at him and gave him a bit of a smirk to go along with the rolling of the eyes. I think he was trying to be politically correct in this day and age when the rules we used to live by are no longer the rules we now live by, thanks to the dreaded Covid pandemic. If I thought the pandemic was on the wane, I needed no further proof than that which the clerk in the Town Hall gave with a simple twitch or two of her optic nerves. It was hard to tell if it was a serious question being posed by the Ev man, but it nonetheless gave us all a bit of a chuckle. Serious or not, the lot of us had put the Covid nonsense behind us, perhaps for the better—one day at a time.
The stock market here in the US is now lower than it was the day Joey Bumbles Biden was sworn in back in January 2021. That's true of the DJIA, but not sure if that's also true of the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ. It's another one of those things that Trump warned us would happen if we elected Joey Biden instead of him in 2020. The indices are so oversold that I'm tempted to see if I can't catch a countertrend rally should one materialize. It's akin to trying to catch a dropped knife these days, but we've had a couple of pretty good countertrend rallies thus far, so maybe it's worth a try. It's also true that stage two in an inflationary bear market is riddled with bear market rallies, so maybe, just maybe, I'm staring one in the face at this very moment. As of yesterday, the indices had dropped maybe 5 or 6 days straight, and I was seeing references in my Twitter feed to "turnaround Tuesday" so I thought there might be an outside chance that we'd see things turn around. Everything ended the day down by about one percent. So much for the hopeful twats on Twitter.
That dumbass Biden was at it again yesterday. He made some assinine comments about gas station owners lowering the price of gas at the pump. I think he thinks that when he says shit like this, people will do what he says because he is, after all, the Supreme Leader. Clearly, he had lost sight of his cue cards, and he was off script for better or worse. Does he even understand that gas stations make their money not by selling gas, since that only gives them pennies per gallon, but on all the other junk gas stations sell? Maybe he thought that if gas prices came down more, he could have at least one thing to point to that might gin up the vote of his base come Election Day. I don't know what that fraud was thinking, but he was clearly off his meds and making a fool of himself, as is his custom. Maybe it tells us something about the red wave coming down the pike. It appears unstoppable, but how wave-like it ends up being is what keeps all we conservatives up at night.
I don't understand all of this Nordstream Pipeline shit. Something happened overnight, and now, according to reports, both pipelines are down. I know the pipeline supplies natural gas to the whole of Europe, but what else does the pipeline deliver? I'm not sure. The Kremlin says that this was an intentional disruption, but who knows how much of that is propaganda and how much of it is true? I saw a video on Twitter this morning dating back to May where Biden was on tape saying something about being able or wanting to take down the pipelines in the event of an invasion by Russia. And now, there are reports of a US aircraft being seen in the vicinity of the so-called leak in the Bering Sea within the last twenty-four hours. I recall thinking when I initially heard Biden comment that it seemed somewhat braggadocious given that the pipeline has nothing to do with the US.
Maybe we should have believed him. It probably wouldn't be the first time he's leaked intelligence, deliberately or otherwise. A more cynical view, not that what we've seen thus far isn't cynical enough might be that Biden and his green new deal zealots have every reason to drive up the price of natural gas so that the US consumer would have to buy solar panels from Joey's buds in Communist China. I'll be interested in seeing where the spot markets in natural gas go today. What happens in Europe, especially when it comes to energy, does not stay in Europe. I heard Bumbles make some other veiled threat the other day to the effect that if Russia annexes any areas in Ukraine, it would be a red line. What the hell does that mean? The citizens of those areas get to vote on any so-called annexation, so how does Bumbles square that circle? There's a lot to chew on here, and none of it is good.
Fast forward 24 hours and it's looking more and more like Biden and his minions were responsible for the Nordstream Pipeline explosion. If it is true, what the hell were the Bidenistas thinking? What on God's green earth made Joey Bumbles Biden think that were he to be found responsible for sabotaging Russia's primary source of income that, Russia wouldn't retaliate in some way, shape, or form? We might as well have sent a ballistic missile into downtown Moscow at rush hour. That's the scale of the idiocy that we see coming out of our White House if the speculation about the US being responsible for this act of terrorism is true. The Pipeline, even though it was being used as a tool by Russia in the war against the West, was also part and parcel of their economic lifeline. The question now is, where does Russia go from here? The question for Americans is, what has this demented fool in the White House gotten us into now?
What calculus has the Biden Regime made that says this was a good idea? Is their plan now to engage Russia in some form of extended conflict such that they will be "forced" to implement martial law in the weeks leading up to the mid-term elections? Putting elections on hold when Biden's democrat party holds all the cards in Congress and the White House has to be a dream for all those democrats facing defeat at the polls in the coming red wave.
This is some serious shit, folks. It will be the most egregious act by any sitting president in the history of our Republic if it turns out that Biden was responsible for this act of terrorism so that he and his fellow democrats could avoid defeat at the polls. I hope I'm wrong. The fact that Tucker on FOX led with this story last night tells me that it's closer to the truth than not. The world now waits while Russia comes to the seemingly inescapable conclusion that the US was behind the destruction of their pipeline. It's more likely that they are already in the process of formulating a response. Duck and cover?
Shares of Apple stock (AAPL) tumbled overnight on the news about demand issues or whatever. All three major indices here in the US are down about 1% in the pre-market. This will be the sixth or seventh down day in a row if this is how the day ends. Ten-year treasuries have been spiking as well, and they were above 4% when I looked a couple of hours ago. That isn't helping. The Bank of England announced this morning that they would buy bonds to staunch the bleeding in their financial markets.
The US markets reversed course on the news, anticipating that the US would implement a similar strategy. It seems a little premature to me to be kicking off a QE (Quantitative Easing) period when QE has been the primary culprit behind our inflation woes, but who am I to question their wisdom on such matters? We'll have to see how our markets respond if and when a Fed head comments on any plans to implement QE here in the states. Easy money is always welcome news until it isn't. Either the Fed is going to do something to deal with our inflation, or it isn't.
The missus and I have been walking down by the ocean every evening for two weeks or so. We're already not looking forward to the time, and it's right around the corner, when we'll have to turn the clocks back, and we'll no longer be able to take that walk. We could walk with a flashlight, but it wouldn't be the same. We'll have to walk earlier in the day or maybe walk on just those days when our schedules are open to doing so. I don't know why we waited so long in the summer season to start walking. I'm guessing it's just one of those things.
We enjoy taking in views of the harbor seals hanging out on the rocky outcroppings, the catch-as-catch-can oil tankers sitting offshore waiting for either the low tide or the availability of a tugboat to come down from Portsmouth, or maybe just the whims of the Captain who's trying to catch a few winks before offloading his cargo and heading back out to sea. How about those three teenagers we saw last night who swam from a distant rocky abutment offshore to a nearby local beach? We weren't sure they would make it (but they did.) We had all we could do not to call the local constabulary to come out and rescue the lads.
The missus sent the Ev man a text last night reminding him of his morning dentist appointment. He never responded, so she went to bed, not knowing one way or the other whether or not he was going to show up for his appointment. I've gotten used to his not responding when we call or text him here and there, but the missus is less understanding. I get it. He sent a text around 5:30 this morning when we were both fast asleep with a simple "yep." That's the Ev man for you. Mister one and done. I had no doubts he'd be at his appointment and said as much to the missus. As far as I can recall, I don't think he's ever not shown up for an appointment. He's not always happy about going to some appointments, but you do what you have to do when it comes to attending to your health. I'm not talking about haircut appointments here.
It looks like that annexation thing I referred to a couple of paragraphs back is going to happen tomorrow (Friday.) Russia will be officially annexing three territories in Ukraine. So, what will Bumbles Biden do about it? Is this one of those things where we must wait, watch, and see what happens when it happens? Will the Bidenistas bring in our allies, or will they do their own thing and not involve the allies? Maybe it's better, considering that there will likely be consequences that none of our allies' fingerprints are on whatever it is that Joey has planned. All of that puts us in direct conflict with another world power that has just as many, if not more, nuclear weapons than we do here in the US. I think Russia has already figured out that we took out their Nordstream pipeline, so it's probably now game-on as far as the Russians go. All of the nonsense in the media you hear from countries worldwide trying to pin the Nordstream issue on the Kremlin is just that. Nonsense.
The US has advised any US citizens in Russia to leave Russian soil at once. This can't be good. I believe that most US citizens in Russia have dual citizenship, but I could be wrong about that. Does the US government think or believe that the US citizens now living in Russia could be conscripted to serve in Russia's war against Ukraine? Do they think there's a possibility that US citizens could be rounded up and held in internment camps similar to what transpired with the Japanese citizens living in America during World War two? I mean, Russia isn't Iran. Right? They won't be tossing Americans off rooftops or maybe even beheading US citizens willy-nilly. And, what does this warning to US citizens have to do with the Nordstream disaster, if anything? It probably has more to do with what Biden plans to do in retaliation for Russia's annexing certain Ukrainian territories than anything else. I don't know, really. I'm just spitballing here.
I woke up in the middle of the night last night and took a quick look at my Twitter feed. I saw one tweet about Tesla's in Florida. Florida got slammed with a devastating Category 4 hurricane overnight, and the tweet said something about people starting their Tesla's. It was all tongue-in-cheek since there are some two million people without power in Florida this morning, and if you own a Tesla in one of the affected areas, you are shit out of luck. There is no power, and there isn't likely to be any power for the foreseeable future. It begs the question, though, about the prudence of buying an electric vehicle when owning such a vehicle increases rather than decreases your chances of survival in certain situations. I'm no electrical engineer, but I also have to wonder what happens to a battery-powered vehicle when that vehicle sits in three feet or more of salt water for a week or more. Did I mention that sharks are swimming in Ft Myers, Fla's streets this morning?
I do like Poland Springwater. I love having a bottle or two in the fridge, especially during hot summer days. I think Poland Spring water has a particular taste that differs from similar spring waters sold hereabouts. Poland Spring water is maybe twice the price of other spring waters but well worth it if you ask me. I'm happy to have it on hand when I want a nice glass of water. So, the store where I usually buy it recently ran out of it, and I had to buy a generic brand since having no spring water on hand wasn't an option.
I could tell immediately that the taste of the generic brand was subpar compared to the Poland Spring brand. I suspected as much, which was primarily why I always buy Poland Spring when I can purchase spring water. The missus was skeptical about the differences in tastes when comparing the brands, so we set up a taste test to prove the point. If it turned out that the generic brand was just as good, or almost just as good, I told the missus that we could stop paying twice the price for the Poland Spring, and that would be that. I didn't dilly dally when she put the two cups in front of me for the taste test. There was no sniffing around the mouth of the cup; there was no holding the cup up to the light to look for this or that; I just took a drink the way I would take any other drink any other day of the week. Without hesitation, I declared my glass as the rightful Poland Spring water. I was right, of course.
The generic spring water tasted a little bit to me like tap water. I didn't need to taste the generic stuff to know I was drinking the true Poland Springwater. The missus reminded me that I had a 50-50 chance of getting it right. I wouldn't say that she was dismissive, but she was dismissive. I doubled down and told her that the hastiness with which I made my decision was all she needed to know about my confidence in my decision. As I sit here thinking about it all, I think it might be helpful to repeat the test for her. We'll see if she can tell the difference. What if she can't tell the difference? Do I buy her the less expensive generic stuff from here on in? Would she be offended at the very suggestion? She uses a lot of her water to make tea, so she doesn't need the good stuff to do that—food for thought.
It's hard to believe that October is coming in a couple of days. Where the hell did the month of September go? I should get out and mow my lawn today. The Red Maples in my front yard are already starting to shed their leaves, so I can mulch them up with the mower. It will make for fewer leaves to rake when the time comes to rake. I stopped putting out bird food for the summer, so I should start to think about refilling the feeders so the birds have something of an orientation to the feeder when the snow starts to fall. I know, I know. I'm overthinking this bird feeder thing. Is it too soon to take the furniture off the back deck? I've put off taking our air conditioner out, but I think I can probably do that now without worrying that we're going to get one or two hot days where I'll regret having removed the air conditioner prematurely. Oh, and we probably ought to reach out to a friend of ours who has a place somewhere around Tampa, Florida. Tampa was ground zero, give or take, for the hurricane that slammed Florida yesterday. Is there anything we can do to help?
My bike riding has been splotchy in September, to say the least. There was our vacation when I didn't ride at all, and then we had a few rainy days during September when I didn't ride for obvious reasons. September is really one of my favorite months to ride for a couple of reasons. One reason is that the summer crowds are gone, and I seemingly have the road to myself, along with a handful of other hard-core riders. Hard-core might be something of an exaggeration. Let's just call them what they are: regulars. I generally don't have eye contact with other riders and that's by choice. I'm not looking to forge relationships, and I'm not wanting to be one of those guys who feels the need to wave to every other rider like we're in some kind of fucking brotherhood or something.
I guess what I'm saying is that I think they're regulars if only because they're out there riding when I'm riding and when every other fair weather rider has long since departed for God only knows where. The other reason I like to ride in September is because of the weather. It's a bitch riding in the extreme heat of the summer, and I can recall a handful of days this summer when the temperatures were in the nineties when riding could have been dangerous. I mean, who the hell needs to have a heat stroke when you're out there just trying to have a little fun and get in a modicum of exercise? So, yeah. The temperatures are comfortably in the seventies now, and the breathing, as they say, is easier.
I rode yesterday, and I swear to God that I didn't know where all the energy I was feeling came from. It was, if nothing, relentless. I probably could have done another loop, but habits being what they are, I did not. You can probably tell from reading this that I'm still feeling a little bit of that residual energy even now, a day later. October will be different. I'll need to add a couple of layers to stay warm while riding and I'll need to account somewhat for Daylight Savings Time. Feets don't fail me now?
The presidential elections in Brazil are on Sunday. I'm rooting for Bolsonaro to win. His opponent is an avowed communist from what I read here and there, and I worry that Bolsonaro's opponent, should he win, will forge an even tighter relationship with the Communist Chinese. Brazil is one of the last true democracies in that part of the world and it would be a bloody shame to see its governance handed over to the leftists. And, make no mistake about it, were Bolsonaro's party to lose, you can bet your bottom dollar that Brazil's vast resources would be plundered by the Chinese. That would be bad for the Brazilians.
I'm shooting from the hip here so don't hold me to anything if you think I'm straying too far from what passes for the truth. I heard that Bolsonao is threatening war of some kind should the leftists steal the election. What does that even mean? Is this a war worth fighting should it come to that? Would anyone put it past Biden to send in a battalion or two to prop up the leftist in this battle? It's hard to believe that we have a president of the US who speaks disparagingly of election winners around the globe when he and his party don't agree with their politics. Unless you're a leftist, you're a dog-faced lying pony soldier.
It's been another meltdown of a week in the financial markets. Just when you thought the markets couldn't go any lower, they go lower. What in the hell is going on? Is this all due to the raising of interest rates here in the US? Were markets so terribly inflated due to interference from the Fed that they needed some serious unwinding before market forces and market forces alone determine real interest rates? I think we're not done here, folks. I think we could go lower, a lot lower. We've not seen any hint of capitulation thus far, but we are now seeing the markets come for the big boys. That's what they do in bear markets. They come for the Apples. They come for the Nike's. They come for the Teslas. It's all a matter of price and time now. And, just so you know, this could go on for a while. We also have a reverse wealth effect on our hands when markets lose the kind of value that they've lost year-to-date. NASDAQ is down >30%, S&P down >24%, and the Dow is just down.
A wealth effect is what you have when people see their stock portfolios growing hand over fist month in and month out. It gives the consumer the confidence he or she needs to go out into the marketplace and spend money on things like cars, homes, and other tangibles and intangibles. If you're sitting on a pile of stocks and bonds that are growing exponentially, you can afford to take additional risks here and there, and, should one or more of those risks go south, not to worry because you have a portfolio that is kicking butt and taking names. You get my drift. When things stop growing hand over fist, and when you actually start losing money, it's a reverse wealth effect. You start to worry about things like being able to meet your financial obligations. You can't stop looking at your portfolio because you're simply not accustomed to seeing so much red ink. You're wondering how far it's going to go and how long it's going to last. It always comes back. Right?
Then, you start to hear about layoffs, and you think to yourself that it can't happen to you. Your spouse keeps nagging you to get out of the financial markets because he or she can't bear to see the money you've worked so hard for just disappear. Stories abound in the media about threats of thermonuclear war, food shortages, people losing their homes because they can't keep up with the increases in rent and mortgage payments, and all you hear coming from the people you sent to Washington to represent you is that we need more inclusion, equity, and diversity in our institutions. The Vice President of the United States comes out and states unequivocably that people of color will be the first recipients of monies to be distributed in the wake of the worst hurricane in Florida's history. Can it get any worse? How comfortable are you now with spending money, any money at all, not knowing where all this is going?
We were out and about with the Ev man yesterday. We planned to go to a farmstand close to where he lives, so we dropped by to pick him up so he could join us. After stopping at Jersey Mike's to get the Ev man a sandwich, we were off to the farm stand. It was a compound of sorts that looked like it was run by a bunch of Rastafarians or maybe hippys depending on your particular point of view. It looked like less of a farmstand and more of a music venue, but we bumped around and looked and this and that before leaving.
The store on the premises looked interesting, but it was also a little too chaotic looking for my tastes. They had too many things packed into a small area, and the feng shui just wasn't cutting the mustard. In another place and time, I might have bought some sausages and homemade bread or maybe some of their homegrown chicken. I think we were on the premises for maybe 30 minutes. Just as we were leaving, we noticed a flurry of what looked like houseflies that appeared out of nowhere. They followed us into our car, and we did our best to rid ourselves of them but to no avail. What the hell was that all about? It was right out of a goddamn Steven King novel. Jesus Christ!
The Ev man stopped by yesterday. He gave me a hand with cleaning our refrigerator, or rather he helped me suss out the particulars on YouTube, so I knew precisely how to do what I wanted to do. I had removed most drawers and shelves the previous day and had them out on the driveway, where I washed them out and left them to dry before putting them back in their rightful places. It was mostly easy peasy except for one shelf, which did not lend itself to being removed easily. Everything else was sparkling clean when all was said and done before the Ev man showed up, except that one shelf stood out like a sore thumb. I certainly appreciated his help in getting everything sorted, and I think he felt good about being able to lend his old man a hand. Who doesn't like feeling useful?
I dropped off my 2000 Volvo at the European Auto shop here in town last night. If you recall, I arrived home last week after running a couple of errands, and I just happened to notice that I had a platter-sized puddle of oil beneath my car. I couldn't see where the leak was coming from, although I suspected that the nut on the bottom of the oil pan might have come loose somehow. It was also possible that the oil filter had come loose, and I witnessed the resulting spillage.
A more dire view might have been a blown gasket where the expense of having it fixed would be cost-prohibitive. I added oil to the top of the dipstick and watched to see if the newly added oil might leak out as readily as I put it in, but none of that happened. I checked the nut on the oil pan, which was also snug. Let's hope the fellas at European Auto can make heads or tails of it. It's all about not having to worry about having the car break down when I'm out and about. Fingers crossed.
I can't wait to listen to the War Room radio show this morning with Steve Bannon. Bannon was Trump's Campaign Manager in Trump's 2016 run for the presidency, and he now does a morning radio show on all things political and geopolitical. He's the original populist and nationalist, so he's had a lot to say about political events around the globe, and he's been a huge fan of Georgia Meloni and others like the Brazilian president, whose name escapes me at the moment.
He's got this countdown thing he's doing to the mid-term elections where he feels that he's done his part, and now, if the plan is executed correctly, the Republicans will win 100 seats for a hundred years. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point. He also believes that Trump will return to the White House for his third term in 2024, and winning back the House and Senate in 2024 will lay the groundwork for Trump's return. If I had to guess, I'd say Steve will be over the moon about Meloni's win in Italy.
I've got a little food shopping this morning, and then I'll drive to Exeter a little after noon to meet up with the Ev man at the Town Hall, where we'll renew his car registration. Maybe I'll hear back from the fellas at European by then on my Volvo, and perhaps I won't. I'd like to know sooner rather than later that the problem is easily fixed and inexpensive to fix when all is said and done. I've still got the outstanding issue with getting the Ev man's inspection sticker, but the "Check Engine" light problem seems more challenging to diagnose than usual, so it could be a while before all of that gets sorted. Are we having fun yet? Oh, and on top of that, the British pound dropped like a rock against the US dollar overnight, so time will tell if that will affect our stock or bond market here in the States. Did I mention that the Moscow stock market was down some 11% as of an hour ago or so? What the hell is that all about?
How about those political polls? Do you believe any of them? Some are what they refer to as suppression polls. They are designed to get people to stay home on election day. If your candidate looks like they will get a shellacking on election day, why bother voting for them? Right? Other polls oversample democrats to give democrats what appears to be an edge. If you are a democrat, you will want to hire a Democratic polling group to do your polling. They will get you the numbers you want, whether right or wrong. One thing the pollsters say this time is that MAGA voters are a silent majority. What Republican in their right mind would pick up the phone, come out as a Trump supporter, and run the risk of having the FBI show up at your door in a predawn raid? This is Biden's America.
It was so funny. The Ev man was standing at the window at the Exeter Town Hall yesterday when the clerk asked him to sign a car registration form in three different places. He looked at her and, with a straight face, asked if she had a clean pen he could use to sign the form. She rolled her eyes at him and gave him a bit of a smirk to go along with the rolling of the eyes. I think he was trying to be politically correct in this day and age when the rules we used to live by are no longer the rules we now live by, thanks to the dreaded Covid pandemic. If I thought the pandemic was on the wane, I needed no further proof than that which the clerk in the Town Hall gave with a simple twitch or two of her optic nerves. It was hard to tell if it was a serious question being posed by the Ev man, but it nonetheless gave us all a bit of a chuckle. Serious or not, the lot of us had put the Covid nonsense behind us, perhaps for the better—one day at a time.
The stock market here in the US is now lower than it was the day Joey Bumbles Biden was sworn in back in January 2021. That's true of the DJIA, but not sure if that's also true of the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ. It's another one of those things that Trump warned us would happen if we elected Joey Biden instead of him in 2020. The indices are so oversold that I'm tempted to see if I can't catch a countertrend rally should one materialize. It's akin to trying to catch a dropped knife these days, but we've had a couple of pretty good countertrend rallies thus far, so maybe it's worth a try. It's also true that stage two in an inflationary bear market is riddled with bear market rallies, so maybe, just maybe, I'm staring one in the face at this very moment. As of yesterday, the indices had dropped maybe 5 or 6 days straight, and I was seeing references in my Twitter feed to "turnaround Tuesday" so I thought there might be an outside chance that we'd see things turn around. Everything ended the day down by about one percent. So much for the hopeful twats on Twitter.
That dumbass Biden was at it again yesterday. He made some assinine comments about gas station owners lowering the price of gas at the pump. I think he thinks that when he says shit like this, people will do what he says because he is, after all, the Supreme Leader. Clearly, he had lost sight of his cue cards, and he was off script for better or worse. Does he even understand that gas stations make their money not by selling gas, since that only gives them pennies per gallon, but on all the other junk gas stations sell? Maybe he thought that if gas prices came down more, he could have at least one thing to point to that might gin up the vote of his base come Election Day. I don't know what that fraud was thinking, but he was clearly off his meds and making a fool of himself, as is his custom. Maybe it tells us something about the red wave coming down the pike. It appears unstoppable, but how wave-like it ends up being is what keeps all we conservatives up at night.
I don't understand all of this Nordstream Pipeline shit. Something happened overnight, and now, according to reports, both pipelines are down. I know the pipeline supplies natural gas to the whole of Europe, but what else does the pipeline deliver? I'm not sure. The Kremlin says that this was an intentional disruption, but who knows how much of that is propaganda and how much of it is true? I saw a video on Twitter this morning dating back to May where Biden was on tape saying something about being able or wanting to take down the pipelines in the event of an invasion by Russia. And now, there are reports of a US aircraft being seen in the vicinity of the so-called leak in the Bering Sea within the last twenty-four hours. I recall thinking when I initially heard Biden comment that it seemed somewhat braggadocious given that the pipeline has nothing to do with the US.
Maybe we should have believed him. It probably wouldn't be the first time he's leaked intelligence, deliberately or otherwise. A more cynical view, not that what we've seen thus far isn't cynical enough might be that Biden and his green new deal zealots have every reason to drive up the price of natural gas so that the US consumer would have to buy solar panels from Joey's buds in Communist China. I'll be interested in seeing where the spot markets in natural gas go today. What happens in Europe, especially when it comes to energy, does not stay in Europe. I heard Bumbles make some other veiled threat the other day to the effect that if Russia annexes any areas in Ukraine, it would be a red line. What the hell does that mean? The citizens of those areas get to vote on any so-called annexation, so how does Bumbles square that circle? There's a lot to chew on here, and none of it is good.
Fast forward 24 hours and it's looking more and more like Biden and his minions were responsible for the Nordstream Pipeline explosion. If it is true, what the hell were the Bidenistas thinking? What on God's green earth made Joey Bumbles Biden think that were he to be found responsible for sabotaging Russia's primary source of income that, Russia wouldn't retaliate in some way, shape, or form? We might as well have sent a ballistic missile into downtown Moscow at rush hour. That's the scale of the idiocy that we see coming out of our White House if the speculation about the US being responsible for this act of terrorism is true. The Pipeline, even though it was being used as a tool by Russia in the war against the West, was also part and parcel of their economic lifeline. The question now is, where does Russia go from here? The question for Americans is, what has this demented fool in the White House gotten us into now?
What calculus has the Biden Regime made that says this was a good idea? Is their plan now to engage Russia in some form of extended conflict such that they will be "forced" to implement martial law in the weeks leading up to the mid-term elections? Putting elections on hold when Biden's democrat party holds all the cards in Congress and the White House has to be a dream for all those democrats facing defeat at the polls in the coming red wave.
This is some serious shit, folks. It will be the most egregious act by any sitting president in the history of our Republic if it turns out that Biden was responsible for this act of terrorism so that he and his fellow democrats could avoid defeat at the polls. I hope I'm wrong. The fact that Tucker on FOX led with this story last night tells me that it's closer to the truth than not. The world now waits while Russia comes to the seemingly inescapable conclusion that the US was behind the destruction of their pipeline. It's more likely that they are already in the process of formulating a response. Duck and cover?
Shares of Apple stock (AAPL) tumbled overnight on the news about demand issues or whatever. All three major indices here in the US are down about 1% in the pre-market. This will be the sixth or seventh down day in a row if this is how the day ends. Ten-year treasuries have been spiking as well, and they were above 4% when I looked a couple of hours ago. That isn't helping. The Bank of England announced this morning that they would buy bonds to staunch the bleeding in their financial markets.
The US markets reversed course on the news, anticipating that the US would implement a similar strategy. It seems a little premature to me to be kicking off a QE (Quantitative Easing) period when QE has been the primary culprit behind our inflation woes, but who am I to question their wisdom on such matters? We'll have to see how our markets respond if and when a Fed head comments on any plans to implement QE here in the states. Easy money is always welcome news until it isn't. Either the Fed is going to do something to deal with our inflation, or it isn't.
The missus and I have been walking down by the ocean every evening for two weeks or so. We're already not looking forward to the time, and it's right around the corner, when we'll have to turn the clocks back, and we'll no longer be able to take that walk. We could walk with a flashlight, but it wouldn't be the same. We'll have to walk earlier in the day or maybe walk on just those days when our schedules are open to doing so. I don't know why we waited so long in the summer season to start walking. I'm guessing it's just one of those things.
We enjoy taking in views of the harbor seals hanging out on the rocky outcroppings, the catch-as-catch-can oil tankers sitting offshore waiting for either the low tide or the availability of a tugboat to come down from Portsmouth, or maybe just the whims of the Captain who's trying to catch a few winks before offloading his cargo and heading back out to sea. How about those three teenagers we saw last night who swam from a distant rocky abutment offshore to a nearby local beach? We weren't sure they would make it (but they did.) We had all we could do not to call the local constabulary to come out and rescue the lads.
The missus sent the Ev man a text last night reminding him of his morning dentist appointment. He never responded, so she went to bed, not knowing one way or the other whether or not he was going to show up for his appointment. I've gotten used to his not responding when we call or text him here and there, but the missus is less understanding. I get it. He sent a text around 5:30 this morning when we were both fast asleep with a simple "yep." That's the Ev man for you. Mister one and done. I had no doubts he'd be at his appointment and said as much to the missus. As far as I can recall, I don't think he's ever not shown up for an appointment. He's not always happy about going to some appointments, but you do what you have to do when it comes to attending to your health. I'm not talking about haircut appointments here.
It looks like that annexation thing I referred to a couple of paragraphs back is going to happen tomorrow (Friday.) Russia will be officially annexing three territories in Ukraine. So, what will Bumbles Biden do about it? Is this one of those things where we must wait, watch, and see what happens when it happens? Will the Bidenistas bring in our allies, or will they do their own thing and not involve the allies? Maybe it's better, considering that there will likely be consequences that none of our allies' fingerprints are on whatever it is that Joey has planned. All of that puts us in direct conflict with another world power that has just as many, if not more, nuclear weapons than we do here in the US. I think Russia has already figured out that we took out their Nordstream pipeline, so it's probably now game-on as far as the Russians go. All of the nonsense in the media you hear from countries worldwide trying to pin the Nordstream issue on the Kremlin is just that. Nonsense.
The US has advised any US citizens in Russia to leave Russian soil at once. This can't be good. I believe that most US citizens in Russia have dual citizenship, but I could be wrong about that. Does the US government think or believe that the US citizens now living in Russia could be conscripted to serve in Russia's war against Ukraine? Do they think there's a possibility that US citizens could be rounded up and held in internment camps similar to what transpired with the Japanese citizens living in America during World War two? I mean, Russia isn't Iran. Right? They won't be tossing Americans off rooftops or maybe even beheading US citizens willy-nilly. And, what does this warning to US citizens have to do with the Nordstream disaster, if anything? It probably has more to do with what Biden plans to do in retaliation for Russia's annexing certain Ukrainian territories than anything else. I don't know, really. I'm just spitballing here.
I woke up in the middle of the night last night and took a quick look at my Twitter feed. I saw one tweet about Tesla's in Florida. Florida got slammed with a devastating Category 4 hurricane overnight, and the tweet said something about people starting their Tesla's. It was all tongue-in-cheek since there are some two million people without power in Florida this morning, and if you own a Tesla in one of the affected areas, you are shit out of luck. There is no power, and there isn't likely to be any power for the foreseeable future. It begs the question, though, about the prudence of buying an electric vehicle when owning such a vehicle increases rather than decreases your chances of survival in certain situations. I'm no electrical engineer, but I also have to wonder what happens to a battery-powered vehicle when that vehicle sits in three feet or more of salt water for a week or more. Did I mention that sharks are swimming in Ft Myers, Fla's streets this morning?
I do like Poland Springwater. I love having a bottle or two in the fridge, especially during hot summer days. I think Poland Spring water has a particular taste that differs from similar spring waters sold hereabouts. Poland Spring water is maybe twice the price of other spring waters but well worth it if you ask me. I'm happy to have it on hand when I want a nice glass of water. So, the store where I usually buy it recently ran out of it, and I had to buy a generic brand since having no spring water on hand wasn't an option.
I could tell immediately that the taste of the generic brand was subpar compared to the Poland Spring brand. I suspected as much, which was primarily why I always buy Poland Spring when I can purchase spring water. The missus was skeptical about the differences in tastes when comparing the brands, so we set up a taste test to prove the point. If it turned out that the generic brand was just as good, or almost just as good, I told the missus that we could stop paying twice the price for the Poland Spring, and that would be that. I didn't dilly dally when she put the two cups in front of me for the taste test. There was no sniffing around the mouth of the cup; there was no holding the cup up to the light to look for this or that; I just took a drink the way I would take any other drink any other day of the week. Without hesitation, I declared my glass as the rightful Poland Spring water. I was right, of course.
The generic spring water tasted a little bit to me like tap water. I didn't need to taste the generic stuff to know I was drinking the true Poland Springwater. The missus reminded me that I had a 50-50 chance of getting it right. I wouldn't say that she was dismissive, but she was dismissive. I doubled down and told her that the hastiness with which I made my decision was all she needed to know about my confidence in my decision. As I sit here thinking about it all, I think it might be helpful to repeat the test for her. We'll see if she can tell the difference. What if she can't tell the difference? Do I buy her the less expensive generic stuff from here on in? Would she be offended at the very suggestion? She uses a lot of her water to make tea, so she doesn't need the good stuff to do that—food for thought.
It's hard to believe that October is coming in a couple of days. Where the hell did the month of September go? I should get out and mow my lawn today. The Red Maples in my front yard are already starting to shed their leaves, so I can mulch them up with the mower. It will make for fewer leaves to rake when the time comes to rake. I stopped putting out bird food for the summer, so I should start to think about refilling the feeders so the birds have something of an orientation to the feeder when the snow starts to fall. I know, I know. I'm overthinking this bird feeder thing. Is it too soon to take the furniture off the back deck? I've put off taking our air conditioner out, but I think I can probably do that now without worrying that we're going to get one or two hot days where I'll regret having removed the air conditioner prematurely. Oh, and we probably ought to reach out to a friend of ours who has a place somewhere around Tampa, Florida. Tampa was ground zero, give or take, for the hurricane that slammed Florida yesterday. Is there anything we can do to help?
My bike riding has been splotchy in September, to say the least. There was our vacation when I didn't ride at all, and then we had a few rainy days during September when I didn't ride for obvious reasons. September is really one of my favorite months to ride for a couple of reasons. One reason is that the summer crowds are gone, and I seemingly have the road to myself, along with a handful of other hard-core riders. Hard-core might be something of an exaggeration. Let's just call them what they are: regulars. I generally don't have eye contact with other riders and that's by choice. I'm not looking to forge relationships, and I'm not wanting to be one of those guys who feels the need to wave to every other rider like we're in some kind of fucking brotherhood or something.
I guess what I'm saying is that I think they're regulars if only because they're out there riding when I'm riding and when every other fair weather rider has long since departed for God only knows where. The other reason I like to ride in September is because of the weather. It's a bitch riding in the extreme heat of the summer, and I can recall a handful of days this summer when the temperatures were in the nineties when riding could have been dangerous. I mean, who the hell needs to have a heat stroke when you're out there just trying to have a little fun and get in a modicum of exercise? So, yeah. The temperatures are comfortably in the seventies now, and the breathing, as they say, is easier.
I rode yesterday, and I swear to God that I didn't know where all the energy I was feeling came from. It was, if nothing, relentless. I probably could have done another loop, but habits being what they are, I did not. You can probably tell from reading this that I'm still feeling a little bit of that residual energy even now, a day later. October will be different. I'll need to add a couple of layers to stay warm while riding and I'll need to account somewhat for Daylight Savings Time. Feets don't fail me now?
The presidential elections in Brazil are on Sunday. I'm rooting for Bolsonaro to win. His opponent is an avowed communist from what I read here and there, and I worry that Bolsonaro's opponent, should he win, will forge an even tighter relationship with the Communist Chinese. Brazil is one of the last true democracies in that part of the world and it would be a bloody shame to see its governance handed over to the leftists. And, make no mistake about it, were Bolsonaro's party to lose, you can bet your bottom dollar that Brazil's vast resources would be plundered by the Chinese. That would be bad for the Brazilians.
I'm shooting from the hip here so don't hold me to anything if you think I'm straying too far from what passes for the truth. I heard that Bolsonao is threatening war of some kind should the leftists steal the election. What does that even mean? Is this a war worth fighting should it come to that? Would anyone put it past Biden to send in a battalion or two to prop up the leftist in this battle? It's hard to believe that we have a president of the US who speaks disparagingly of election winners around the globe when he and his party don't agree with their politics. Unless you're a leftist, you're a dog-faced lying pony soldier.
It's been another meltdown of a week in the financial markets. Just when you thought the markets couldn't go any lower, they go lower. What in the hell is going on? Is this all due to the raising of interest rates here in the US? Were markets so terribly inflated due to interference from the Fed that they needed some serious unwinding before market forces and market forces alone determine real interest rates? I think we're not done here, folks. I think we could go lower, a lot lower. We've not seen any hint of capitulation thus far, but we are now seeing the markets come for the big boys. That's what they do in bear markets. They come for the Apples. They come for the Nike's. They come for the Teslas. It's all a matter of price and time now. And, just so you know, this could go on for a while. We also have a reverse wealth effect on our hands when markets lose the kind of value that they've lost year-to-date. NASDAQ is down >30%, S&P down >24%, and the Dow is just down.
A wealth effect is what you have when people see their stock portfolios growing hand over fist month in and month out. It gives the consumer the confidence he or she needs to go out into the marketplace and spend money on things like cars, homes, and other tangibles and intangibles. If you're sitting on a pile of stocks and bonds that are growing exponentially, you can afford to take additional risks here and there, and, should one or more of those risks go south, not to worry because you have a portfolio that is kicking butt and taking names. You get my drift. When things stop growing hand over fist, and when you actually start losing money, it's a reverse wealth effect. You start to worry about things like being able to meet your financial obligations. You can't stop looking at your portfolio because you're simply not accustomed to seeing so much red ink. You're wondering how far it's going to go and how long it's going to last. It always comes back. Right?
Then, you start to hear about layoffs, and you think to yourself that it can't happen to you. Your spouse keeps nagging you to get out of the financial markets because he or she can't bear to see the money you've worked so hard for just disappear. Stories abound in the media about threats of thermonuclear war, food shortages, people losing their homes because they can't keep up with the increases in rent and mortgage payments, and all you hear coming from the people you sent to Washington to represent you is that we need more inclusion, equity, and diversity in our institutions. The Vice President of the United States comes out and states unequivocably that people of color will be the first recipients of monies to be distributed in the wake of the worst hurricane in Florida's history. Can it get any worse? How comfortable are you now with spending money, any money at all, not knowing where all this is going?
We were out and about with the Ev man yesterday. We planned to go to a farmstand close to where he lives, so we dropped by to pick him up so he could join us. After stopping at Jersey Mike's to get the Ev man a sandwich, we were off to the farm stand. It was a compound of sorts that looked like it was run by a bunch of Rastafarians or maybe hippys depending on your particular point of view. It looked like less of a farmstand and more of a music venue, but we bumped around and looked and this and that before leaving.
The store on the premises looked interesting, but it was also a little too chaotic looking for my tastes. They had too many things packed into a small area, and the feng shui just wasn't cutting the mustard. In another place and time, I might have bought some sausages and homemade bread or maybe some of their homegrown chicken. I think we were on the premises for maybe 30 minutes. Just as we were leaving, we noticed a flurry of what looked like houseflies that appeared out of nowhere. They followed us into our car, and we did our best to rid ourselves of them but to no avail. What the hell was that all about? It was right out of a goddamn Steven King novel. Jesus Christ!
Vineyard Strong!
25/09/22 07:07
Here we go again, homies. We're going to do it all over again. Whatever the hell it is, they say that history repeats itself, so that's what we'll likely see this coming week. There will be twists and turns here and there, but that's to be expected. Did I mention that the missus and I agreed that we are going to grow pumpkins and watermelons next year? I'm tired of the groundhogs eating my tomatoes, so they'll be eating pumpkins and watermelons next year if they eat anything. Oh, and I should mention that our Hummingbirds have flown the coop. They've departed for points south as they do every September around this time. I'm not sure what to make of the fact that they seemed to have left a little early this year. Maybe it has something to do with Climate Change. Regardless, Godspeed.
You can't turn on the news these days without hearing and or seeing something about the Queen of England's funeral. Bury the bitch, already. It is just dragging on and on ad nauseum. I don't have anything against the Queen, personally, but putting on this ghastly procession for days and days seems unnatural. And, as a news junkie, I'm appalled that I can't pick up a newspaper these days without having to turn to page four or five before I get past news about the Queen's funeral. If I see one more picture of the Queen's spawn wiping tears from their eyes, I think I'm going to lose it. The old bag was 96 years old, for chrissakes. She's had a good life. She was a good Queen by all accounts. When you've done everything there is to do, which she did, it's time to go. Let Chuckles and his main squeeze do their thing now. Enough is enough.
I'm not sure what the Fed is going to do this week, so that'll be new. We're expecting they will announce a 75 basis point move in interest rates. If they go higher, maybe 100 basis points, the financial markets will likely hasten what already appears to be a downward trajectory in the stock market. It could be a veritable puke, as they say. If you have a mortgage that fluctuates with interest rate changes, hang on to your hat. If you have a hankering to buy a new home and you're hoping to secure a reasonable interest rate, that horse has left the fucking barn.
This is what happens when liquidity in the financial markets starts to dry up. All eyes are on the housing market now, and once that starts to come in, we could be in for even more rough sledding. We're close enough now to the mid-term elections, where I think we might hear the Fed start to talk about moderating their tightening (schedule for increasing interest rates). Not enough to usher back in the usual froth and speculation that got us to this point, mind you, but just enough to staunch the bleeding in the stock market.
The mid-term elections are just weeks away now. Funny thing is, I'm seeing a lot of signs hereabouts for the democrats, but I'm seeing very few for Republican candidates. My guess is that Republicans are keeping a very low profile this election season, and they are not wearing their political affiliation on their sleeves as Democrats do. It seems all very deliberate to me. Maybe that's wishful thinking on my part. Have we, as conservatives, been sufficiently cowed by the democrats that we don't even dare put our signs out anymore? I think that's one explanation. I also think that we have become something of a silent majority who, despite our not wanting to wear our political affiliation on our sleeves, will more than likely come out in vast numbers on election day to vote these clowns in Congress out of office. No one will see us coming.
I was telling the missus that I might like to go see one or more of the local pols running for Congress in our district. I was kind of throwing it out there to see if she might be interested. We don't have much time, so I'll have to see if one or more of them has a planned event that we might attend. I'm not sure the missus shares my passion when it comes to throwing the bums out, but she's also mindful that she probably doesn't want me single-handedly rubbing elbows with like-minded supporters at a rally, especially if she's nowhere to be seen. She and I went to see Ted Cruz back in 2016 before Trump came down the escalator with Melania, and that was fun. Seeing these politicians in person, who we've only ever seen on the telly up close and personal, can be interesting, to say the least. It also helps to be jazzed up as Election Day gets closer and closer. Who doesn't like a good horse race, right?
I'm not sure if this is a problem or not, but just before elections, I seem to see a lot of out-of-state license plates around town. I get an up close and personal look at them because I'm usually on my bike when they pass me by on the roadway. I'm thinking to myself, why would somebody from Ohio be here in town just before we have an election? I'm using Ohio as an example, but that's just one of many out-of-state plates that I typically see. The bad boy in me says that I'm seeing these cars from out of state because the democrat party has sent them to our state to make sure that voters get to the polls on election day. More specifically, to make sure that they get their voters to the polls. Is there a chance that they are bringing in out of staters to vote in our elections? You bet your ass there is. Is there a chance that they are bringing illegal aliens to the polls to vote for their candidates? There is no doubt about it. If they can't steal elections, they can't win them.
This story about the illegal aliens being flown to Martha's Vineyard won't go away. As a reminder, the governor of the state of Massachusetts sent in the Army to relocate the migrants who had been on the island for a mere 24 hours. The elite living on the island who pray at the altar of the beleaguered illegal aliens across the globe and want each and every one of them to come to our country couldn't tolerate the mere presence of the brown-skinned Venezuelans for more than 24 hours despite having both the space and the resources to provide for them. They even set up a GoFundMe campaign after the migrants departed. Not for the migrants whom they never came to know, but for illegal aliens in general. I, for one, was delighted to see the hypocrisy of the islanders brought to the fore because it exposed them for the frauds that they are, and it highlighted the plight of the illegals and the policies of the Biden Administration that have brought this human catastrophe to our shores.
The left wants very badly to see the governors of the states responsible for ferrying these illegals out of their states brought to justice. They are reportedly on the phone non-stop with Biden's Attorney General insisting that governors like DeSantis be brought up on human trafficking charges. It's laughable. Since DeSantis is a potential presidential candidate in 2024 along with Trump, make no mistake about it, the leftists want him in jail along with Trump, so they have no competition when Biden runs again for a second term. And who is this clown of a democrat sheriff in Texas who is now investigating DeSantis's role in flying the illegal aliens into Martha's Vineyard? Stay in your own lane, stupido. This is bigger than you. DeSantis was quick to remind the sheriff that there was little made of the recent deaths of some 50 migrants in the back of a tractor-trailer in his jurisdiction. In other words, shut the fuck up.
As narratives go, I like our chances with the illegal alien narrative as we head into the election on November 8th. Believe me, this is not what the leftists want to be talking about. They want to be talking about abortion and how the republicans are taking away their rights to do what they wish with their bodies. The media, or the propaganda arm of the Democrat party, has taken the bait on this Martha's Vinyard thing with the illegals, and it's all they're talking about, much to the delight of the republicans. In fact, red-state governors have promised to send even more illegals to various sanctuary states and back to the Vineyard in the days and weeks to come. That should help to keep it on the front burner and in the consciousness of every American citizen going to the polls on November 8th. We just have to be a little bit careful not to turn them into victims. If Republicans are seen as opportunists and using the illegals as props or worse, that could turn the tables on us. So far, so good.
What the hell, Vlad. Putin, in a primetime speech to the Russian people, is now planning to bring more forces to the fight in Ukraine to protect the four provinces that they have effectively annexed since the beginning of their invasion of Ukraine. I think the bottom line is, if any one or more of the annexed provinces are threatened by the West, Russia will view that as an invasion of Russia itself. Russia will then take whatever action is necessary to protect the annexed sections of Ukraine, including the use of tactical nuclear weapons against the West.
The West continues to pour weapons into Ukraine to assist Ukraine in its fight against Russia, and now Russia is taking a stand with the territories annexed. Make no mistake about it, this is a major escalation in the war. What worries me is that Bumbles Biden is going to fumble our country into nuclear war against a country that has just as many or more nukes as we have here in the US. Between you and me, I'm not sure that what we're seeing Biden and his globalist minions do when it comes to starting a nuclear war isn't intentional.
The last clown on the face of the earth that you want to trust with the nuclear codes is Bumbles Biden. He is so cognitively impaired that he can't be trusted to make decisions about a go-no-go situation when the time comes to launch the missiles. He'll be sitting pretty with his wife with her fishnet stockings and his son with the crack pipe hanging out of his mouth deep in the bunker below the White House and without a worry in the world when the Generals bring him the suitcase containing the nuclear codes.
He'll have the likes of Susan Rice and Barrack Obama urging him on to press the proper buttons that will deliver what they hope to be a more utopian and infinitely less racist world after half or more of the globe digs out of what can only be described as a nuclear holocaust. The destruction around the globe will be indescribable, but Bumbles and his leftist minions will live to fight another day. The good news for Bumbles is that there will be no more elections. He need no longer fear losing an election to the likes of Trump or DeSantis. I can hear the generals now. It's now or never, Mr. President. This is your time. We must stop Putin at all costs.
How this latest announcement from Putin changes the trajectory of the war, short of starting a nuclear war, is hard to know. I suppose NATO will fortify its positions in countries bordering Ukraine, and they will issue the usual cautionary press releases to push back against Putin's rhetoric, but nothing will likely change on the ground relative to the shipments of weapons and weapons systems now being delivered daily to Ukrainian forces on the ground in Ukraine. You would think that this latest missive from Putin might give the West reason to pause, see if there isn't a better way forward, and go from there.
I personally don't think that the US or our allies in Europe much care how much Ukrainian blood is spilled on Ukrainian soil. There is something much bigger at play here, although I'm not quite sure what that is. Maybe it's all about feeding that behemoth, the Military Industrial Complex, that President Eisenhower warned us about back in the 50's. Maybe it's about weakening Russia or forcing the ouster of Putin. What I think I can say with some confidence is that it's going to get worse before it gets better.
The missus asked me if I was interested in watching the new show on Netflix about Jeffrey Dahmer. I wasn't sure how to respond. I am a died-in-the-wool cold case guy so let me put that out there. That said, this is not a cold case story. I also have a passing interest in what passes for the pathology behind serial killers, so the Dahmer story certainly qualifies on that score. As interested in this subject matter as I am, and who doesn't have a morbid fascination of sorts when it comes to real sickos like Ted Bundy, I'm careful not to jump in with both feet when the missus asks me such questions.
I responded that there isn't much left to know about Jeffrey Dahmer, so I probably wouldn't want to watch the show on Netflix. It's common knowledge in the shadowy world of serial killers that Dahmer tortured and killed animals as a youngster, he lured teenagers to his apartment as an adult, where he drugged, abused, and consumed them, and was then killed in prison. As career paths go, this was never going to end well for Dahmer. The jury is still out as to whether or not I'll watch the show, but I'm a sucker for shows with good ratings so stay tuned.
These Fed meetings are something to behold. Imagine trying to roll the dice on whether or not the Fed's comments are going to spike, or, conversely, destroy, the indices. What happens when the Fed raises interest rates as anticipated? Do the markets go up, or do the markets go down? If they go up or down, how much will they go up or down? Sometimes, the actual announcement is just that, an announcement. It's the Fed's comments after the announcement that determine what happens in the market. Yesterday, for example, the Fed announced a 75 basis point increase which was on par with expectations.
It was only after the Fed signaled that they would likely continue these hikes into 2024 that the market decided they'd seen enough, and the indices started to sell off in earnest. The S&P, which had been up most of the day, sold off into the close and ended up down 1.7%. The NASDAQ and DJIA had similar trajectories into the close. This has been the story of the markets since the end of 2021. This is what happens when they take away the punch bowl of easy money (zero interest rates). You can't say that you didn't see this coming.
I just happened to notice yesterday that my beloved 2000-year Volvo was leaking some oil. I mean, really leaking some oil. It's almost as though it had sprung a leak. There was a damn puddle beneath my car the size of a small platter. Behind my car, and up the street for a bit, I followed a trail of oil that I'd left behind when I came home from the market. I thought to myself, this can't be good. I checked the dipstick, and it was about as low as I'd ever seen it. I added oil and took a look below the engine to see if it was just pouring out onto the ground. It was not. I wondered if the plug on the bottom of the oil pan had somehow come loose, but I couldn't see it well enough to make that case. I'll want to check the oil levels this morning to see if they've changed overnight after adding oil yesterday. This kind of stuff is not really in my wheelhouse, so I'll need to have my local mechanic check things out if I can get an appointment. I'm hoping this isn't the death knell of what has been a damn dependable car for me and the fam over the last 10 years. Baby Jesus, if you're listening.
We haven't seen one of the inflated bills from the company that provides us with our electricity here at the homestead, but I hear it's coming and soon. Maybe within the month is what I'm hearing. It sounds like the increase is going to be anywhere from 60 to 100% over what we're paying now. This is the price that the fool in the White House would have us pay so we as a country can continue to fund the war in Ukraine. Energy supplies across the board are at risk thanks to Bumbles Biden.
The impact of these increases will be felt not only in increased prices at the pump and in the prices of natural gas and home heating oil, but those costs have to be passed along to the consumer in nearly every other segment of the economy. Now you know why there is so much concern about the rate of inflation and what that means for the standard of living here in the United States. I'm reminded of what Volker (Fed Chairman) did back in the 1970s when Carter was president, and he was faced with bringing down inflation. He stepped up to the podium and announced a 500 basis point increase in interest rates. What we see Powell doing now with his incremental 75 basis point increases just isn't getting the job done.
These increases in our electricity bills coming down the pike won't be putting us out onto the street, but I really worry about the people out there who are already living on the margins. I'm talking about people on fixed incomes who will have to decide between heating their homes and putting food on their tables or maybe putting their prescriptions on hold because they simply don't have the means to pay for everything they need. Something has to give. Our state is providing something of a leg up for those in dire circumstances, and that's a good thing. We'll need to make more of an effort here at home to turn off lights here and there, keep our heat down to a simmer of sorts, so we're not blowing through our budget for home heating, and maybe give some thought to making a contribution or two to local charities that assist the less fortunate. I never did buy that cord of wood I talked about a month or so ago, so that's likely to come back and bite me at some point. There's a price to pay for dragging your feet, and I think my so-called bill is already in the mail.
I hope that the mother fuckers who would crawl over broken glass to vote for Joey Biden and his democrat party are happy with the way things are going. I mean, who would vote for Biden and his democrats if elections were held today after witnessing the carnage that they've caused in our country and with our culture since Joey was sworn in in 2021? I like the fact that the new and revised electric bills with the increase I spoke about are going out just before the Mid Term elections on November 8th, but early voting has been going on in several states, so that is going to mitigate any impact to the democrats that might come as a result of the shock they feel when they see their bills. I'm also hopeful that everyone and anyone who has been watching their savings accounts or 401k's over the last several months might wake the fuck up and think to themselves that having a different political party at the helm might be one way to turn this ship of ours around. Trump warned us about Joey, and, to no one's surprise, he was right.
It is amazing to me when I think about the fact that all of this energy stuff is just so unnecessary. We're sitting on an endless supply of oil and natural gas in our country, and the thought that one retard of a president can put a stop to pulling all of it out of the ground with a snap of his fingers is just nuts. We were net energy exporters before Biden stole the election, and now we're begging our enemies to increase production because deep in the bowels of our government, we have some climate change crazies who are making all the decisions when it comes to energy production.
This is what I'm talking about: Congresswoman Talib (MI-D) was questioning banker Jamie Dimon in a congressional hearing yesterday as to what he and his bank was planning to do to stop funding new oil and gas products in order to attain zero carbon status here in the United States. Dimon responded as follows: "Absolutely not, and that would be the road to Hell for America." She proceeded to berate him like the absolute nut job that she is. You really need to look this one up on YouTube. The sad part is, Talib was likely cheered on by her fellow climate change alarmists in Congress and elsewhere who would rather see our country reduced to rubble before they would agree to pump one more ounce of black gold out of the soil beneath our feet. This is what passes for your democrat party in the year of the Lord, 2021. God help us.
Just wow. This is the second week in a row where the S&P has lost 5 percent of its value. That's ten percent in two weeks! The Dow Jones dipped below the June low yesterday while the NASDAQ and S&P did not. It's probably an indicator of sorts that the markets are going lower. Mrs G said something about moving this and that account to the sidelines which shouldn't surprise anyone. I think the NASDAQ is down YTD roughly 30% as of yesterday. I told her that at least one bear market in recent memory saw the NASDAQ decline some 80%. I'm not sure that if that made her feel any better but it is what it is. She has this corny notion, and I think that she's not alone, that all of her money is going to go down the tubes and disappear forever if things continue to deteriorate. I assured her that financial markets go up and they go down. That's just what they do. I didn't tell her that we're in stage two of a four-stage inflationary bear market and we have a long way to go before we see any evidence of a capitulation. Loosely translated, it will get worse before it gets better.
There were a lot of rumors floating around on Twitter yesterday about Xi of China going down in coup. I know nothing about the power structure in China, and probably even less than the multitude of prognosticators on Twitter who jump to this and that conclusion without so much as a shred of evidence, but given all the chaos in the world these days it seems like it's nonetheless something to keep an eye on. Is it possible that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) thought that maybe Xi was moving fast enough against Taiwan? Were they somehow unhappy with his alliances and affiliations with the Iranians and the Russians? There have been some tweets about XI ordering his people to prepare for war within the last month or so but no one is really sure what that means. War against whom exactly? And then we have some clown from the naval college here in the US warning that if China surrounded Taiwan with warships there is nothing that the US could do to stop any of it. Since when do our intelligence agencies rely on Twitter to get their propaganda out?
We're some six weeks out from the mid term elections here in the US and I'm starting to think that everything I hear and see has to be viewed through a political prism. In other words, stories and narratives are designed to sway this or that group one way or another in order to get them to the voting booth on November 8th. The democrats are flooding the airwaves with stories about abortion and the ten-year olds who have to bring their babies to term in certain states because the big bad republicans took away their rights to do with their bodies as they please. They've been using abortion as a wedge issue as long as I can remember so this is nothing new. The republicans are pushing cultural and economic narratives and themes that appeal to the suburban moms like transgenderism, inflation, and parents rights. I think the videos of prepubescent children attending drag shows and stuffing dollar bills into the garters of men dressed up as women are particulalrly heinous but wickedly effective in getting moms to take a stand against this latest bit of buffonery from the looney left. Not on my fucking watch, cupcake.
Even worse are the stories I'm seeing on the telly, mostly from Tucker on FOX, about the various hospitals across our country that are providing gender affirming care to children as young as three and as old as eighteen. They are carrying this gender dysphoria thing to an extreme when they give prepubescent girls hysterectomies and they lop off the genitals of young boys who think they're really girls because some social worker in their second grade classroom tells them its so. How barbaric are these practices and why all of a sudden does this seem to be emerging as a cottage industry for hosptials coast-to-coast when it was literally unheard of not that long ago? Are these fringe practices yet one more example of what the liberals see as an appropriate therapy for youngsters with this so-called affliction, or this just another way for hospitals to make a quick buck? It's telling that once Tucker revealed the very existence of the websites selling these services that the websites were taken down.
Italians go to the polls today to vote for a new Prime Minister. They are expected to elect their first female Prime Minister. I don't follow Italian politics one way or aother but, when I hear that a country's politics are shifting to the right, I think it's something to keep an eye on. It suggests to me that they tried socialism and it failed spectacularly. That's a good thing any way you measure it. I heard some clownish politician in the EU suggest that should Meloni win, and she's the babe I'm talking about here, that they have "tools" at their disposal to deal with such matters.
In other words, the globalists desire to move the countries en masse to the left is now being thwarted and a new and vibrant nationalism is being ushered in much to the consternation of the globalists. All that aside, Meloni seems like a very interesting character indeed. Here's hoping she prevails and that Italy is better off for having elected her. Just so you know, none of my interest in this matter has anything to do with her being a woman. All that matters now is that she can do the job that the citizens of Italy have hopefully elected her to do. Godspeed and best wishes, Ms. Meloni!
You can't turn on the news these days without hearing and or seeing something about the Queen of England's funeral. Bury the bitch, already. It is just dragging on and on ad nauseum. I don't have anything against the Queen, personally, but putting on this ghastly procession for days and days seems unnatural. And, as a news junkie, I'm appalled that I can't pick up a newspaper these days without having to turn to page four or five before I get past news about the Queen's funeral. If I see one more picture of the Queen's spawn wiping tears from their eyes, I think I'm going to lose it. The old bag was 96 years old, for chrissakes. She's had a good life. She was a good Queen by all accounts. When you've done everything there is to do, which she did, it's time to go. Let Chuckles and his main squeeze do their thing now. Enough is enough.
I'm not sure what the Fed is going to do this week, so that'll be new. We're expecting they will announce a 75 basis point move in interest rates. If they go higher, maybe 100 basis points, the financial markets will likely hasten what already appears to be a downward trajectory in the stock market. It could be a veritable puke, as they say. If you have a mortgage that fluctuates with interest rate changes, hang on to your hat. If you have a hankering to buy a new home and you're hoping to secure a reasonable interest rate, that horse has left the fucking barn.
This is what happens when liquidity in the financial markets starts to dry up. All eyes are on the housing market now, and once that starts to come in, we could be in for even more rough sledding. We're close enough now to the mid-term elections, where I think we might hear the Fed start to talk about moderating their tightening (schedule for increasing interest rates). Not enough to usher back in the usual froth and speculation that got us to this point, mind you, but just enough to staunch the bleeding in the stock market.
The mid-term elections are just weeks away now. Funny thing is, I'm seeing a lot of signs hereabouts for the democrats, but I'm seeing very few for Republican candidates. My guess is that Republicans are keeping a very low profile this election season, and they are not wearing their political affiliation on their sleeves as Democrats do. It seems all very deliberate to me. Maybe that's wishful thinking on my part. Have we, as conservatives, been sufficiently cowed by the democrats that we don't even dare put our signs out anymore? I think that's one explanation. I also think that we have become something of a silent majority who, despite our not wanting to wear our political affiliation on our sleeves, will more than likely come out in vast numbers on election day to vote these clowns in Congress out of office. No one will see us coming.
I was telling the missus that I might like to go see one or more of the local pols running for Congress in our district. I was kind of throwing it out there to see if she might be interested. We don't have much time, so I'll have to see if one or more of them has a planned event that we might attend. I'm not sure the missus shares my passion when it comes to throwing the bums out, but she's also mindful that she probably doesn't want me single-handedly rubbing elbows with like-minded supporters at a rally, especially if she's nowhere to be seen. She and I went to see Ted Cruz back in 2016 before Trump came down the escalator with Melania, and that was fun. Seeing these politicians in person, who we've only ever seen on the telly up close and personal, can be interesting, to say the least. It also helps to be jazzed up as Election Day gets closer and closer. Who doesn't like a good horse race, right?
I'm not sure if this is a problem or not, but just before elections, I seem to see a lot of out-of-state license plates around town. I get an up close and personal look at them because I'm usually on my bike when they pass me by on the roadway. I'm thinking to myself, why would somebody from Ohio be here in town just before we have an election? I'm using Ohio as an example, but that's just one of many out-of-state plates that I typically see. The bad boy in me says that I'm seeing these cars from out of state because the democrat party has sent them to our state to make sure that voters get to the polls on election day. More specifically, to make sure that they get their voters to the polls. Is there a chance that they are bringing in out of staters to vote in our elections? You bet your ass there is. Is there a chance that they are bringing illegal aliens to the polls to vote for their candidates? There is no doubt about it. If they can't steal elections, they can't win them.
This story about the illegal aliens being flown to Martha's Vineyard won't go away. As a reminder, the governor of the state of Massachusetts sent in the Army to relocate the migrants who had been on the island for a mere 24 hours. The elite living on the island who pray at the altar of the beleaguered illegal aliens across the globe and want each and every one of them to come to our country couldn't tolerate the mere presence of the brown-skinned Venezuelans for more than 24 hours despite having both the space and the resources to provide for them. They even set up a GoFundMe campaign after the migrants departed. Not for the migrants whom they never came to know, but for illegal aliens in general. I, for one, was delighted to see the hypocrisy of the islanders brought to the fore because it exposed them for the frauds that they are, and it highlighted the plight of the illegals and the policies of the Biden Administration that have brought this human catastrophe to our shores.
The left wants very badly to see the governors of the states responsible for ferrying these illegals out of their states brought to justice. They are reportedly on the phone non-stop with Biden's Attorney General insisting that governors like DeSantis be brought up on human trafficking charges. It's laughable. Since DeSantis is a potential presidential candidate in 2024 along with Trump, make no mistake about it, the leftists want him in jail along with Trump, so they have no competition when Biden runs again for a second term. And who is this clown of a democrat sheriff in Texas who is now investigating DeSantis's role in flying the illegal aliens into Martha's Vineyard? Stay in your own lane, stupido. This is bigger than you. DeSantis was quick to remind the sheriff that there was little made of the recent deaths of some 50 migrants in the back of a tractor-trailer in his jurisdiction. In other words, shut the fuck up.
As narratives go, I like our chances with the illegal alien narrative as we head into the election on November 8th. Believe me, this is not what the leftists want to be talking about. They want to be talking about abortion and how the republicans are taking away their rights to do what they wish with their bodies. The media, or the propaganda arm of the Democrat party, has taken the bait on this Martha's Vinyard thing with the illegals, and it's all they're talking about, much to the delight of the republicans. In fact, red-state governors have promised to send even more illegals to various sanctuary states and back to the Vineyard in the days and weeks to come. That should help to keep it on the front burner and in the consciousness of every American citizen going to the polls on November 8th. We just have to be a little bit careful not to turn them into victims. If Republicans are seen as opportunists and using the illegals as props or worse, that could turn the tables on us. So far, so good.
What the hell, Vlad. Putin, in a primetime speech to the Russian people, is now planning to bring more forces to the fight in Ukraine to protect the four provinces that they have effectively annexed since the beginning of their invasion of Ukraine. I think the bottom line is, if any one or more of the annexed provinces are threatened by the West, Russia will view that as an invasion of Russia itself. Russia will then take whatever action is necessary to protect the annexed sections of Ukraine, including the use of tactical nuclear weapons against the West.
The West continues to pour weapons into Ukraine to assist Ukraine in its fight against Russia, and now Russia is taking a stand with the territories annexed. Make no mistake about it, this is a major escalation in the war. What worries me is that Bumbles Biden is going to fumble our country into nuclear war against a country that has just as many or more nukes as we have here in the US. Between you and me, I'm not sure that what we're seeing Biden and his globalist minions do when it comes to starting a nuclear war isn't intentional.
The last clown on the face of the earth that you want to trust with the nuclear codes is Bumbles Biden. He is so cognitively impaired that he can't be trusted to make decisions about a go-no-go situation when the time comes to launch the missiles. He'll be sitting pretty with his wife with her fishnet stockings and his son with the crack pipe hanging out of his mouth deep in the bunker below the White House and without a worry in the world when the Generals bring him the suitcase containing the nuclear codes.
He'll have the likes of Susan Rice and Barrack Obama urging him on to press the proper buttons that will deliver what they hope to be a more utopian and infinitely less racist world after half or more of the globe digs out of what can only be described as a nuclear holocaust. The destruction around the globe will be indescribable, but Bumbles and his leftist minions will live to fight another day. The good news for Bumbles is that there will be no more elections. He need no longer fear losing an election to the likes of Trump or DeSantis. I can hear the generals now. It's now or never, Mr. President. This is your time. We must stop Putin at all costs.
How this latest announcement from Putin changes the trajectory of the war, short of starting a nuclear war, is hard to know. I suppose NATO will fortify its positions in countries bordering Ukraine, and they will issue the usual cautionary press releases to push back against Putin's rhetoric, but nothing will likely change on the ground relative to the shipments of weapons and weapons systems now being delivered daily to Ukrainian forces on the ground in Ukraine. You would think that this latest missive from Putin might give the West reason to pause, see if there isn't a better way forward, and go from there.
I personally don't think that the US or our allies in Europe much care how much Ukrainian blood is spilled on Ukrainian soil. There is something much bigger at play here, although I'm not quite sure what that is. Maybe it's all about feeding that behemoth, the Military Industrial Complex, that President Eisenhower warned us about back in the 50's. Maybe it's about weakening Russia or forcing the ouster of Putin. What I think I can say with some confidence is that it's going to get worse before it gets better.
The missus asked me if I was interested in watching the new show on Netflix about Jeffrey Dahmer. I wasn't sure how to respond. I am a died-in-the-wool cold case guy so let me put that out there. That said, this is not a cold case story. I also have a passing interest in what passes for the pathology behind serial killers, so the Dahmer story certainly qualifies on that score. As interested in this subject matter as I am, and who doesn't have a morbid fascination of sorts when it comes to real sickos like Ted Bundy, I'm careful not to jump in with both feet when the missus asks me such questions.
I responded that there isn't much left to know about Jeffrey Dahmer, so I probably wouldn't want to watch the show on Netflix. It's common knowledge in the shadowy world of serial killers that Dahmer tortured and killed animals as a youngster, he lured teenagers to his apartment as an adult, where he drugged, abused, and consumed them, and was then killed in prison. As career paths go, this was never going to end well for Dahmer. The jury is still out as to whether or not I'll watch the show, but I'm a sucker for shows with good ratings so stay tuned.
These Fed meetings are something to behold. Imagine trying to roll the dice on whether or not the Fed's comments are going to spike, or, conversely, destroy, the indices. What happens when the Fed raises interest rates as anticipated? Do the markets go up, or do the markets go down? If they go up or down, how much will they go up or down? Sometimes, the actual announcement is just that, an announcement. It's the Fed's comments after the announcement that determine what happens in the market. Yesterday, for example, the Fed announced a 75 basis point increase which was on par with expectations.
It was only after the Fed signaled that they would likely continue these hikes into 2024 that the market decided they'd seen enough, and the indices started to sell off in earnest. The S&P, which had been up most of the day, sold off into the close and ended up down 1.7%. The NASDAQ and DJIA had similar trajectories into the close. This has been the story of the markets since the end of 2021. This is what happens when they take away the punch bowl of easy money (zero interest rates). You can't say that you didn't see this coming.
I just happened to notice yesterday that my beloved 2000-year Volvo was leaking some oil. I mean, really leaking some oil. It's almost as though it had sprung a leak. There was a damn puddle beneath my car the size of a small platter. Behind my car, and up the street for a bit, I followed a trail of oil that I'd left behind when I came home from the market. I thought to myself, this can't be good. I checked the dipstick, and it was about as low as I'd ever seen it. I added oil and took a look below the engine to see if it was just pouring out onto the ground. It was not. I wondered if the plug on the bottom of the oil pan had somehow come loose, but I couldn't see it well enough to make that case. I'll want to check the oil levels this morning to see if they've changed overnight after adding oil yesterday. This kind of stuff is not really in my wheelhouse, so I'll need to have my local mechanic check things out if I can get an appointment. I'm hoping this isn't the death knell of what has been a damn dependable car for me and the fam over the last 10 years. Baby Jesus, if you're listening.
We haven't seen one of the inflated bills from the company that provides us with our electricity here at the homestead, but I hear it's coming and soon. Maybe within the month is what I'm hearing. It sounds like the increase is going to be anywhere from 60 to 100% over what we're paying now. This is the price that the fool in the White House would have us pay so we as a country can continue to fund the war in Ukraine. Energy supplies across the board are at risk thanks to Bumbles Biden.
The impact of these increases will be felt not only in increased prices at the pump and in the prices of natural gas and home heating oil, but those costs have to be passed along to the consumer in nearly every other segment of the economy. Now you know why there is so much concern about the rate of inflation and what that means for the standard of living here in the United States. I'm reminded of what Volker (Fed Chairman) did back in the 1970s when Carter was president, and he was faced with bringing down inflation. He stepped up to the podium and announced a 500 basis point increase in interest rates. What we see Powell doing now with his incremental 75 basis point increases just isn't getting the job done.
These increases in our electricity bills coming down the pike won't be putting us out onto the street, but I really worry about the people out there who are already living on the margins. I'm talking about people on fixed incomes who will have to decide between heating their homes and putting food on their tables or maybe putting their prescriptions on hold because they simply don't have the means to pay for everything they need. Something has to give. Our state is providing something of a leg up for those in dire circumstances, and that's a good thing. We'll need to make more of an effort here at home to turn off lights here and there, keep our heat down to a simmer of sorts, so we're not blowing through our budget for home heating, and maybe give some thought to making a contribution or two to local charities that assist the less fortunate. I never did buy that cord of wood I talked about a month or so ago, so that's likely to come back and bite me at some point. There's a price to pay for dragging your feet, and I think my so-called bill is already in the mail.
I hope that the mother fuckers who would crawl over broken glass to vote for Joey Biden and his democrat party are happy with the way things are going. I mean, who would vote for Biden and his democrats if elections were held today after witnessing the carnage that they've caused in our country and with our culture since Joey was sworn in in 2021? I like the fact that the new and revised electric bills with the increase I spoke about are going out just before the Mid Term elections on November 8th, but early voting has been going on in several states, so that is going to mitigate any impact to the democrats that might come as a result of the shock they feel when they see their bills. I'm also hopeful that everyone and anyone who has been watching their savings accounts or 401k's over the last several months might wake the fuck up and think to themselves that having a different political party at the helm might be one way to turn this ship of ours around. Trump warned us about Joey, and, to no one's surprise, he was right.
It is amazing to me when I think about the fact that all of this energy stuff is just so unnecessary. We're sitting on an endless supply of oil and natural gas in our country, and the thought that one retard of a president can put a stop to pulling all of it out of the ground with a snap of his fingers is just nuts. We were net energy exporters before Biden stole the election, and now we're begging our enemies to increase production because deep in the bowels of our government, we have some climate change crazies who are making all the decisions when it comes to energy production.
This is what I'm talking about: Congresswoman Talib (MI-D) was questioning banker Jamie Dimon in a congressional hearing yesterday as to what he and his bank was planning to do to stop funding new oil and gas products in order to attain zero carbon status here in the United States. Dimon responded as follows: "Absolutely not, and that would be the road to Hell for America." She proceeded to berate him like the absolute nut job that she is. You really need to look this one up on YouTube. The sad part is, Talib was likely cheered on by her fellow climate change alarmists in Congress and elsewhere who would rather see our country reduced to rubble before they would agree to pump one more ounce of black gold out of the soil beneath our feet. This is what passes for your democrat party in the year of the Lord, 2021. God help us.
Just wow. This is the second week in a row where the S&P has lost 5 percent of its value. That's ten percent in two weeks! The Dow Jones dipped below the June low yesterday while the NASDAQ and S&P did not. It's probably an indicator of sorts that the markets are going lower. Mrs G said something about moving this and that account to the sidelines which shouldn't surprise anyone. I think the NASDAQ is down YTD roughly 30% as of yesterday. I told her that at least one bear market in recent memory saw the NASDAQ decline some 80%. I'm not sure that if that made her feel any better but it is what it is. She has this corny notion, and I think that she's not alone, that all of her money is going to go down the tubes and disappear forever if things continue to deteriorate. I assured her that financial markets go up and they go down. That's just what they do. I didn't tell her that we're in stage two of a four-stage inflationary bear market and we have a long way to go before we see any evidence of a capitulation. Loosely translated, it will get worse before it gets better.
There were a lot of rumors floating around on Twitter yesterday about Xi of China going down in coup. I know nothing about the power structure in China, and probably even less than the multitude of prognosticators on Twitter who jump to this and that conclusion without so much as a shred of evidence, but given all the chaos in the world these days it seems like it's nonetheless something to keep an eye on. Is it possible that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) thought that maybe Xi was moving fast enough against Taiwan? Were they somehow unhappy with his alliances and affiliations with the Iranians and the Russians? There have been some tweets about XI ordering his people to prepare for war within the last month or so but no one is really sure what that means. War against whom exactly? And then we have some clown from the naval college here in the US warning that if China surrounded Taiwan with warships there is nothing that the US could do to stop any of it. Since when do our intelligence agencies rely on Twitter to get their propaganda out?
We're some six weeks out from the mid term elections here in the US and I'm starting to think that everything I hear and see has to be viewed through a political prism. In other words, stories and narratives are designed to sway this or that group one way or another in order to get them to the voting booth on November 8th. The democrats are flooding the airwaves with stories about abortion and the ten-year olds who have to bring their babies to term in certain states because the big bad republicans took away their rights to do with their bodies as they please. They've been using abortion as a wedge issue as long as I can remember so this is nothing new. The republicans are pushing cultural and economic narratives and themes that appeal to the suburban moms like transgenderism, inflation, and parents rights. I think the videos of prepubescent children attending drag shows and stuffing dollar bills into the garters of men dressed up as women are particulalrly heinous but wickedly effective in getting moms to take a stand against this latest bit of buffonery from the looney left. Not on my fucking watch, cupcake.
Even worse are the stories I'm seeing on the telly, mostly from Tucker on FOX, about the various hospitals across our country that are providing gender affirming care to children as young as three and as old as eighteen. They are carrying this gender dysphoria thing to an extreme when they give prepubescent girls hysterectomies and they lop off the genitals of young boys who think they're really girls because some social worker in their second grade classroom tells them its so. How barbaric are these practices and why all of a sudden does this seem to be emerging as a cottage industry for hosptials coast-to-coast when it was literally unheard of not that long ago? Are these fringe practices yet one more example of what the liberals see as an appropriate therapy for youngsters with this so-called affliction, or this just another way for hospitals to make a quick buck? It's telling that once Tucker revealed the very existence of the websites selling these services that the websites were taken down.
Italians go to the polls today to vote for a new Prime Minister. They are expected to elect their first female Prime Minister. I don't follow Italian politics one way or aother but, when I hear that a country's politics are shifting to the right, I think it's something to keep an eye on. It suggests to me that they tried socialism and it failed spectacularly. That's a good thing any way you measure it. I heard some clownish politician in the EU suggest that should Meloni win, and she's the babe I'm talking about here, that they have "tools" at their disposal to deal with such matters.
In other words, the globalists desire to move the countries en masse to the left is now being thwarted and a new and vibrant nationalism is being ushered in much to the consternation of the globalists. All that aside, Meloni seems like a very interesting character indeed. Here's hoping she prevails and that Italy is better off for having elected her. Just so you know, none of my interest in this matter has anything to do with her being a woman. All that matters now is that she can do the job that the citizens of Italy have hopefully elected her to do. Godspeed and best wishes, Ms. Meloni!
Red Wave Cometh
18/09/22 07:09
What the hell? The FBI is now raiding the homes of fifty Trump supporters? I should say, Biden's FBI. I mean, talk about losing our institutions. Isn't that what the harpies in the democrat party wail about all the time? It's actually happening, folks. This is a damn travesty. It's bad enough that Bumbles Biden is running around the country demonizing Trump supporters in every speech he reads from his trusty teleprompter. This is how they intend to win the mid-term elections. Just like Hitler's propagandist, Goebels, if you lie long enough and with sufficient vigor, people will believe your lies. This is who the democrat party is these days. Who in their right mind wants to belong to a political party that won't rest until every last one of their opponents is either dead or locked up in a jail cell somewhere?
Our next-door neighbor has all of their political signs out on their lawns ahead of the primary here in New Hampshire tomorrow. They are diehard democrats who have had a good swill of the Koolaid that the democrats have been serving up, and they're coming back for more. Maybe they're just as juiced up for their political party as I am for mine, so we'll leave it at that. That said, the Biden Administration has been a disaster for our country, so you would think that they might want to reconsider who they vote for when the time comes to go to the polls. As they say in the movies, not so much. They are doubling down. I have a good mind to take a picture of their signs just so I can track their success or lack of success as the votes start to roll in. If I could do that without being seen, I surely would.
I am a little concerned that the candidates I plan to vote for tomorrow are a little too MAGA. Too MAGA to win in the general election in November is what I mean to say. Trump has endorsed neither, but both are huge Trump supporters, and both believe in Trump's America First policies. It's possible that Trump has not endorsed either candidate because he thinks that his endorsement could hurt the candidates. That's how he rolls here and there. Trump isn't going to be around forever, so we conservatives have to stick to our convictions and vote for those candidates who are true to the cause. I make it sound like a cult, but it's not even close. It's a belief system that will hopefully keep our great republic on the straight and narrow for the foreseeable future.
We MAGA folk want lower crime rates, legal immigration, zero illegal immigration, fewer drugs rolling across our borders, laws to protect the sanctity of the unborn, classrooms that teach the three R's, energy independence, the abolition of sanctuary states, a reasonable take on the separation of church and state, mandatory ID's at the voting booth, minimal absentee voting, equal opportunity, freedom of speech, leaders who respect the rule of law, and a bottoms-up approach to dealing with pandemics and such. In other words, we can't have leaders whose first response to a pandemic is to close everything down. I'm just scratching the surface here, but it's my wish list, so I'll do with it what I please. With any luck, this is what the two candidates I plan to vote for tomorrow support in one way or another. My neighbor would likely support a lawsuit whose sole purpose would be to ban these candidates from ever running for political office. Are you starting to get the picture?
We're just back from vacation for two days now, and as best as I can tell, we still have hummingbirds around. Well, one hummingbird that I've actually laid eyes on, anyway. I changed their sugar water so they'll have something sweet and nourishing to drink before they head south in the next week or so. I actually moved my feeder on our back deck because I was getting tired of seeing black ants that had gotten inside the feeder somehow. I don't know if that makes the feeder less attractive to the hummingbirds or not, but it annoyed me, so I moved it about a foot away. It's a little closer to the house now, so I'm hoping that doesn't pose any problems for my little friends. We came back to an almost empty thistle feeder as well, so the missus and I went to Walmart last night, where I picked up a ten-pound bag. That should last a while. The missus tried to talk me into buying two bags, but I decided against it.
I need to go to the store this morning. We're completely out of bottled water and cold brew. Before I forget, I bought a little kit in the last week or so that promised to remove the oxidated look of the Ev man's headlights on his car. You know how they fog over when that happens. I worried that his headlights wouldn't get the job done for him when he was out and about in the dark. I also bought a higher-intensity headlamp which I think I mentioned previously. The kit did the trick for the most part. It isn't perfect, but it's close enough for government work, as they say. I sent the Ev man a before and after picture, but I haven't heard back from him. It's been two days now. I'm pleased with the end result, so that has to count for something. It took a little bit of elbow grease, and I worried here and there that I wasn't doing the clockwise and counter-clockwise thing correctly, but it all worked out. One side came out better, but that might have been because of me. I might need to take another pass at that one.
I don't fully understand the titles, but I think they refer to my brand of conservatism as populism or populist. It's a kind of nationalism, if I'm not mistaken. Over this past weekend, there were elections in both Canada and Sweden. You won't read much about it in our leftist media because the winning candidates and parties in both of those elections were populists. Since our leftist media gets to decide what you see and what you don't see, don't expect them to tell you when fellow leftist regimes in other countries fail spectacularly. The citizens in both of those countries are pushing back against the liberal policies of the globalists and the damage that those policies have wrought on their nations. The Davos crowd can not be pleased. Their plan for world domination and subjugation of those nation's citizens is now clearly in a cocked hat, for lack of a better term. Straight ahead on the calendar are mid-term elections here in the United States and Brazil, where we're expecting more of the same as we've seen in Canada and Sweden. People are standing up and taking their countries back. It's true what they say about pendulums. When they swing too far in one direction, well, you know what I mean.
Today is one of those unusually hot summer days that we sometimes see in September. It's the perfect weather to hang clothes out on the line. Admit it, you never saw that coming. But, it's true. I took the lot of the Ev man's dirty clothes accumulated over the course of our vacation at the lake to a local laundromat. The Ev man would prefer that we do his laundry at our house, but he'll be none the wiser if we don't tell him (which we have no plans to do.) If I can get all of his clothes in one machine, which I was able to do, then it's all for the better. No fuss, no muss, as they say in the television commercials.
Timing is everything too. If you hang things out too late, then they don't have enough time to dry. If you leave them on the line into the early evening, they are more than likely going to be damp to the touch when you go to collect them. You didn't think I knew anything about hanging clothes on the clothesline, did you? Maybe you couldn't see me doing it knowing what you know about my home life. But I had everything out and on the line well before noon, so we are looking good. It will all be lost on the Ev man, but that's life. Maybe he'll notice, maybe he won't.
The missus and I popped over to Kittery, Maine, last night to have dinner at a little restaurant on the water. We each had a cup of chowder, and I ordered some mussels while the missus had a nice chicken sandwich for her main meal. It was the final day of our vacation before the missus had to return to work on Tuesday. Our server was friendly and as sociable as she needed to be to get the job done. Our initial plan was to split a chowder, but, in my own inimitable way, I said fuck it, and I ordered two chowders. I'm glad I did because the chowder was quite good, and I would have wanted more had we only had one cup between the two of us. You always have to be a little concerned about the amount of stock you get in your chowder compared to the amount of broth. I think the ratio of potatoes and clams to broth in both of the cups was about as close to perfect as one could expect. It was also not too hot and not too cold. Somebody in the kitchen knew what they were doing. It was spot on, as they say.
I can't get these raids by Biden's FBI out of my mind. I was watching Tucker on FOX last night, and he went on and on about this issue. One thing I didn't realize was that the FBI is showing up at people's homes based on "tips." Those tipsters, whoever they were, accused said persons of being at the January 6th rally where things went sideways on that fateful day in 2020. Tucker said something about the government using facial recognition software to identify people at the fracas that day, so you know they knew who was there and who wasn't.
They also knew that these people on whose doorsteps they were showing up were nowhere near the Capital that day. And, who exactly are these so-called tipsters? Which of their neighbors dropped a dime on a neighbor they knew was a Trump supporter? Since when is being a Trump supporter a crime? Since when is being a republican, maybe a MAGA republican, cause for the Gestapo or brownshirts of the Biden Administration to show up on your doorstep accusing you of this and that crime? It's all about intimidation. It's all about making MAGA voters think twice about voting for their MAGA candidates. It's about instilling fear in the populace. It all ends on Election Day in November.
The leftist democrats are using January 6th as a pretext to criminalize, investigate, and lock up their political opposition as they see fit. It gives them the legal leverage to shake down every last republican and to use the law as a cudgel to intimidate and inspect every last document, electronic and otherwise, that they can get their hands on. It matters not that these materials are privileged and perhaps subject to attorney-client privilege. The leftist democrats could care less what laws are broken, tattered, or torn asunder.
They have the power now in Washington, and they have every intention of using it to demonize their political opponents, weaponize our Intelligence agencies, and use their power to steer the outcome of elections in their favor. If that means calling moms and dads who speak their minds at school board meetings "domestic terrorists," then that is what they do. Now that the Bidenistas have labeled Trump supporters "extremists" under the revised anti-terrorism laws after 9/11, civil liberties in our country have taken a turn for the worse. Maybe they need to be reminded that Trump received 71 million votes in the 2020 election. They will be out again on Election Day in 2022 and 2024.
It was so funny. Well, in an ironic sort of way. Bumbles Biden was partying at the White House yesterday while celebrating the passage of The Inflation Reduction Act. We all know that it does no such thing. We all know it's nothing more than a payoff to the donors of the Democrat party. We all know that it adds to the inflation that is crushing the American consumer day in and day out. Bumbles even had James Taylor on site strumming his guitar while playing a song about suicide (Fire and Rain). I mean, talk about tone-deaf. The best part, or maybe the most ironic part of it all, was that the year-over-year inflation numbers had just been released, and they were worse than anticipated. While fuel-related inflation numbers had come down a bit due to Biden's releasing oil from our nation's Strategic Oil Reserve, inflation in every other area was up markedly.
Making matters worse was the fact that the stock market was not taking this inflation news in stride. By Market close, the NASDAQ was down 5+ percent, and other indices had been similarly skewered. I think the S&P was down 4.3%. It was the Market's worst one-day loss since the 2020 Pandemic and, before that, the financial crisis in 2008. Think about the contrast between Biden and his minions snacking on sandwiches, drinking their wine, and celebrating the passage of The Inflation Reduction Act while the financial markets were being ravaged. Anyone and everyone in the markets was wishing that they were not in the markets. There had been a bit of a run-up in the market in the last week or so after the market logged a loss of some 12 percentage points over a two to three-week period, so I think people were starting to feel good about gaining back some of those losses. Nobody was prepared for the bloodbath in the market that we saw yesterday. I mean nobody.
On a brighter note, both of my candidates won their primary races last night. The missus worked a little late last night, so we were late in getting to the polls, but we made it just in time and cast our ballots like the good citizens that we are. Karoline Leavitt kicked some serious ass and surprised all the pundits who thought that the establishment guy, Matt Mowers, had it in the bag. Ms. Leavitt, if elected, will be the youngest member of the House of Representatives in our country's history. She strikes me as a Marjorie Taylor-like fighter, and God only knows I love a fighter when it comes to my politicians.
Ms. Leavitt was on Trump's communication team during his first term, so that had to help. I don't think anyone saw her winning as decisively as she did. I've never written a check to a politician in my life, but I'm tempted to make an exception for Karoline. When I think of the money that the likes of Kevin McCarthy (Minority House Speaker) spent in our state trying to boost her opponent, Matt Mowers, it pisses me off and makes me want to pitch in. I know McCarthy isn't MAGA, but he shouldn't be spending money to take out MAGA candidates. That can't sit well with Trump. It sure as hell doesn't sit well with me. Ms. Leavitt will be, God willing, taking out Chris Pappas in the general election in November.
The other candidate I voted for was General Don Bolduc. He'll be running against Senator Maggie Hassan in November. These damn democrats, and I'm talking about Pappas and Hassan here, have voted for every last one of Biden's policies that have been destroying our country from within. Do I need to go down the list of my grievances against the Biden regime again? I have neither the time nor the patience to do that this morning. I think the General has the appropriate worldview required to be a good and productive member of the United States Senate representing New Hampshire. He will not be a fucking rubber stamp for Bumbles Biden, and, more to the point, he will hopefully staunch the bleeding caused by Bumbles and his leftist regime. We want to send Maggie back to the quohog flats from whence she came before her senatorial stint. I think the General can take her down. Electorally speaking, of course.
What up with these red state Governors sending these illegal aliens to blue states? What's good for the goose is good for the gander? Governor DeSantis of Florida sent a planeload of 52 illegal aliens to Martha's Vineyard. That has to be a wake-up call for the hypocritical libs. They want the borders open to let these illegals into every other community but their community. Biden was wanting to flood our country with illegals thinking that he could turn red states blue or some such nonsense.
Now that they are getting a dose of their own medicine, the governors of these liberal shitholes are crying bloody murder. Now they see what Biden has unleashed on the red states along our southern border, and it is no longer out of sight, out of mind. They are waking up to illegal aliens sleeping, shitting, and urinating in their streets, in their schoolyards, you name it, there they fucking are. But sending the aliens to Martha's Vineyard is a beauty to behold. It's the Valhalla of liberal elitism. Maybe the Obama's will have them over for tea.
It's that age-old NIMBY (not in my backyard( thing again, isn't it. Did the Bidenistas give any thought as to what our country would do with 3-5 million or more illegal immigrants? Where did they think they would live? Who would be good enough to house them and help them care for their children? Who did the Bidenistas think would provide these illegal aliens with healthcare, schools for their children, and a bit of spare change here and there so they could arrange for their own entertainment?
It's also not lost on the communities along our southern border that many of these migrants showing up on their doorsteps and shitting in their schoolyards would not be ideal candidates under normal circumstances. In other words, they are not sending their best. You can see these shithole places around the world emptying their prisons and mental health facilities and putting them on busses where they meet up with this or that caravan heading north to Joe Biden's America. Cough it up for the coyotes, and you're on your way.
I'm not sure that I get it when I see and hear these big city mayors in sewers like New York City, Chicago, and Washington, DC whining like a stuck pig because they see a busload or two of illegal aliens arriving in downtown proper. I have to believe that they already have millions of illegal aliens living in their midst, so what's a handful or two more? Is it because these latest arrivals are somehow less desirable? Are they not all equal in God's eyes? What precisely is it about these illegal aliens that have their panties in a wad? You know damn well it has everything to do with the fact that they were sent by red state governors. Say it!
Judging by the prime-time primal screams of the mayors in these shitholes at the very sight of these busses coming to town, you'd think something was up. Why would they be ordering the National Guard to help deal with the migrants? It gives them yet one more reason to request additional funding from the federal government, so that's nothing new. When you think about it, red state governors only have so many options when it comes to dealing with illegal aliens. Giving the libs a taste of their own medicine might well qualify both as an opportunity and a last resort. Pick your poison.
I'm waking up to temperatures in the fifties this morning, and I'm thinking to myself, I should have bought a cord or two of wood for mornings just like this. The missus is now up and about, and she's complaining that her nightgown is getting a bit threadbare here and there. She's lamenting the fact that we never stopped at the Vermont Country Store while we were on vacation, where she might have had a chance to pick up another nightgown. It's just more of the same. Woe is me, wash, rinse, repeat. Throw on a sweater for chrissakes, and enough with the pissing and moaning.
Put yourself in the place of an illegal alien waking up on a cold sidewalk in some foreign land (USA) without a pot to piss in or a place to go for a hot meal. They'd give their left testicle and then some for a threadbare nightgown to throw over their shivering torsos. Listen to me, Mr. Empathy. Take your hot shower, little darlings, and we can discuss how we might go about replacing that nightgown of yours. Is it too late to get that cord of wood? It seems so daunting when I think about all the work involved in getting our stove up and running again. I just don't see it in the cards as I sit here shivering in my jammies this fine September morning.
I'm waking up to the news this morning that those 50 or so illegal aliens that were flown into Martha's Vineyard yesterday by Governor DeSantis from Florida have now been airlifted off the island and flown to points unknown. The Vineyard is one of the wealthiest liberal enclaves in the continental USA, yet having 50 illegal aliens on their soil constituted a humanitarian crisis. They simply don't have the infrastructure to support these migrants, was all you heard in the liberal media yesterday. Yet, the island is littered with multi-acre estates, which could have easily been used to set up housing for the migrants. Hell, Obama lives on the island, and he's championed diversity and such from day one of his Administration. Where was he when the migrant's plane touched down on the one and only airport on the island? The quick and dirty answer is, nowhere to be seen. These mother fuckers are unbelievable.
Hey, I like the timing of it. The mid-term elections are right around the corner, and the issue of immigration deserves to be front and center. Ironically enough, it's the liberals who are splashing it all over the newspapers and media from coast to coast, thanks to this dust-up manufactured by the Republicans. It's the liberals who are reminding the voters that while immigration may be a temporary inconvenience on the island of Marthas Vineyard, it is a veritable crisis in small towns along our southern border in states like Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, etc., where the number of illegal aliens coming into their towns and cities every day of the week is in the tens of thousands. The liberals would rather talk about abortion, extremist republicans, January 6th, or anything but illegal immigration. Hell, Vice President Kamala Harris reminded us all yesterday in an interview with Chuckles Todd on NBC that our borders are secure. The American people know better.
I'm hearing more and more examples of democrats not agreeing to participate in public debates with their republican opponents in the days and weeks leading up to the mid-term elections on November 9th. I get it. The Democrats have no record of accomplishments to run on, and, while they've passed legislation here and there that may please their base, it has also added to our deficit which is now north of $30 trillion. In other words, the democrats have been spending money like drunken sailors. But, it's not just the spending.
It's a whole host of other things. We'll see how the strategy of not going to debates works out for them. The Democrat party also seems to be running any number of candidates as unopposed, which means they settle on a candidate who they think can win, and that's who they put up against the Republican candidate. Meanwhile, the Republican candidates are battling it out in the primaries until they end up with a candidate who may or may not garner the support of the voters who cast a vote for the winning candidate. The tougher the battle in the primaries, the more hostile the infighting gets, and it all makes for a more contentious and less cohesive party dynamic for the winning candidate who needs the full support of the voters and their party when all is said and done.
My neighbor had surgery on her knee yesterday. I think it was a knee replacement, but don't quote me on that. I was surprised to see her coming home so soon after the surgery. I thought she would be in the hospital for of a couple of days anyway. They've really perfected some of these procedures is all I can offer. Her driver is around her age, and she's no spring chicken, so I considered running over to lend a hand when I saw the car coming down the street. There are steps involved in her going from her car to her house, so that had to pose a challenge or two for both her and her companion.
This was me thinking out loud while sitting in the comfort of my living room, of course. Might they have appreciated an extra set of hands? Probably. I waited to see if someone might come knocking, but nobody did. She has a couple of capable sons that I know of, and they were nowhere to be seen. How they finally managed, I don't know but here's hoping that they're not sitting around this morning thinking the worst about a neighbor who couldn't be bothered to lend a hand when an extra hand would have been appreciated. Am I overthinking this?
FedEx came out after the Market close yesterday and changed up their earnings guidance for the worse. FedEx is the veritable canary in the coal mine when and where prospects for an improving economy are either in the cards or not in the cards. It is a bellwether for the entire shipping industry, and to a greater extent, the economy at large. If FedEx doesn't see things improving, and they clearly don't given their updated guidance, that is not a good thing. Not a good thing for people with their life savings in the stock market, not good for people seeking employment, not a good thing for an economy already struggling to stay out of a deep recession or worse, and not a good thing for people who will be laid off in struggling companies coast to coast. It is probably just the beginning of a long list of companies that will have to adjust their guidance due to a deteriorating economy. Stock market futures ahead of the Market open this morning are blood red.
We'll be heading over to see Mrs G today. It's been a good couple of weeks since we've seen her. Maybe almost three weeks if we're counting the actual days. We were off on vacation so that accounts for much of our time away. She says that her facility is having issus with covid again and there are some 26 staffers who have come down with the dreaded virus. Only three residents have come down with the virus. To put it all in perspective, I think the resident-to-staff ratio at her facility is quite high. So, how do you account for the staff coming down with so much covid? Does the fact that they're required to wear masks account for any of it? It's counter intuitive, I know, but that's the point. You might also look to see who is out and about in the community and who is not out in the community. The staff is the obvious winner in this category but the residents do go out from time to time and they have no obligations to report in, mask up, or anything of the kind while out and about or when they return.
The management of her facility is urging the residents to get the latest and greatest booster shot as a result of the uptick in Covid cases. Do they not know that more hospitalizations than not these days involve people who have had multiple boosters? People with no history of getting the jab, or people who having gotten only the base jabs, are faring the best. In other words, these fools managing her joint are increasing the risks to their residents by pushing the stinking jabs. When will it all stop? When will someone there start paying attention to the science? Isn't that what they say? Follow the science?
It has to help that the residents of her facility are probably fitter than most considering the fact that you don't get to grow old, or end up in facilities like the one in which Mrs G resides, if you're otherwise beset with comorbidities. I should add that people in the facility are not dropping likes flies despite having received multiple jabs since the Covid thing began in March of 2020. What's one more jab in the scheme of things. Right? If it gives the residents peace of mind, as crazy and devious as that sounds, then fuck it. Sign up for the booster and get on with your lives. Or, not.
Our next-door neighbor has all of their political signs out on their lawns ahead of the primary here in New Hampshire tomorrow. They are diehard democrats who have had a good swill of the Koolaid that the democrats have been serving up, and they're coming back for more. Maybe they're just as juiced up for their political party as I am for mine, so we'll leave it at that. That said, the Biden Administration has been a disaster for our country, so you would think that they might want to reconsider who they vote for when the time comes to go to the polls. As they say in the movies, not so much. They are doubling down. I have a good mind to take a picture of their signs just so I can track their success or lack of success as the votes start to roll in. If I could do that without being seen, I surely would.
I am a little concerned that the candidates I plan to vote for tomorrow are a little too MAGA. Too MAGA to win in the general election in November is what I mean to say. Trump has endorsed neither, but both are huge Trump supporters, and both believe in Trump's America First policies. It's possible that Trump has not endorsed either candidate because he thinks that his endorsement could hurt the candidates. That's how he rolls here and there. Trump isn't going to be around forever, so we conservatives have to stick to our convictions and vote for those candidates who are true to the cause. I make it sound like a cult, but it's not even close. It's a belief system that will hopefully keep our great republic on the straight and narrow for the foreseeable future.
We MAGA folk want lower crime rates, legal immigration, zero illegal immigration, fewer drugs rolling across our borders, laws to protect the sanctity of the unborn, classrooms that teach the three R's, energy independence, the abolition of sanctuary states, a reasonable take on the separation of church and state, mandatory ID's at the voting booth, minimal absentee voting, equal opportunity, freedom of speech, leaders who respect the rule of law, and a bottoms-up approach to dealing with pandemics and such. In other words, we can't have leaders whose first response to a pandemic is to close everything down. I'm just scratching the surface here, but it's my wish list, so I'll do with it what I please. With any luck, this is what the two candidates I plan to vote for tomorrow support in one way or another. My neighbor would likely support a lawsuit whose sole purpose would be to ban these candidates from ever running for political office. Are you starting to get the picture?
We're just back from vacation for two days now, and as best as I can tell, we still have hummingbirds around. Well, one hummingbird that I've actually laid eyes on, anyway. I changed their sugar water so they'll have something sweet and nourishing to drink before they head south in the next week or so. I actually moved my feeder on our back deck because I was getting tired of seeing black ants that had gotten inside the feeder somehow. I don't know if that makes the feeder less attractive to the hummingbirds or not, but it annoyed me, so I moved it about a foot away. It's a little closer to the house now, so I'm hoping that doesn't pose any problems for my little friends. We came back to an almost empty thistle feeder as well, so the missus and I went to Walmart last night, where I picked up a ten-pound bag. That should last a while. The missus tried to talk me into buying two bags, but I decided against it.
I need to go to the store this morning. We're completely out of bottled water and cold brew. Before I forget, I bought a little kit in the last week or so that promised to remove the oxidated look of the Ev man's headlights on his car. You know how they fog over when that happens. I worried that his headlights wouldn't get the job done for him when he was out and about in the dark. I also bought a higher-intensity headlamp which I think I mentioned previously. The kit did the trick for the most part. It isn't perfect, but it's close enough for government work, as they say. I sent the Ev man a before and after picture, but I haven't heard back from him. It's been two days now. I'm pleased with the end result, so that has to count for something. It took a little bit of elbow grease, and I worried here and there that I wasn't doing the clockwise and counter-clockwise thing correctly, but it all worked out. One side came out better, but that might have been because of me. I might need to take another pass at that one.
I don't fully understand the titles, but I think they refer to my brand of conservatism as populism or populist. It's a kind of nationalism, if I'm not mistaken. Over this past weekend, there were elections in both Canada and Sweden. You won't read much about it in our leftist media because the winning candidates and parties in both of those elections were populists. Since our leftist media gets to decide what you see and what you don't see, don't expect them to tell you when fellow leftist regimes in other countries fail spectacularly. The citizens in both of those countries are pushing back against the liberal policies of the globalists and the damage that those policies have wrought on their nations. The Davos crowd can not be pleased. Their plan for world domination and subjugation of those nation's citizens is now clearly in a cocked hat, for lack of a better term. Straight ahead on the calendar are mid-term elections here in the United States and Brazil, where we're expecting more of the same as we've seen in Canada and Sweden. People are standing up and taking their countries back. It's true what they say about pendulums. When they swing too far in one direction, well, you know what I mean.
Today is one of those unusually hot summer days that we sometimes see in September. It's the perfect weather to hang clothes out on the line. Admit it, you never saw that coming. But, it's true. I took the lot of the Ev man's dirty clothes accumulated over the course of our vacation at the lake to a local laundromat. The Ev man would prefer that we do his laundry at our house, but he'll be none the wiser if we don't tell him (which we have no plans to do.) If I can get all of his clothes in one machine, which I was able to do, then it's all for the better. No fuss, no muss, as they say in the television commercials.
Timing is everything too. If you hang things out too late, then they don't have enough time to dry. If you leave them on the line into the early evening, they are more than likely going to be damp to the touch when you go to collect them. You didn't think I knew anything about hanging clothes on the clothesline, did you? Maybe you couldn't see me doing it knowing what you know about my home life. But I had everything out and on the line well before noon, so we are looking good. It will all be lost on the Ev man, but that's life. Maybe he'll notice, maybe he won't.
The missus and I popped over to Kittery, Maine, last night to have dinner at a little restaurant on the water. We each had a cup of chowder, and I ordered some mussels while the missus had a nice chicken sandwich for her main meal. It was the final day of our vacation before the missus had to return to work on Tuesday. Our server was friendly and as sociable as she needed to be to get the job done. Our initial plan was to split a chowder, but, in my own inimitable way, I said fuck it, and I ordered two chowders. I'm glad I did because the chowder was quite good, and I would have wanted more had we only had one cup between the two of us. You always have to be a little concerned about the amount of stock you get in your chowder compared to the amount of broth. I think the ratio of potatoes and clams to broth in both of the cups was about as close to perfect as one could expect. It was also not too hot and not too cold. Somebody in the kitchen knew what they were doing. It was spot on, as they say.
I can't get these raids by Biden's FBI out of my mind. I was watching Tucker on FOX last night, and he went on and on about this issue. One thing I didn't realize was that the FBI is showing up at people's homes based on "tips." Those tipsters, whoever they were, accused said persons of being at the January 6th rally where things went sideways on that fateful day in 2020. Tucker said something about the government using facial recognition software to identify people at the fracas that day, so you know they knew who was there and who wasn't.
They also knew that these people on whose doorsteps they were showing up were nowhere near the Capital that day. And, who exactly are these so-called tipsters? Which of their neighbors dropped a dime on a neighbor they knew was a Trump supporter? Since when is being a Trump supporter a crime? Since when is being a republican, maybe a MAGA republican, cause for the Gestapo or brownshirts of the Biden Administration to show up on your doorstep accusing you of this and that crime? It's all about intimidation. It's all about making MAGA voters think twice about voting for their MAGA candidates. It's about instilling fear in the populace. It all ends on Election Day in November.
The leftist democrats are using January 6th as a pretext to criminalize, investigate, and lock up their political opposition as they see fit. It gives them the legal leverage to shake down every last republican and to use the law as a cudgel to intimidate and inspect every last document, electronic and otherwise, that they can get their hands on. It matters not that these materials are privileged and perhaps subject to attorney-client privilege. The leftist democrats could care less what laws are broken, tattered, or torn asunder.
They have the power now in Washington, and they have every intention of using it to demonize their political opponents, weaponize our Intelligence agencies, and use their power to steer the outcome of elections in their favor. If that means calling moms and dads who speak their minds at school board meetings "domestic terrorists," then that is what they do. Now that the Bidenistas have labeled Trump supporters "extremists" under the revised anti-terrorism laws after 9/11, civil liberties in our country have taken a turn for the worse. Maybe they need to be reminded that Trump received 71 million votes in the 2020 election. They will be out again on Election Day in 2022 and 2024.
It was so funny. Well, in an ironic sort of way. Bumbles Biden was partying at the White House yesterday while celebrating the passage of The Inflation Reduction Act. We all know that it does no such thing. We all know it's nothing more than a payoff to the donors of the Democrat party. We all know that it adds to the inflation that is crushing the American consumer day in and day out. Bumbles even had James Taylor on site strumming his guitar while playing a song about suicide (Fire and Rain). I mean, talk about tone-deaf. The best part, or maybe the most ironic part of it all, was that the year-over-year inflation numbers had just been released, and they were worse than anticipated. While fuel-related inflation numbers had come down a bit due to Biden's releasing oil from our nation's Strategic Oil Reserve, inflation in every other area was up markedly.
Making matters worse was the fact that the stock market was not taking this inflation news in stride. By Market close, the NASDAQ was down 5+ percent, and other indices had been similarly skewered. I think the S&P was down 4.3%. It was the Market's worst one-day loss since the 2020 Pandemic and, before that, the financial crisis in 2008. Think about the contrast between Biden and his minions snacking on sandwiches, drinking their wine, and celebrating the passage of The Inflation Reduction Act while the financial markets were being ravaged. Anyone and everyone in the markets was wishing that they were not in the markets. There had been a bit of a run-up in the market in the last week or so after the market logged a loss of some 12 percentage points over a two to three-week period, so I think people were starting to feel good about gaining back some of those losses. Nobody was prepared for the bloodbath in the market that we saw yesterday. I mean nobody.
On a brighter note, both of my candidates won their primary races last night. The missus worked a little late last night, so we were late in getting to the polls, but we made it just in time and cast our ballots like the good citizens that we are. Karoline Leavitt kicked some serious ass and surprised all the pundits who thought that the establishment guy, Matt Mowers, had it in the bag. Ms. Leavitt, if elected, will be the youngest member of the House of Representatives in our country's history. She strikes me as a Marjorie Taylor-like fighter, and God only knows I love a fighter when it comes to my politicians.
Ms. Leavitt was on Trump's communication team during his first term, so that had to help. I don't think anyone saw her winning as decisively as she did. I've never written a check to a politician in my life, but I'm tempted to make an exception for Karoline. When I think of the money that the likes of Kevin McCarthy (Minority House Speaker) spent in our state trying to boost her opponent, Matt Mowers, it pisses me off and makes me want to pitch in. I know McCarthy isn't MAGA, but he shouldn't be spending money to take out MAGA candidates. That can't sit well with Trump. It sure as hell doesn't sit well with me. Ms. Leavitt will be, God willing, taking out Chris Pappas in the general election in November.
The other candidate I voted for was General Don Bolduc. He'll be running against Senator Maggie Hassan in November. These damn democrats, and I'm talking about Pappas and Hassan here, have voted for every last one of Biden's policies that have been destroying our country from within. Do I need to go down the list of my grievances against the Biden regime again? I have neither the time nor the patience to do that this morning. I think the General has the appropriate worldview required to be a good and productive member of the United States Senate representing New Hampshire. He will not be a fucking rubber stamp for Bumbles Biden, and, more to the point, he will hopefully staunch the bleeding caused by Bumbles and his leftist regime. We want to send Maggie back to the quohog flats from whence she came before her senatorial stint. I think the General can take her down. Electorally speaking, of course.
What up with these red state Governors sending these illegal aliens to blue states? What's good for the goose is good for the gander? Governor DeSantis of Florida sent a planeload of 52 illegal aliens to Martha's Vineyard. That has to be a wake-up call for the hypocritical libs. They want the borders open to let these illegals into every other community but their community. Biden was wanting to flood our country with illegals thinking that he could turn red states blue or some such nonsense.
Now that they are getting a dose of their own medicine, the governors of these liberal shitholes are crying bloody murder. Now they see what Biden has unleashed on the red states along our southern border, and it is no longer out of sight, out of mind. They are waking up to illegal aliens sleeping, shitting, and urinating in their streets, in their schoolyards, you name it, there they fucking are. But sending the aliens to Martha's Vineyard is a beauty to behold. It's the Valhalla of liberal elitism. Maybe the Obama's will have them over for tea.
It's that age-old NIMBY (not in my backyard( thing again, isn't it. Did the Bidenistas give any thought as to what our country would do with 3-5 million or more illegal immigrants? Where did they think they would live? Who would be good enough to house them and help them care for their children? Who did the Bidenistas think would provide these illegal aliens with healthcare, schools for their children, and a bit of spare change here and there so they could arrange for their own entertainment?
It's also not lost on the communities along our southern border that many of these migrants showing up on their doorsteps and shitting in their schoolyards would not be ideal candidates under normal circumstances. In other words, they are not sending their best. You can see these shithole places around the world emptying their prisons and mental health facilities and putting them on busses where they meet up with this or that caravan heading north to Joe Biden's America. Cough it up for the coyotes, and you're on your way.
I'm not sure that I get it when I see and hear these big city mayors in sewers like New York City, Chicago, and Washington, DC whining like a stuck pig because they see a busload or two of illegal aliens arriving in downtown proper. I have to believe that they already have millions of illegal aliens living in their midst, so what's a handful or two more? Is it because these latest arrivals are somehow less desirable? Are they not all equal in God's eyes? What precisely is it about these illegal aliens that have their panties in a wad? You know damn well it has everything to do with the fact that they were sent by red state governors. Say it!
Judging by the prime-time primal screams of the mayors in these shitholes at the very sight of these busses coming to town, you'd think something was up. Why would they be ordering the National Guard to help deal with the migrants? It gives them yet one more reason to request additional funding from the federal government, so that's nothing new. When you think about it, red state governors only have so many options when it comes to dealing with illegal aliens. Giving the libs a taste of their own medicine might well qualify both as an opportunity and a last resort. Pick your poison.
I'm waking up to temperatures in the fifties this morning, and I'm thinking to myself, I should have bought a cord or two of wood for mornings just like this. The missus is now up and about, and she's complaining that her nightgown is getting a bit threadbare here and there. She's lamenting the fact that we never stopped at the Vermont Country Store while we were on vacation, where she might have had a chance to pick up another nightgown. It's just more of the same. Woe is me, wash, rinse, repeat. Throw on a sweater for chrissakes, and enough with the pissing and moaning.
Put yourself in the place of an illegal alien waking up on a cold sidewalk in some foreign land (USA) without a pot to piss in or a place to go for a hot meal. They'd give their left testicle and then some for a threadbare nightgown to throw over their shivering torsos. Listen to me, Mr. Empathy. Take your hot shower, little darlings, and we can discuss how we might go about replacing that nightgown of yours. Is it too late to get that cord of wood? It seems so daunting when I think about all the work involved in getting our stove up and running again. I just don't see it in the cards as I sit here shivering in my jammies this fine September morning.
I'm waking up to the news this morning that those 50 or so illegal aliens that were flown into Martha's Vineyard yesterday by Governor DeSantis from Florida have now been airlifted off the island and flown to points unknown. The Vineyard is one of the wealthiest liberal enclaves in the continental USA, yet having 50 illegal aliens on their soil constituted a humanitarian crisis. They simply don't have the infrastructure to support these migrants, was all you heard in the liberal media yesterday. Yet, the island is littered with multi-acre estates, which could have easily been used to set up housing for the migrants. Hell, Obama lives on the island, and he's championed diversity and such from day one of his Administration. Where was he when the migrant's plane touched down on the one and only airport on the island? The quick and dirty answer is, nowhere to be seen. These mother fuckers are unbelievable.
Hey, I like the timing of it. The mid-term elections are right around the corner, and the issue of immigration deserves to be front and center. Ironically enough, it's the liberals who are splashing it all over the newspapers and media from coast to coast, thanks to this dust-up manufactured by the Republicans. It's the liberals who are reminding the voters that while immigration may be a temporary inconvenience on the island of Marthas Vineyard, it is a veritable crisis in small towns along our southern border in states like Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, etc., where the number of illegal aliens coming into their towns and cities every day of the week is in the tens of thousands. The liberals would rather talk about abortion, extremist republicans, January 6th, or anything but illegal immigration. Hell, Vice President Kamala Harris reminded us all yesterday in an interview with Chuckles Todd on NBC that our borders are secure. The American people know better.
I'm hearing more and more examples of democrats not agreeing to participate in public debates with their republican opponents in the days and weeks leading up to the mid-term elections on November 9th. I get it. The Democrats have no record of accomplishments to run on, and, while they've passed legislation here and there that may please their base, it has also added to our deficit which is now north of $30 trillion. In other words, the democrats have been spending money like drunken sailors. But, it's not just the spending.
It's a whole host of other things. We'll see how the strategy of not going to debates works out for them. The Democrat party also seems to be running any number of candidates as unopposed, which means they settle on a candidate who they think can win, and that's who they put up against the Republican candidate. Meanwhile, the Republican candidates are battling it out in the primaries until they end up with a candidate who may or may not garner the support of the voters who cast a vote for the winning candidate. The tougher the battle in the primaries, the more hostile the infighting gets, and it all makes for a more contentious and less cohesive party dynamic for the winning candidate who needs the full support of the voters and their party when all is said and done.
My neighbor had surgery on her knee yesterday. I think it was a knee replacement, but don't quote me on that. I was surprised to see her coming home so soon after the surgery. I thought she would be in the hospital for of a couple of days anyway. They've really perfected some of these procedures is all I can offer. Her driver is around her age, and she's no spring chicken, so I considered running over to lend a hand when I saw the car coming down the street. There are steps involved in her going from her car to her house, so that had to pose a challenge or two for both her and her companion.
This was me thinking out loud while sitting in the comfort of my living room, of course. Might they have appreciated an extra set of hands? Probably. I waited to see if someone might come knocking, but nobody did. She has a couple of capable sons that I know of, and they were nowhere to be seen. How they finally managed, I don't know but here's hoping that they're not sitting around this morning thinking the worst about a neighbor who couldn't be bothered to lend a hand when an extra hand would have been appreciated. Am I overthinking this?
FedEx came out after the Market close yesterday and changed up their earnings guidance for the worse. FedEx is the veritable canary in the coal mine when and where prospects for an improving economy are either in the cards or not in the cards. It is a bellwether for the entire shipping industry, and to a greater extent, the economy at large. If FedEx doesn't see things improving, and they clearly don't given their updated guidance, that is not a good thing. Not a good thing for people with their life savings in the stock market, not good for people seeking employment, not a good thing for an economy already struggling to stay out of a deep recession or worse, and not a good thing for people who will be laid off in struggling companies coast to coast. It is probably just the beginning of a long list of companies that will have to adjust their guidance due to a deteriorating economy. Stock market futures ahead of the Market open this morning are blood red.
We'll be heading over to see Mrs G today. It's been a good couple of weeks since we've seen her. Maybe almost three weeks if we're counting the actual days. We were off on vacation so that accounts for much of our time away. She says that her facility is having issus with covid again and there are some 26 staffers who have come down with the dreaded virus. Only three residents have come down with the virus. To put it all in perspective, I think the resident-to-staff ratio at her facility is quite high. So, how do you account for the staff coming down with so much covid? Does the fact that they're required to wear masks account for any of it? It's counter intuitive, I know, but that's the point. You might also look to see who is out and about in the community and who is not out in the community. The staff is the obvious winner in this category but the residents do go out from time to time and they have no obligations to report in, mask up, or anything of the kind while out and about or when they return.
The management of her facility is urging the residents to get the latest and greatest booster shot as a result of the uptick in Covid cases. Do they not know that more hospitalizations than not these days involve people who have had multiple boosters? People with no history of getting the jab, or people who having gotten only the base jabs, are faring the best. In other words, these fools managing her joint are increasing the risks to their residents by pushing the stinking jabs. When will it all stop? When will someone there start paying attention to the science? Isn't that what they say? Follow the science?
It has to help that the residents of her facility are probably fitter than most considering the fact that you don't get to grow old, or end up in facilities like the one in which Mrs G resides, if you're otherwise beset with comorbidities. I should add that people in the facility are not dropping likes flies despite having received multiple jabs since the Covid thing began in March of 2020. What's one more jab in the scheme of things. Right? If it gives the residents peace of mind, as crazy and devious as that sounds, then fuck it. Sign up for the booster and get on with your lives. Or, not.
Vacation Edition
11/09/22 08:28
Good morning, world! We made it! We’re here in Lake George, New York. Thanks to all the hard work by the missus, we got er done. And all of that talk about needing an extra something on top of the car just to bring the necessary bedding was, at the end of the day, unnecessary. The Ev man carried most of it from the house, and I packed the car one thing at a time. I even ended up with a clear view out of the car, so I could keep an eye on the bicycles. That’s how you do it.
The Ev man needs and deserves a vacation as well. No? You bet your ass he does. Imagine not being able to get away from your place every so often. I wouldn’t like it, and neither would you. We all need that change of scenery to refresh this or that in the space between our ears. As soon as we arrived at the place on the lake, we all went for a swim. Staying at a place on the lake means walking out your front door and walking into the lake. Staying at a place on Sandy Bay means you have sand underfoot and between your toes for as far as the eye can see.
Is there a better time of the year to be here in the Adirondacks? You can “see” the leaves changing color even though that’s a few weeks away yet. Nighttime temperatures can tip into the forties, so you’ll need that extra blanket. Did I mention that there are no blankets in this place? How do you offer a rental without blankets? I can understand not offering sheets and towels, but blankets? This rental just happens to be a converted restaurant that we used to frequent as a family when I was just a child. We were just a boat ride and a bay away if we needed a pizza in a pinch.
The Ev man and I were initially concerned that there was no WI-FI in the place. We had my brother from another mother open the place up due to our anticipated late arrival, and he texted us something to the effect that he didn’t think we had any WI-FI. The Ev man nailed it down when he discovered the router in his bedroom. I think this place even has air conditioning, although we’ll likely not need it during our stay, knowing what we know about the forecast. If I had to guess, I’d say that we’ll go swimming more often than not if we have any issues with the heat.
I’m a bit of a news junkie, so I would not have been happy had there been no WI-FI on the premises. I think I speak for the Ev man as well when I say that we would have had to adjust this or that to get our WI-FI fix. If that means spending two hours a day at the local Starbucks, then that is what you do. Starbucks isn’t exactly local, so that should tell you something about the depth of our collective addictions when it comes to the internet. To put it more plainly, we would have crawled over broken glass just to get two bars on our handheld devices. Oh, and cellular data seems to be non-existent here. Just total fuckery.
The floors are very uneven in this place. I was a little worried that when going to bed that the missus and I would be rolling over on each other, given the tilt in the flooring. As I said, this place has been around for a few years. Thankfully, the bed was nice and firm, and we had no such problem. I also don’t know what size that bed is, but it seems to be short of a queen by a bit, both lengthwise and widthwise. I couldn’t turn over during the night without getting up in the missus’s grille. She was fast asleep, so she would have been none the wiser, but, to me, it seemed a bit constraining. She had the luxury of using every last square inch of the real estate while I had to worry about being squeezed off the side of the bed. You have to be awake to worry, so there’s that.
It’s 7:38 am here on Sandy Bay, and the missus informs me that there are already two boats moored out on the bay. It’s Sunday morning of a three-day Labor Day weekend, so maybe that shouldn’t surprise us. It also tells us something about the level of insanity that we can expect as the day gets underway. I don’t know precisely how many buoys there are out there on Sandy Bay, but I’m guessing that most, if not all, will be taken by the time the noon hour comes around. The hotter it gets today, the sooner the buoys will be taken. You grab them while you can because this location is heaven on earth for boaters and, yes, especially people who like to get sand between their toes when they go in the water.
I’d hoped to have something for breakfast for the fam, but I think I’ve fallen flat where that is concerned. We stopped at Stewarts before we arrived here at the camp as we always do for the customary gallon of milk and a dozen eggs, but I couldn’t bring myself to pay $8 a pound for what appeared to be less than a pound of bacon. I don’t know if it will be any cheaper when we go to the supermarket but here’s hoping. I suppose I could make Ev an egg sandwich with the eggs we bought and some nice sourdough bread that we brought from home. It’s the best we have to offer for now. We also have some oatmeal and some cereal, but that about does it.
For maybe the first time ever here at the lake, we don’t have a boat to use. We’ve come to Sandy Bay over the years by boat, but this year, we’re renting a place right on the bay so there really is no need for a boat. Well, no need for a boat to come here anyway. Do we love to cruise the lake when we do have a boat? Of course, we do. We’ll look at boat rentals in a couple of days when the summer crowds have gone back to wherever they came from. The lake will be less crowded, and, if the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise, rental prices will be off-peak season if that even exists. That’s a whole lot of wishful thinking on my part. But, the fam is worth it, so I’ll pay the piper if and when the time comes.
I have a good mind to put the prices of everything I’m talking about down on paper just so I can look back sometime in the future and see how crazy things were way back when. It’s not just the price of bacon. It’s the price of the rental we’re staying at. It’s the price of the boat we’re wanting to rent. It’s the price of a gallon of gasoline we’ll need to buy if we want to go boating. It’s the price of gas that we need to put in the car to go from point A to point B. If we had plans to go fishing, which we don’t, I’d be telling you about the price we paid for a dozen night crawlers. I’m a little embarrassed to talk about any of it because it all seems so outrageous.
I watched Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania last night on my iPad. He was in a kick-ass mood, and he was in town to boost the prospects of both Dr. Oz and Doug Mastriano. They are running for Pennsylvania’s Senate and Governor’s seat, respectively. There had to be ten to fifteen thousand people in the auditorium. Compare that to a measly 250-300 people that were in attendance at Biden’s “rally” earlier in the week. It was a raucous crowd, and they loved every minute of what Trump was serving up. As Trump always puts it, “is there any better place to be than a Trump rally?” He still looks and sounds like a candidate who’s running in 2024, so, for anyone still on the sidelines, it’s all hands on deck. Oh, and Trump still maintains that he won the 2020 election. He’ll get no argument from me.
Debbie Rah-Rah is on her way. Did I mention that she and her main squeeze, Wille, planned to pay us a visit today? It’s always good to see Deb and Willie, so we’ll roll out the welcome carpet. We don’t have a lot to offer them in the way of refreshments since we’ve not been to the store, so we’ll have to make it up as we go along. Deb is a huge fan of Sandy Bay, so once she goes into the lake, we might not see her for a while. You can walk across the end of the bay here at the shoreline, and you’d still only be waist-deep in the water. That’s neither here nor there, but I thought I might just mention it. I’m not sure about Wille and water, but he’s free to follow his inner Wille whenever and wherever that takes him.
I can already feel myself getting a little long-winded when it comes to writing in my journal. Vacations tend to do that to me. I just go on and on for no particular reason, and there’s no end to the gibberish I write about. I made Evan a nice egg sandwich when he got up, so I’m happy he was receptive to having me make it. That isn’t always the case. As it is, there aren’t a lot of choices without going out to a store, so it is what it is. Would he have preferred a little ketchup with his eggs? No doubt. Would he have liked a sausage or two with his eggs? You betcha. Would he have liked his egg sandwich with cheese? Unquestionably. Maybe a little melted cheddar on his sourdough toast and eggs? My God, yes. This is only day one of seven. Strap in.
Happy Labor Day, fam! What the hell was I thinking? I didn’t even bring a bloody pair of socks to this place? I have a sweater on because it’s a rainy and cold early September morning here on the shores of the lake. It was stormy as hell last night when we went to bed. Is there anything cozier on God’s good earth than hitting the sack when the world is turning upside down out of doors? The wind was howling, the waves were lashing our bay-facing windows, and the dock lights up and down the shore were fuzzy and ill-defined as we faded off to sleep under an ever-worsening storm. It wasn’t a three-dog night, but it was close.
This is in contrast to yesterday, which was beautiful. It was sunny and warm, and there was a nice cool breeze coming down the bay out of the north. Everybody who wanted to swim went swimming, and my brother from another mother was good enough to stop by with lunch for everybody. I called in the order to Beans, and it was all good. To keep things simple, I ordered the same sandwich for Willie, the Ev man, and me. The missus had a nice garden salad, Debbie Rah-Rah had a nice Italian sandwich, and Rollie had what I think was an Italian sub of sorts. Rollie also brought a nice berry pie from the Cleverdale Country store, which was more than decent of him.
The lot of us sat lakeside for the better part of the day and enjoyed watching the activities taking place out on the bay. It’s really the last weekend to enjoy the lake since it just gets cooler and less hospitable as we get further into the month of September. The leaves haven’t started to change yet, but it won’t be long now. The lot of us debated whether it would rain or not, and it became less and less of a debate as the day went on since you could see the rain coming over the mountains some ten miles or so to the north. Those of us who didn’t want the rain saw one trajectory, and those following the local forecast knew all too well what we had in store for us saw an entirely different trajectory. The die, as they say, was cast.
It was good to see everyone enjoying themselves. The Ev man went swimming once or twice, as did Debbie Rah-Rah and the missus. Every buoy in the bay was taken by noon, and boats drifted in and out of the bay into the early afternoon looking for a buoy to tie up to, but pickings were slim to none. There is no better place to bring your fam on the entire lake than Sandy Bay. You need a boat to get here unless you’re fortunate enough to live in a house along the shore. Oh, I almost forgot. Then there are renters like us who come and go throughout the summer months looking for our own slice of the pie. We’re here three days now, and we still haven’t been food shopping.
I’m a little distracted now since the electricity has gone off, and we’re all sitting around wondering how long it will be before we get our electricity back. I don’t know how long I can stay focused on doing what I’m doing at this keyboard while the family frets over this, that, and the other thing. We can’t open the refrigerator door since we don’t know how long we’ll be without electricity. If we can’t open the refrigerator door, we can’t get any of our leftover pizza if that is what we wanted to have for breakfast.
The weekend is over. Yesterday was a complete washout. It rained all day, and as I woke up this morning, it’s still raining. So what is what I say? I mean, who cares? It’s not like we had planned to go hiking or anything. We can still go swimming if we want. Yes, you can go swimming in the rain. If I had to guess, I’d say temperatures are probably in the sixties, so that doesn’t bode well for water sports. I asked the missus if she had any plans to go to the museum while we were in town, and she said that she did not. I take from that that there are no exhibits on tap that she’s interested in seeing. That’s fine. We’ll do something else.
One good thing about this rental is that there are tables for everyone. We usually have to fight for table space, given that the missus needs room to do her vacation puzzle. The Ev man and I refer to the table that she’s using as the kid’s table, given its size. I think that the table is used precisely for the kids. You know, give them their own space and let them have at it, whatever that is. If they want to make a mess of whatever, they can do that too. Pipe down, you little bastards. I can hear my father now as I sit here writing in this here journal. Those aren’t his words, just so you know, but the sentiment is close to being on target. He’s been gone since 1995. RIP pops.
I’m always mindful when cooking something for the fam that I balance carbs with protein. That is especially true when it comes to cooking for the Ev man. That means making a nice meat sauce to go with spaghetti sauce. That means adding a rash of bacon to any BLT and not that turkey substitute stuff, although turkey is protein as well. I made a nice spaghetti dinner last night for the fam. I was a little surprised when the missus said that she wasn’t going to have any, so I think I shamed her into having a forkful or two just to appease me. She didn’t have the meat sauce, which meant more meat sauce for the Ev man and me. There is a God.
I bought the kind of Parmesan cheese that the Ev man likes so that he could have more than his share of wood shavings if that is what he wanted to do. Ever since they came out with the studies showing that Parmesan cheese had fillers like wood shavings, we’ve usually tried to avoid the cheaper brands to stay away from the shavings. Not the Ev man, though. He doubled down. The more shavings, the better. That has been his mindset. I’m not sure where that comes from, but it is what it is. I do worry that he goes through the Parmesan cheese a little too fast, though, which means that he gets more than the average bear when it comes to the shavings. Maybe I’ll call him Woody, or Woodrow from now on. I think that won’t be lost on him.
It’s the Ev man’s vacation too. Right? It’s his time away from however he refers to his existence. It’s a nice break from this or that. Maybe it just means that it’s a change of scenery. I noticed that the empty bottles and cans were piling up on the table next to his bed here at the rental, and I had a good mind to sweep the lot of it into an empty trash bin. But, I thought to myself, if this is what he wants, if this is what he prefers, then who the hell am I to suggest that he do anything any differently? Sometimes, you need to stop being a dad and just let the children do what the children want to do. If that means letting them sit at the children’s table while throwing spaghetti at each other, then fuck it, that’s what you do. Did I mention the clothes on the floor in his bedroom? Do we need to go there? We do not.
I was telling the fam that we should have stopped to buy more milk and maybe a couple of tomatoes when we were out food shopping yesterday. I wanted to buy milk from the store down the road here and not at the supermarket where we were making other purchases. We bought ice at the supermarket, so there was some urgency in getting back to the rental as quickly as possible. I also didn’t want tomatoes from the supermarket, so thought we might want to stop at a local roadside stand. Despite passing a rather robust-looking farmers market roadside thingy, the missus insisted that just keep going. But, ma, they have watermelons there! I don’t call her “ma,” just so you know, but you get my drift. She wasn’t buying any of it. I don’t want to tell you how much we spent at the supermarket. That was without buying milk and watermelon!
We all went down to the Cleverdale store yesterday morning for breakfast sandwiches. It was the first of two rainy days on our vacation, and, needless to say, we weren’t the only people at the store. I don’t know that we were expecting to order sandwiches, but that is what we ended up doing, so it was all good. Ev loved his Mexican burrito breakfast, and the missus and I had bagel sandwiches which we found to be a bit too bready, if that’s a word. Ev was wanting to return the next morning for another nice breakfast, but the place had weird hours, so was closed for the next two days.
It looks like we’re going to pass on renting a boat. It was all about the Ev man for me, so when he said that he was fine with not renting a boat, then I was okay with it as well. The logistics of renting a boat on this lake, not to mention the expense, are enough to have you rethinking any plans you might have made in the days and weeks leading up to our time here at the lake. Can you imagine the noobs running through their doors wanting to rent a boat when they don’t know the first thing about using a boat? I think the agencies hereabouts are trying to implement some kind of licensing for boaters, so we’ll see how that works out. Here’s hoping that it saves a life or two.
I’ve only seen one of my peeps now that we’re here at the lake for some three-plus days. I’ll need to reach out and see if any of them want to come up for a swim or maybe just hang out for a bit. My brother from another mother was good enough to o spring for lunch for the lot of us the other day, so I’ll want to return that favor one way or another. I’m happy to report that we might get to see a little bit of sun today after two straight days of rain, so that should lift our spirits. We’re on the shores of Lake George, the queen of American lakes, for chrissakes. We owe it to ourselves to get our rear ends into the lake and let Mother Nature decide where we go from there.
Wait one fucking minute! I thought that the judge overseeing the Trump case where the DOJ raided Mar-a-Lago told them that one of the reasons that she was appointing a Special Master was because she couldn’t trust the DOJ when it came to leaking documents and such to the media. Well, as Ronald Reagan used to say, “there they go again.” And the compliant media just goes along with the charade when they amplify the story, again and again, ad nauseam. Now they have him. Now they have what they need not only to indict Trump but to lock him up. The DOJ has now leaked documents to the Washington Post showing that Trump had top-secret information concerning the nuclear capability on some yet-to-be-identified country. As Jeff Kushner puts it, it’s Russia-gate 2.0. It’s laughable, is what it is.
We have a water dispenser here at this rental that we’re kind of liking. You know what I’m talking about. Right? It’s one of those 20-gallon jugs that sits atop a base that both heats and cools the water. We’ve emptied one already, and we set about trying to get a replacement with some success. Not because our rental agent was very helpful in getting that to happen, but because she wasn’t. This fellow who seems to be involved with the maintenance of the joint one way or another was around the other day, and he was good enough to drop off two replacement jugs for us. Sometimes, you just need to know whom to ask. The rental agent, as a matter of fact, told us that we were on our own when it came to getting a water refill. Bollocks!
Did I mention that I made the Ev man sloppy Joe’s last night for dinner? He bought a can of Manwich the other day when we went food shopping. It’s one of those deals where you cook the hamburger separately, and then you throw in the Manwich sauce before mixing it all together. It’s not my cup of tea, but the Ev man seemed to like it, so that’s all that matters. I made enough so he can have seconds and maybe even thirds over the course of the next day or two. Oh, and I scooped it onto a couple of nice hamburger buns that Ev picked up. The missus settled for an ear of corn, and I didn’t have anything for whatever reason. I take that back. I had a lemon poppyseed muffin. Who’s your daddy?
Anyway, the Ev man said something about getting one of these water dispenser things in his apartment. He seems to think that he has just the spot for it, so this might be something we want to give a little more thought to. Can we buy these jugs and replace them ourselves, or does he need to contract with a supplier in order to get the water up to his apartment? Is it something that he likes now but might tire of as time goes on? The water in his town is shite, so this might be one way around that problem. I used to cart up gallon jugs of spring water which kept him for a while, but he stopped asking for those deliveries, and I didn’t push back. I’m not happy knowing what I know about what he’s drinking when it comes to the water coming through his tap. I think it’s something that we can and should remedy. Food for thought.
It’s been a wicked year thus far for people looking to make a few shekels in the stock market. I was sure that the Biden Administration was going to cook the books so that Americans going to the polls in November to vote in the Mid Term elections would look favorably on the party in power in Washington (Democrats) that was wholly or partially responsible for making it all happen. But returns for those Americans in the stock markets have been abysmal. The NASDAQ is down some 27% YTD, and the S&P is down some 17% YTD. If the democrats lose a lot of seats in Congress because of their constituent’s leaky or sinking 401k’s, then maybe that’s a good thing. Then again, maybe there will be a run-up in the markets between now and November. We’ve seen a good bear market rally here and there, so hope springs eternal, as they say. I’ll take the losses if it means we conservatives take back the House and the Senate. FJB
It’s Friday, the last full day of our vacation here in Sandy Bay. We’ve had a good mix of weather, and it looks like we’re going to end the week on a high note. The missus and the Ev man have had their time swimming, so that’s good. I could care less about swimming, so I’m good as well. The Bay has been predictably quiet in this week after Labor Day, and whatever passed for raucous up until now has since gone elsewhere for better or worse. We’re not that insulated that we didn’t hear about the passing of Queen Elizabeth, but, for all intents and purposes, it was in one ear and out the other. Her stooge of a son is taking over as king, so there’s that. I’m all for dismantling the monarchy and turning over the castles to the people, just so you know where I’m coming from.
Man, you can’t go anywhere hereabouts without seeing deer. We came so close to one last night on our way into town that the Ev man referred to it as a “National Geographic” moment. It was just standing on the side of the road doing whatever the hell deer do. I drove slowly, thinking that it might at any moment dart out into the road ahead of me or, worse yet, leap over the hood of my car, giving us all a fright. It never budged from its spot and what that told me is that they’ve become totally habituated to living within city limits as it were, and they are here to fucking stay. Deer hunting is probably not possible, given the laws that say you cannot discharge a weapon within city limits. Well, within proximity to local housing anyway.
We never did rent a boat. I think I lost my desire to do that as days came and went here at the cottage. If the week hadn’t started out as rainy as it did, I might have been able to sustain whatever it was that had me on track to rent a boat. I thought it might be good for the Ev man to get behind the wheel, but the logistics of putting him behind the wheel was too much for even me to overcome. I made the mistake of not planning other things in the event that the boating thing didn’t work out. That left me feeling a bit flat-footed, and the ripple effects of that failure played out in a rather predictable fashion over the last couple of days. I was nearly bedridden and uninterested in anything and everything requiring my involvement. I was down for the count, as they say. Thankfully, I was not on anyone’s dance card, so the Ev man and the missus got along just fine without me.
There is always this thing about who I am reaching out to while staying here at the lake for the week. I’m talking about my extended family, just to be clear. There are some vacations where I just want to do my own thing, and the family be damned. Who says that I need to reach out to anyone? Is that too anti-social of me? And, am I so self-centered that I think people are even interested in coming around to see me and my fam? I assume nothing, of course. That said, I think I feel a little bad about not reaching out because I think it sends the wrong message. Sometimes, I could give two fucks about sending the wrong message. The backdrop to all of this is that I’m close to my brothers and sisters, so my wanting to do my own thing would seem fairly counter-intuitive. If any of this sounds confusing, it is because it is.
I should get around to making the BLTs that I promised the fam that I would make. I’ll have to do it today since we’ll not have time to do it tomorrow. We need to be out of this joint by 10 tomorrow morning. That is god-awful early by anyone’s standards. We still have a couple of peaches sitting here on the dining room table, so I’m hoping the Ev man will eat them before we leave tomorrow. I even bought some turkey bacon for the missus since she’s not a consumer of red meat. The missus asked me if I was interested in returning to this spot in the future. I think I responded with a “maybe.” For all I know, the prices of rentals on the lake here might well price us out of future vacations. It’s sad to think that, but it’s true. I just cannot in good conscience pay half a year’s wages just to vacation here. It’s nice, but it’s not that nice.
We tried to drive into the village of Lake George last night, but we got jammed up in the road leading into town. I should have known. There is this muscle car convention or something every year post-Labor Day that creates a mess on the roads and makes it difficult to get from point A to point B, especially if your travel plans have you going into the Village of lake George. We exited stage left, and in doing so, it gave the Ev man a fright. All he saw was the “Do not enter” signage. He thought I was going off the reservation by bucking local laws and going up a one-way street the wrong way. He quickly realized that I knew what I was doing and that I was not, in fact, going up a one-way street the wrong way. It was clear sailing from there, although we were heading out of town and away from what appeared to be hellacious night on the town if you were a muscle car lover.
If I thought I could have gotten the Ev man out of the car to take a walk around the village streets where we could get a closer look at some of the cars, I would have tried harder to do just that. Not because he has no interest in seeing the cars, I would hasten to add, but rather because he’s not inclined to do that sort of thing. Getting out and walking about, I mean. Generally speaking, he’s more inclined to take in the world from the comfort of wherever he’s sitting in the car than to be about and about. He’s just not that guy who’s out there grabbing the world by the balls while his peers are sitting on the sidelines. It’s just the opposite. We push him here and there around the edges, but, limitations being what they are, we defer to his judgment.
The New Hampshire primary is this coming Tuesday. I’ll be casting my votes for the two MAGA candidates, General Bolduc and Karoline Leavitt. Our RINO governor, Sununu, has already endorsed the Morse guy to run against Maggie Hassan in November. The Morse guy strikes me as a dweeb and an establishment guy, so, in my humble opinion, that is not what we need in Congress. We need a couple of damn fighters. We need more Marjorie Taylor Greens and fewer fucking Hassans. And, for God’s sake, we need to get rid of that damn flake, Chris Pappas. Both Hassan and Pappas have been kissing Biden’s ass since they got into office. We need to run those fucks out of office on a rail. If we can stop the democrats from stealing our election in November, my guys might have a chance.
I don’t know that the Ev man is doing all that well. I think he’s a bit distressed that vacation is over, and we’re heading on home today. I tried to get him to take a shower, but he’s not wanting any part of taking a shower. I told him that he’ll feel better, but that went nowhere. He just digs his heels in deeper. I wish he would listen to his old man. I have his best interests at heart, but he may not see it that way. He asked that I make him eggs and bacon for breakfast, so I’ll add that to my list of things to do this morning. That request came in yesterday afternoon. We’ll see how it holds up this morning.
I took my first shower of the week last night after being here for 6 days. When you’re swimming every other day in one of the cleanest lakes in the world, you can take certain breaks along the way, even when it includes things like showering. I was telling the missus yesterday that I didn’t think that the Ev man was all that keen on going over to my brother from another mother’s house when I suggested that we drop by there to return his fishing equipment. He went along anyway but hunkered down in the back seat of the car and hoped, and I was reading between the lines as I always do when it comes to the Ev man, that he wouldn’t have to get out of his seat once we arrived at the house. As fortune would have it, we saw no one around, so left the poles and such in the garage and went on our way.
Our vacation is over now, so I’ll need to put this journal stuff away and help the missus get our stuff squared away. The missus expressed a desire to return to this spot, so that is what we’ll probably do next year around this time. I don’t have a good reason one way or another to push back on her preferences, so sometimes you just go along to get along. The attraction is, and will always be, the beautiful bay just outside our windows here on the lake. The missus tells me that the boats have already begun to arrive for the day, and, not surprisingly, they come in early and leave late. If we had a boat and no house on the lake to go to, we might well consider joining the lot of them. As it is, we have neither, so we’re leaving them all to their own devices. As you were, mateys.
The Ev man needs and deserves a vacation as well. No? You bet your ass he does. Imagine not being able to get away from your place every so often. I wouldn’t like it, and neither would you. We all need that change of scenery to refresh this or that in the space between our ears. As soon as we arrived at the place on the lake, we all went for a swim. Staying at a place on the lake means walking out your front door and walking into the lake. Staying at a place on Sandy Bay means you have sand underfoot and between your toes for as far as the eye can see.
Is there a better time of the year to be here in the Adirondacks? You can “see” the leaves changing color even though that’s a few weeks away yet. Nighttime temperatures can tip into the forties, so you’ll need that extra blanket. Did I mention that there are no blankets in this place? How do you offer a rental without blankets? I can understand not offering sheets and towels, but blankets? This rental just happens to be a converted restaurant that we used to frequent as a family when I was just a child. We were just a boat ride and a bay away if we needed a pizza in a pinch.
The Ev man and I were initially concerned that there was no WI-FI in the place. We had my brother from another mother open the place up due to our anticipated late arrival, and he texted us something to the effect that he didn’t think we had any WI-FI. The Ev man nailed it down when he discovered the router in his bedroom. I think this place even has air conditioning, although we’ll likely not need it during our stay, knowing what we know about the forecast. If I had to guess, I’d say that we’ll go swimming more often than not if we have any issues with the heat.
I’m a bit of a news junkie, so I would not have been happy had there been no WI-FI on the premises. I think I speak for the Ev man as well when I say that we would have had to adjust this or that to get our WI-FI fix. If that means spending two hours a day at the local Starbucks, then that is what you do. Starbucks isn’t exactly local, so that should tell you something about the depth of our collective addictions when it comes to the internet. To put it more plainly, we would have crawled over broken glass just to get two bars on our handheld devices. Oh, and cellular data seems to be non-existent here. Just total fuckery.
The floors are very uneven in this place. I was a little worried that when going to bed that the missus and I would be rolling over on each other, given the tilt in the flooring. As I said, this place has been around for a few years. Thankfully, the bed was nice and firm, and we had no such problem. I also don’t know what size that bed is, but it seems to be short of a queen by a bit, both lengthwise and widthwise. I couldn’t turn over during the night without getting up in the missus’s grille. She was fast asleep, so she would have been none the wiser, but, to me, it seemed a bit constraining. She had the luxury of using every last square inch of the real estate while I had to worry about being squeezed off the side of the bed. You have to be awake to worry, so there’s that.
It’s 7:38 am here on Sandy Bay, and the missus informs me that there are already two boats moored out on the bay. It’s Sunday morning of a three-day Labor Day weekend, so maybe that shouldn’t surprise us. It also tells us something about the level of insanity that we can expect as the day gets underway. I don’t know precisely how many buoys there are out there on Sandy Bay, but I’m guessing that most, if not all, will be taken by the time the noon hour comes around. The hotter it gets today, the sooner the buoys will be taken. You grab them while you can because this location is heaven on earth for boaters and, yes, especially people who like to get sand between their toes when they go in the water.
I’d hoped to have something for breakfast for the fam, but I think I’ve fallen flat where that is concerned. We stopped at Stewarts before we arrived here at the camp as we always do for the customary gallon of milk and a dozen eggs, but I couldn’t bring myself to pay $8 a pound for what appeared to be less than a pound of bacon. I don’t know if it will be any cheaper when we go to the supermarket but here’s hoping. I suppose I could make Ev an egg sandwich with the eggs we bought and some nice sourdough bread that we brought from home. It’s the best we have to offer for now. We also have some oatmeal and some cereal, but that about does it.
For maybe the first time ever here at the lake, we don’t have a boat to use. We’ve come to Sandy Bay over the years by boat, but this year, we’re renting a place right on the bay so there really is no need for a boat. Well, no need for a boat to come here anyway. Do we love to cruise the lake when we do have a boat? Of course, we do. We’ll look at boat rentals in a couple of days when the summer crowds have gone back to wherever they came from. The lake will be less crowded, and, if the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise, rental prices will be off-peak season if that even exists. That’s a whole lot of wishful thinking on my part. But, the fam is worth it, so I’ll pay the piper if and when the time comes.
I have a good mind to put the prices of everything I’m talking about down on paper just so I can look back sometime in the future and see how crazy things were way back when. It’s not just the price of bacon. It’s the price of the rental we’re staying at. It’s the price of the boat we’re wanting to rent. It’s the price of a gallon of gasoline we’ll need to buy if we want to go boating. It’s the price of gas that we need to put in the car to go from point A to point B. If we had plans to go fishing, which we don’t, I’d be telling you about the price we paid for a dozen night crawlers. I’m a little embarrassed to talk about any of it because it all seems so outrageous.
I watched Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania last night on my iPad. He was in a kick-ass mood, and he was in town to boost the prospects of both Dr. Oz and Doug Mastriano. They are running for Pennsylvania’s Senate and Governor’s seat, respectively. There had to be ten to fifteen thousand people in the auditorium. Compare that to a measly 250-300 people that were in attendance at Biden’s “rally” earlier in the week. It was a raucous crowd, and they loved every minute of what Trump was serving up. As Trump always puts it, “is there any better place to be than a Trump rally?” He still looks and sounds like a candidate who’s running in 2024, so, for anyone still on the sidelines, it’s all hands on deck. Oh, and Trump still maintains that he won the 2020 election. He’ll get no argument from me.
Debbie Rah-Rah is on her way. Did I mention that she and her main squeeze, Wille, planned to pay us a visit today? It’s always good to see Deb and Willie, so we’ll roll out the welcome carpet. We don’t have a lot to offer them in the way of refreshments since we’ve not been to the store, so we’ll have to make it up as we go along. Deb is a huge fan of Sandy Bay, so once she goes into the lake, we might not see her for a while. You can walk across the end of the bay here at the shoreline, and you’d still only be waist-deep in the water. That’s neither here nor there, but I thought I might just mention it. I’m not sure about Wille and water, but he’s free to follow his inner Wille whenever and wherever that takes him.
I can already feel myself getting a little long-winded when it comes to writing in my journal. Vacations tend to do that to me. I just go on and on for no particular reason, and there’s no end to the gibberish I write about. I made Evan a nice egg sandwich when he got up, so I’m happy he was receptive to having me make it. That isn’t always the case. As it is, there aren’t a lot of choices without going out to a store, so it is what it is. Would he have preferred a little ketchup with his eggs? No doubt. Would he have liked a sausage or two with his eggs? You betcha. Would he have liked his egg sandwich with cheese? Unquestionably. Maybe a little melted cheddar on his sourdough toast and eggs? My God, yes. This is only day one of seven. Strap in.
Happy Labor Day, fam! What the hell was I thinking? I didn’t even bring a bloody pair of socks to this place? I have a sweater on because it’s a rainy and cold early September morning here on the shores of the lake. It was stormy as hell last night when we went to bed. Is there anything cozier on God’s good earth than hitting the sack when the world is turning upside down out of doors? The wind was howling, the waves were lashing our bay-facing windows, and the dock lights up and down the shore were fuzzy and ill-defined as we faded off to sleep under an ever-worsening storm. It wasn’t a three-dog night, but it was close.
This is in contrast to yesterday, which was beautiful. It was sunny and warm, and there was a nice cool breeze coming down the bay out of the north. Everybody who wanted to swim went swimming, and my brother from another mother was good enough to stop by with lunch for everybody. I called in the order to Beans, and it was all good. To keep things simple, I ordered the same sandwich for Willie, the Ev man, and me. The missus had a nice garden salad, Debbie Rah-Rah had a nice Italian sandwich, and Rollie had what I think was an Italian sub of sorts. Rollie also brought a nice berry pie from the Cleverdale Country store, which was more than decent of him.
The lot of us sat lakeside for the better part of the day and enjoyed watching the activities taking place out on the bay. It’s really the last weekend to enjoy the lake since it just gets cooler and less hospitable as we get further into the month of September. The leaves haven’t started to change yet, but it won’t be long now. The lot of us debated whether it would rain or not, and it became less and less of a debate as the day went on since you could see the rain coming over the mountains some ten miles or so to the north. Those of us who didn’t want the rain saw one trajectory, and those following the local forecast knew all too well what we had in store for us saw an entirely different trajectory. The die, as they say, was cast.
It was good to see everyone enjoying themselves. The Ev man went swimming once or twice, as did Debbie Rah-Rah and the missus. Every buoy in the bay was taken by noon, and boats drifted in and out of the bay into the early afternoon looking for a buoy to tie up to, but pickings were slim to none. There is no better place to bring your fam on the entire lake than Sandy Bay. You need a boat to get here unless you’re fortunate enough to live in a house along the shore. Oh, I almost forgot. Then there are renters like us who come and go throughout the summer months looking for our own slice of the pie. We’re here three days now, and we still haven’t been food shopping.
I’m a little distracted now since the electricity has gone off, and we’re all sitting around wondering how long it will be before we get our electricity back. I don’t know how long I can stay focused on doing what I’m doing at this keyboard while the family frets over this, that, and the other thing. We can’t open the refrigerator door since we don’t know how long we’ll be without electricity. If we can’t open the refrigerator door, we can’t get any of our leftover pizza if that is what we wanted to have for breakfast.
The weekend is over. Yesterday was a complete washout. It rained all day, and as I woke up this morning, it’s still raining. So what is what I say? I mean, who cares? It’s not like we had planned to go hiking or anything. We can still go swimming if we want. Yes, you can go swimming in the rain. If I had to guess, I’d say temperatures are probably in the sixties, so that doesn’t bode well for water sports. I asked the missus if she had any plans to go to the museum while we were in town, and she said that she did not. I take from that that there are no exhibits on tap that she’s interested in seeing. That’s fine. We’ll do something else.
One good thing about this rental is that there are tables for everyone. We usually have to fight for table space, given that the missus needs room to do her vacation puzzle. The Ev man and I refer to the table that she’s using as the kid’s table, given its size. I think that the table is used precisely for the kids. You know, give them their own space and let them have at it, whatever that is. If they want to make a mess of whatever, they can do that too. Pipe down, you little bastards. I can hear my father now as I sit here writing in this here journal. Those aren’t his words, just so you know, but the sentiment is close to being on target. He’s been gone since 1995. RIP pops.
I’m always mindful when cooking something for the fam that I balance carbs with protein. That is especially true when it comes to cooking for the Ev man. That means making a nice meat sauce to go with spaghetti sauce. That means adding a rash of bacon to any BLT and not that turkey substitute stuff, although turkey is protein as well. I made a nice spaghetti dinner last night for the fam. I was a little surprised when the missus said that she wasn’t going to have any, so I think I shamed her into having a forkful or two just to appease me. She didn’t have the meat sauce, which meant more meat sauce for the Ev man and me. There is a God.
I bought the kind of Parmesan cheese that the Ev man likes so that he could have more than his share of wood shavings if that is what he wanted to do. Ever since they came out with the studies showing that Parmesan cheese had fillers like wood shavings, we’ve usually tried to avoid the cheaper brands to stay away from the shavings. Not the Ev man, though. He doubled down. The more shavings, the better. That has been his mindset. I’m not sure where that comes from, but it is what it is. I do worry that he goes through the Parmesan cheese a little too fast, though, which means that he gets more than the average bear when it comes to the shavings. Maybe I’ll call him Woody, or Woodrow from now on. I think that won’t be lost on him.
It’s the Ev man’s vacation too. Right? It’s his time away from however he refers to his existence. It’s a nice break from this or that. Maybe it just means that it’s a change of scenery. I noticed that the empty bottles and cans were piling up on the table next to his bed here at the rental, and I had a good mind to sweep the lot of it into an empty trash bin. But, I thought to myself, if this is what he wants, if this is what he prefers, then who the hell am I to suggest that he do anything any differently? Sometimes, you need to stop being a dad and just let the children do what the children want to do. If that means letting them sit at the children’s table while throwing spaghetti at each other, then fuck it, that’s what you do. Did I mention the clothes on the floor in his bedroom? Do we need to go there? We do not.
I was telling the fam that we should have stopped to buy more milk and maybe a couple of tomatoes when we were out food shopping yesterday. I wanted to buy milk from the store down the road here and not at the supermarket where we were making other purchases. We bought ice at the supermarket, so there was some urgency in getting back to the rental as quickly as possible. I also didn’t want tomatoes from the supermarket, so thought we might want to stop at a local roadside stand. Despite passing a rather robust-looking farmers market roadside thingy, the missus insisted that just keep going. But, ma, they have watermelons there! I don’t call her “ma,” just so you know, but you get my drift. She wasn’t buying any of it. I don’t want to tell you how much we spent at the supermarket. That was without buying milk and watermelon!
We all went down to the Cleverdale store yesterday morning for breakfast sandwiches. It was the first of two rainy days on our vacation, and, needless to say, we weren’t the only people at the store. I don’t know that we were expecting to order sandwiches, but that is what we ended up doing, so it was all good. Ev loved his Mexican burrito breakfast, and the missus and I had bagel sandwiches which we found to be a bit too bready, if that’s a word. Ev was wanting to return the next morning for another nice breakfast, but the place had weird hours, so was closed for the next two days.
It looks like we’re going to pass on renting a boat. It was all about the Ev man for me, so when he said that he was fine with not renting a boat, then I was okay with it as well. The logistics of renting a boat on this lake, not to mention the expense, are enough to have you rethinking any plans you might have made in the days and weeks leading up to our time here at the lake. Can you imagine the noobs running through their doors wanting to rent a boat when they don’t know the first thing about using a boat? I think the agencies hereabouts are trying to implement some kind of licensing for boaters, so we’ll see how that works out. Here’s hoping that it saves a life or two.
I’ve only seen one of my peeps now that we’re here at the lake for some three-plus days. I’ll need to reach out and see if any of them want to come up for a swim or maybe just hang out for a bit. My brother from another mother was good enough to o spring for lunch for the lot of us the other day, so I’ll want to return that favor one way or another. I’m happy to report that we might get to see a little bit of sun today after two straight days of rain, so that should lift our spirits. We’re on the shores of Lake George, the queen of American lakes, for chrissakes. We owe it to ourselves to get our rear ends into the lake and let Mother Nature decide where we go from there.
Wait one fucking minute! I thought that the judge overseeing the Trump case where the DOJ raided Mar-a-Lago told them that one of the reasons that she was appointing a Special Master was because she couldn’t trust the DOJ when it came to leaking documents and such to the media. Well, as Ronald Reagan used to say, “there they go again.” And the compliant media just goes along with the charade when they amplify the story, again and again, ad nauseam. Now they have him. Now they have what they need not only to indict Trump but to lock him up. The DOJ has now leaked documents to the Washington Post showing that Trump had top-secret information concerning the nuclear capability on some yet-to-be-identified country. As Jeff Kushner puts it, it’s Russia-gate 2.0. It’s laughable, is what it is.
We have a water dispenser here at this rental that we’re kind of liking. You know what I’m talking about. Right? It’s one of those 20-gallon jugs that sits atop a base that both heats and cools the water. We’ve emptied one already, and we set about trying to get a replacement with some success. Not because our rental agent was very helpful in getting that to happen, but because she wasn’t. This fellow who seems to be involved with the maintenance of the joint one way or another was around the other day, and he was good enough to drop off two replacement jugs for us. Sometimes, you just need to know whom to ask. The rental agent, as a matter of fact, told us that we were on our own when it came to getting a water refill. Bollocks!
Did I mention that I made the Ev man sloppy Joe’s last night for dinner? He bought a can of Manwich the other day when we went food shopping. It’s one of those deals where you cook the hamburger separately, and then you throw in the Manwich sauce before mixing it all together. It’s not my cup of tea, but the Ev man seemed to like it, so that’s all that matters. I made enough so he can have seconds and maybe even thirds over the course of the next day or two. Oh, and I scooped it onto a couple of nice hamburger buns that Ev picked up. The missus settled for an ear of corn, and I didn’t have anything for whatever reason. I take that back. I had a lemon poppyseed muffin. Who’s your daddy?
Anyway, the Ev man said something about getting one of these water dispenser things in his apartment. He seems to think that he has just the spot for it, so this might be something we want to give a little more thought to. Can we buy these jugs and replace them ourselves, or does he need to contract with a supplier in order to get the water up to his apartment? Is it something that he likes now but might tire of as time goes on? The water in his town is shite, so this might be one way around that problem. I used to cart up gallon jugs of spring water which kept him for a while, but he stopped asking for those deliveries, and I didn’t push back. I’m not happy knowing what I know about what he’s drinking when it comes to the water coming through his tap. I think it’s something that we can and should remedy. Food for thought.
It’s been a wicked year thus far for people looking to make a few shekels in the stock market. I was sure that the Biden Administration was going to cook the books so that Americans going to the polls in November to vote in the Mid Term elections would look favorably on the party in power in Washington (Democrats) that was wholly or partially responsible for making it all happen. But returns for those Americans in the stock markets have been abysmal. The NASDAQ is down some 27% YTD, and the S&P is down some 17% YTD. If the democrats lose a lot of seats in Congress because of their constituent’s leaky or sinking 401k’s, then maybe that’s a good thing. Then again, maybe there will be a run-up in the markets between now and November. We’ve seen a good bear market rally here and there, so hope springs eternal, as they say. I’ll take the losses if it means we conservatives take back the House and the Senate. FJB
It’s Friday, the last full day of our vacation here in Sandy Bay. We’ve had a good mix of weather, and it looks like we’re going to end the week on a high note. The missus and the Ev man have had their time swimming, so that’s good. I could care less about swimming, so I’m good as well. The Bay has been predictably quiet in this week after Labor Day, and whatever passed for raucous up until now has since gone elsewhere for better or worse. We’re not that insulated that we didn’t hear about the passing of Queen Elizabeth, but, for all intents and purposes, it was in one ear and out the other. Her stooge of a son is taking over as king, so there’s that. I’m all for dismantling the monarchy and turning over the castles to the people, just so you know where I’m coming from.
Man, you can’t go anywhere hereabouts without seeing deer. We came so close to one last night on our way into town that the Ev man referred to it as a “National Geographic” moment. It was just standing on the side of the road doing whatever the hell deer do. I drove slowly, thinking that it might at any moment dart out into the road ahead of me or, worse yet, leap over the hood of my car, giving us all a fright. It never budged from its spot and what that told me is that they’ve become totally habituated to living within city limits as it were, and they are here to fucking stay. Deer hunting is probably not possible, given the laws that say you cannot discharge a weapon within city limits. Well, within proximity to local housing anyway.
We never did rent a boat. I think I lost my desire to do that as days came and went here at the cottage. If the week hadn’t started out as rainy as it did, I might have been able to sustain whatever it was that had me on track to rent a boat. I thought it might be good for the Ev man to get behind the wheel, but the logistics of putting him behind the wheel was too much for even me to overcome. I made the mistake of not planning other things in the event that the boating thing didn’t work out. That left me feeling a bit flat-footed, and the ripple effects of that failure played out in a rather predictable fashion over the last couple of days. I was nearly bedridden and uninterested in anything and everything requiring my involvement. I was down for the count, as they say. Thankfully, I was not on anyone’s dance card, so the Ev man and the missus got along just fine without me.
There is always this thing about who I am reaching out to while staying here at the lake for the week. I’m talking about my extended family, just to be clear. There are some vacations where I just want to do my own thing, and the family be damned. Who says that I need to reach out to anyone? Is that too anti-social of me? And, am I so self-centered that I think people are even interested in coming around to see me and my fam? I assume nothing, of course. That said, I think I feel a little bad about not reaching out because I think it sends the wrong message. Sometimes, I could give two fucks about sending the wrong message. The backdrop to all of this is that I’m close to my brothers and sisters, so my wanting to do my own thing would seem fairly counter-intuitive. If any of this sounds confusing, it is because it is.
I should get around to making the BLTs that I promised the fam that I would make. I’ll have to do it today since we’ll not have time to do it tomorrow. We need to be out of this joint by 10 tomorrow morning. That is god-awful early by anyone’s standards. We still have a couple of peaches sitting here on the dining room table, so I’m hoping the Ev man will eat them before we leave tomorrow. I even bought some turkey bacon for the missus since she’s not a consumer of red meat. The missus asked me if I was interested in returning to this spot in the future. I think I responded with a “maybe.” For all I know, the prices of rentals on the lake here might well price us out of future vacations. It’s sad to think that, but it’s true. I just cannot in good conscience pay half a year’s wages just to vacation here. It’s nice, but it’s not that nice.
We tried to drive into the village of Lake George last night, but we got jammed up in the road leading into town. I should have known. There is this muscle car convention or something every year post-Labor Day that creates a mess on the roads and makes it difficult to get from point A to point B, especially if your travel plans have you going into the Village of lake George. We exited stage left, and in doing so, it gave the Ev man a fright. All he saw was the “Do not enter” signage. He thought I was going off the reservation by bucking local laws and going up a one-way street the wrong way. He quickly realized that I knew what I was doing and that I was not, in fact, going up a one-way street the wrong way. It was clear sailing from there, although we were heading out of town and away from what appeared to be hellacious night on the town if you were a muscle car lover.
If I thought I could have gotten the Ev man out of the car to take a walk around the village streets where we could get a closer look at some of the cars, I would have tried harder to do just that. Not because he has no interest in seeing the cars, I would hasten to add, but rather because he’s not inclined to do that sort of thing. Getting out and walking about, I mean. Generally speaking, he’s more inclined to take in the world from the comfort of wherever he’s sitting in the car than to be about and about. He’s just not that guy who’s out there grabbing the world by the balls while his peers are sitting on the sidelines. It’s just the opposite. We push him here and there around the edges, but, limitations being what they are, we defer to his judgment.
The New Hampshire primary is this coming Tuesday. I’ll be casting my votes for the two MAGA candidates, General Bolduc and Karoline Leavitt. Our RINO governor, Sununu, has already endorsed the Morse guy to run against Maggie Hassan in November. The Morse guy strikes me as a dweeb and an establishment guy, so, in my humble opinion, that is not what we need in Congress. We need a couple of damn fighters. We need more Marjorie Taylor Greens and fewer fucking Hassans. And, for God’s sake, we need to get rid of that damn flake, Chris Pappas. Both Hassan and Pappas have been kissing Biden’s ass since they got into office. We need to run those fucks out of office on a rail. If we can stop the democrats from stealing our election in November, my guys might have a chance.
I don’t know that the Ev man is doing all that well. I think he’s a bit distressed that vacation is over, and we’re heading on home today. I tried to get him to take a shower, but he’s not wanting any part of taking a shower. I told him that he’ll feel better, but that went nowhere. He just digs his heels in deeper. I wish he would listen to his old man. I have his best interests at heart, but he may not see it that way. He asked that I make him eggs and bacon for breakfast, so I’ll add that to my list of things to do this morning. That request came in yesterday afternoon. We’ll see how it holds up this morning.
I took my first shower of the week last night after being here for 6 days. When you’re swimming every other day in one of the cleanest lakes in the world, you can take certain breaks along the way, even when it includes things like showering. I was telling the missus yesterday that I didn’t think that the Ev man was all that keen on going over to my brother from another mother’s house when I suggested that we drop by there to return his fishing equipment. He went along anyway but hunkered down in the back seat of the car and hoped, and I was reading between the lines as I always do when it comes to the Ev man, that he wouldn’t have to get out of his seat once we arrived at the house. As fortune would have it, we saw no one around, so left the poles and such in the garage and went on our way.
Our vacation is over now, so I’ll need to put this journal stuff away and help the missus get our stuff squared away. The missus expressed a desire to return to this spot, so that is what we’ll probably do next year around this time. I don’t have a good reason one way or another to push back on her preferences, so sometimes you just go along to get along. The attraction is, and will always be, the beautiful bay just outside our windows here on the lake. The missus tells me that the boats have already begun to arrive for the day, and, not surprisingly, they come in early and leave late. If we had a boat and no house on the lake to go to, we might well consider joining the lot of them. As it is, we have neither, so we’re leaving them all to their own devices. As you were, mateys.
Pick Your Poison
04/09/22 07:05
Buenos Dias, laddies! We're off and running on another Monday morning. I'll need to push this week's post out one day earlier this week due to issues beyond my control. That means getting on the stick and writing in this here journal until my brain starts to hurt. I'll need to write a week's worth of gibberish in a week short of a day. Am I making any sense at all? I don't feel like I am, but I'm not the final judge. Anyway, it is what it is. Do I have big plans for this week's journal? Not really, truth be told. That has never stopped me before, so, as they say in the movies, feets don't fail me now.
I am a little curious this morning as to what the financial markets are going to do today. We saw all the major indices plunge by some four percent last Friday, so we'll see if continues today. There is some consensus amongst the talking heads on the telly that the market topped last week after rallying several weeks in this inflationary bear market we find ourselves in. Powell's comments didn't help the market on Friday, so we'll see where the darn thing goes today. Is it possible that we lose another four percent today? That would be eight percent in two days. Probably not likely short of some calamitous event in the markets, but it is possible. There is always that business about the market being oversold or overbought and the pendulum swinging one way or another, but that speaks to probabilities and not much else. On your mark, get set, trade!
Like the missus, I enjoyed watching a few of the Little League World Series games on the telly over the last week or two. From the start, the team from Honolulu looked to be the dominant team, and the team favored to win the whole enchilada. As you may or may not know, the teams are broken down into two categories: The International teams and the teams from the USA. The winners from each of the two categories face off in the finals for the so-called "World Series." The Asian teams usually do quite well, but they were beaten by the team from Curacao this year. Curacao went into the final game yesterday against Honolulu expecting great things, but they were soundly trounced. It didn't help that Curacao's ace pitcher wasn't eligible to play in the game.
You knew there was a problem when the cameras from the networks stopped scanning the faces of the parents of the players from Curacao in the stands. That was not the case when, in the first inning, one of the players from Curacao scored a run by stealing a base when the ball got loose from one of the players from Honolulu. That seemed to capture in a nutshell the kind of magic that the players from Curacao needed to beat this team from Honolulu. Any hopes and dreams the boys from Curacao had of taking home the trophy quickly faded when the boys from Honolulu had two back-to-back home runs in their very next return to the batter's box. It was also the last time you saw any faces of the parents of the boys from Curacao on National television. Maybe that was for the best since the team from Honolulu went on to beat Curacao 13-3.
I was listening to one of my favorite morning talk show hosts this morning, and he's just back from a vacation with his family in Arizona. He commented that Arizona has basically been annexed by the Mexican Cartels. Illegal aliens were everywhere, and the danger from the Cartels, especially for those Arizonans living along the border, was very real. If you had any sense at all, you carried a weapon with you wherever you went. You protected your family at all costs. This is America. What has happened to our great country? That's me speaking. If that can happen in the state of Arizona, it can happen anywhere in our great country. It makes me sick to my stomach to think that we have a president and a political party that is responsible for this carnage, this invasion, this travesty of justice.
It's no wonder that republican candidates are ahead in the polls in Arizona. People want their fucking country back. They want the illegal aliens sent back to their country of origin, they want the flow of drugs across their border to come to a stop, and they want their politicians to grow a fucking spine and do something about the problems dropped on their doorsteps by the leftist democrats and their pathetic pied piper, Joey Bumbles Biden. Those of us not living in states along our southern border should take no comfort in the fact that we don't have illegals and drug runners running through our backyards at night. The Biden Administration is transporting thousands of illegals into every state in our union every night of the week, so nobody should be under the delusion that they won't be affected by this invasion.
I've seen quite a few tweets from Dr. Oz as of late about what he's doing out on the campaign trail. As you know, he's the Republican Senatorial candidate from Pennsylvania, and he's running against John Fetterman on the Democratic ticket. As you may also know, Fetterman had a stroke recently, and he's spent a total of 11 minutes on the campaign trail since his so-called recovery. I think that the Fetterman people think that they can run his campaign out of his basement as Joe Biden did during his 2020 race against Trump with similar results. The democrats don't want a voice in the senate with the candidate that they elect, they want a rubber stamp so they can get their radical agenda through Congress and onto the desk of someone they hope will be a democrat president.
If their Senator has to crawl on their hands and knees to put through their vote once in Washington, then so be it. The ends justify the means when it comes to the democrats. They play for keeps. His stroke aside, Fetterman is a radical, and the republicans need to make sure that the voters in Pennsylvania understand the consequences of sending someone like Fetterman to the United States Senate. Dr. Oz is a lot of things, but one thing he is not is radical. Is Pennsylvania not better off electing a RINO (Republican in name only) to the Senate instead of a socialist freak like Fetterman? They most assuredly are. They have a long history of voting for republican senators, so sending Oz to Washington shouldn't be a stretch. Let's do this, my friends.
I'll be heading off with the Ev man this morning to his appointment with his eye doctor. It's one of those appointments where they put that stuff in your eyes, and you're essentially blinded for about 4 hours. That might be a small exaggeration, but he didn't care for the experience the last time he had it done, so I'll be driving this time around. I've got a couple of other errands to run while he's recovering, so it should all work out. Did I mention that I bought a couple of high-intensity low-beam headlights for his car? I was driving it last week or so, and I thought his low beams were a little on the tired side. He has an older car which might help explain some of it, but the lenses are getting a bit frosted if that's the right word, so these new bulbs should help. I don't think he's out at night all that much, but he is out and about in the early morning hours quite often, so think of this as a risk mitigation measure.
I'm going to have to rethink my garden next year. It seems that we have a groundhog hereabouts that has eaten a lot of my tomatoes right off the damn vine. The little mother chewed right through the plastic fence I put up, and he's been helping himself to the fruits of my labor. He doesn't even wait for them to ripen. I'll be damned if I going to spend the kind of money one needs to spend to put up a sturdier fence just to keep animals out of my garden. It's nice to have homegrown tomatoes but not if I have to spend a king's ransom just to ensure that they reach maturity. I'll happily spend a few more sheckles at the local supermarket, where they feature tomatoes from this or that local farm. Take that, you little bastard! I have one or two plants that have been picked clean before I was able to grab even one tomato, and that irritates the hell out of me. If I were handy with a crossbow or if I thought my neighbors would ignore the sound of a shotgun discharging within earshot of their property, I might well dispatch the little bugger and never look back.
This whole business with Trump and the documents seized by the FBI when they raided his home at Mar-a-Lago a few weeks back gets more bizarre by the day. I don't know who's right or wrong in this Kabuki dance of a fuck-fest, but all of this talk about indicting Trump seems so far-fetched. You're telling me that you're going to indict Trump on a technicality over documents that he had stored at his home? The only thing that makes any sense is that the Biden-ista's are wanting to use the Justice Department to collar Biden's political opposition. What the fuck kind of world are we living in? In what universe is this allowed to happen in the greatest Republic on the face of the earth? It seems a reach at best, and it could well mean the end of the FBI as we know it as an institution once they realize that the American people are not buying what they're selling. They are already on thin ice after any number of missteps that, much to their dismay, have gone public and not in a good way.
Biden is running around making speeches and warning the general public about the dangers of the MAGA-Republicans. I gather that he's referring to Trump's supporters. Like a pyromaniac looking forward to starting his next blaze, Biden has lit the match by going public about the dangers to our republic from Trump supporters, and now, if he can get the Justice Department to put the cuffs on Trump, he will have put a match to the fuel thereby proving his case as Trump supporters take to the streets with their pitchforks and their passion. If the Biden-ista's have their way, it will be January 6th on steroids. Should the riots and mayhem not occur, Biden and his leftist followers will take a victory lap while declaring that the Trump era is over. With a lackluster response to the frogmarching of their political leader into the courtroom, Biden will insist that the general public is now in favor of his heavy-handed tactics and he has been vindicated in doing what he's done.
How far will the Bidenista's take this before the independents that they need to win some of the key congressional races in the upcoming midterms decide that they've seen enough? I looked at a handful of polls yesterday that show Trump beating Biden handily in three or four of the pivotal states that any presidential candidate needs to win in 2024. One poll showed Hershel Walker beating Warnock by a slim margin in the Georgia Senate race. With seventy-four percent of the public believing that our country is going in the wrong direction, it's no surprise that republican candidates are surging in the polls coast to coast. Biden was on the telly last night broadcasting his stump speech from Pennsylvania. If you can believe this, he was going on and on about his support for the police. This is the same ass clown whose party has long called for the defunding of the police. Crime rates have surged on the streets of America under Biden, yet there he was, declaring that Trump supporters posed the greatest danger to our Republic. We've got the video, Joey. Would you like to see it?
Supreme Court Justice, Sotomayor, recently upheld the NYC mandate that municipal workers be vaccinated against COVID. More accurately, she declined to block the city from enforcing its vaccine mandate. There may be other departments involved as well, but you get the point. I'm not sure that this makes any sense knowing what we all know by now that the more recent variants have been more of a nuisance than anything else. Mask mandates are either no longer in place or are not otherwise enforced in most places.
Are people dying from the virus from time to time? They are, but people are dying from a lot of things that are not otherwise mandated by the City or upheld by some greater authority, i.e., the Supreme Court. Why would Sotomayor come down on the side of the City when the science says that the City needn't have a mandate in place? Isn't it the Socialists who are always telling us to believe science? We should keep in mind that these so-called Socialists or liberals also believe in the authority of Big Government and that Big Government knows best when it comes to ruling and controlling the citizenry. Maybe none of this should come as a surprise.
I slept like shit last night. That P med has to be the culprit. As far as I can tell, it's doing squat for me. My plan is to stop taking it and move on to plan B. Anyway, I've been meaning to ask the missus to look at our electric bill and let me know what it looks like. I'm hearing here and there that rates are going up, but I have no idea since I never see that particular bill. I don't know that we're going into the energy dumpster the likes of what we're seeing in Europe, so that's good. With all of these green energy freaks wanting to shut down refineries and nuclear energy plants, it's no wonder really that rates are going up and brownouts and blackouts, which once seemed inconceivable here in the United States, are more likely than not. In the hottest month on the calendar, California is urging its citizens to turn their thermostats up to 85 to avoid putting additional strain on an already maxed-out power grid. How exactly do they plan to charge their Teslas? Raise your hand if this green energy thing isn't working for you.
We're heading into Labor Day weekend here in the US. Labor Day is typically the start of the Fall election season, so that should be interesting. It seems like the only tweets I'm seeing in my Twitter feed as of late are those from liberal candidates. Big Tech is doing its part to make sure that the voices of conservatives, or fascists, as Joe Biden would tell you, are suppressed or removed from any and all conversations. I heard yesterday that Google is shutting down certain outlets related to Trump's app, Truth Social, so that he and his fellow fascists don't have any opportunity to weigh in on matters. What I think they don't understand is that people, by and large, have made up their minds about what Biden's democrat party has done to our country, and they're going into the voting booths coast to coast come November to put a stop to all of it. It won't matter how many bots they employ to try to change minds. The carnage is real, and there will be a price to pay. People are hopping mad.
The bullshit coming out of Joey Bumbles Biden's mouth these days is an abomination. His comments about MAGA supporters being fascists reminds me of Hillary's referencing Trump supporters as "deplorables." And how about that clip of Biden in Pennsylvania the other day when he told a national audience that six police officers were killed during the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th? It was a fucking lie! Do you know that there are people out there who will believe this nonsense? If that doesn't get your dander up as a red-blooded American, I don't know what will. It's bad enough that he's a demented fuck-fest. We don't need the clown to be out on the stump disparaging half of America. I thought he ran on being the great uniter. Great uniter, my ass. The Biden Administration and every last asshat in Congress who has supported his leftist agenda needs to get the boot this November. We need to put a stop to this leftist insanity once and for all. I barely recognize this country of ours anymore. Do you know how painful that is to say out loud?
I spent a while with the Ev man today. We used our time together to tidy his place up ahead of our going off on vacation. I've come away from the experience thinking to myself that we need to work on his organizational skills when it comes to staying ahead of the things in his apartment that need staying ahead of. If I sound a bit cryptic here, it's intentional. I told him that it's not in his best interest to give anyone the impression that he's incapable of doing just that. That could take him in a direction that would not please him in the least. He knew precisely what I was talking about. He tends to dig himself a hole that he's inxapable of digging himself out if you get my meaning. I think he just taps out and looks to the referree (me?) to help him get up off the mat and back onto his feet. It's not exactly the proverbial point of no return but it's close. It's funny how that works sometimes. You get sucked into the black hole of life along with everything else around you and the next thing you know you're the frog in the pot of boiling water wondering how things went so sideways.
I just want to be clear. It wasn't all me. He was here and there picking up trash and sweeping up after me as I went from spot to spot in his small apartment with a sponge in hand. He always leaves me to do the dishes and that's probably a good thing. I can whip through a stack of dishes like a hot knife through butter. He has a dishwasher but some dishes needed soaking. I will say that I think his head was somewhere else today. Not that he was distracted but I think given his druthers, I think he would have been just as happy to lay on his couch with his headphones on. I'm saying that becasue that is precisely where I found him when I looked up from doing this and that. Or, maybe he was lying on his bed wondering how much longer I was going to be before I was finished doing what I was doing. This is me spitballing in the rear view mirror as it were. I sent him a message later in the day once back home telling him how I wished I had tasked him with putting away the dishes that I left in both the dishwaser and in the drying rack. He responded with a wistful, "Oh."
Bumbles Biden gave a speech from Independence Hall in Philidelphia last night. It was a planned political speech so, like any other speech Biden gives, I had zero interest in tuning in to watch or listen to it. I had the telly on so I saw glimpses of the backdrop and it looked like some half-cocked production out of a bad movie. The backdrop lighting was intended to do what I'm not sure. It had a dark blood-red coloring to it that I've since heard suggested that they are the colors of Antifa. Antifa, as you may or may not know, are the brownshirts of the Biden Administration. The speech itself, after my curiosity got the best of me and I was forced to look at a few clips after the fact, was in a word, Hitler-esque. It was deeply disturbing. Biden lashed out at MAGA republicans as the enemy of the state among other things. If you simply replaced the term "MAGA republicans" with the word "Jews", "Japanese", or any other targeted group in recent history in our country or elsewhere, the words coming out of Biden's mouth could only be interpreted as divisive if not a direct physical threat to 73 milliion supporters of one Donald J. Trump.
It was a speech that was unbecoming of an American President. It was beyond the pale in so many respects. I was embarassed for Biden and our country to think that his speech was being seen around the world as hateful and excoriating as it was. It would most certainly have some thinking that as a country we've lost our collective minds. To see an American president speaking in such dark terms about an opposing political party was perhaps remiscent of a speech one might expect from a Stalin, a Hitler, a Castro, or some other 3rd world dictator. One has to wonder if Biden's speech wasn't designed to be as devisive and derisive as it was. Is it not in their best interest as a political party to demonize their political enemies? Is it not in their best interests to cast their opposition as less than human thereby making them easy targets for every Bidenista wanting to do the implied bidding of their fearless leader? Would igniting a civil war give Biden what he and his minions need to cancel elections and impose martial law upon our citizenry? Houston, we have a fucking problem.
Make no mistake about it. Biden's followers want him waging war on his political enemies. This is who they are. This is what they do. There is nothing they won't do to hang on to political power. The ends always justify the means when it comes to the democrats. I hesitate to throw every last democrat under the bus because the democrat party of today in America is not your grandfather's democrat party. This is a more Marxist democrat party that subscribes to the vilest tenets of their ideology and we're seeing precisely what Ronald Reagan warned us about so many years ago when he said that "the only permanent danger to the hope that is America comes from within."
I want to be careful here as well to not give the impression that what we're seeing and hearing from Biden is actually something that Biden subscribes to. He's been co-opted somehow. I don't know what drugs he's on, I don't who's pulling the strings behind the curtain, nobody knows how compromised he is by internal or external forces. We do know he suffers from late stage dementia so most of what comes out of his mouth is not of his creation. Whatever and whomever it is may well be more insidious and more dangerous than any of us realize.
Now that I have a target on my back as a MAGA republican thanks to Joey Bumbles Biden and his Hitlerean speech last night from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, I suppose I should watch my back. I'll have to be careful who I confide in and who I associate with as we get closer to the Mid Term elections. I'll not wear my affection for the MAGA crowd on my sleeve nor will I slap stickers on my car that might trigger an anti-MAGA brownshirt into doing something that the two or more of us might regret. If I had something to lock and load I might just do that but, alas, I do not. I'll not tip my hand while tweeting nor will I look to antagonize those who voice their favor for the democrats in either the Mid Term or 2024 presidential elections. As much as I disdain them and their party, whatever name that party goes by these days, I'll not lash out like a petulant child when they do what they do. I will rise above it all. I will not give them a reason to tag me as an insurrectionist.
Trump has a rally in Pennsylvania tonight to support Dr. Oz and Colonel Mastriano. It should be a rally for the ages. We'll be on the road for most of the day so I'll look forward to settling in later this evening to watch the rally. Trump's support and subsequent rallies for the people he supports typically helps them over the finish line. We're still a good sixty days out from the election so lots can happen. I'll try not to get too far over my skis with wild eyed speculation since Pennsylvania is a must-win state if we're to win back the House and Senate from the leftists. I'm hearing that they're expecting some fifteen thousand attendees and that compares favorably to the 275 people that barely filled a gym just outside Philadelphia during Biden's visit. In other words, it's all about Pennsylvania. As goes Pennsylvania, so goes the Mid Term elections.
Imagine that. The day after Biden gives a disturbingly dystopian speech from Indpendence Hall in Pennsylvania where he laid out his case against MAGA republicans, the stupid bastard walks it all back just a day later. Does the damn fool even know what the term MAGA stands for? It means Make America Great Again. Anyway, someone got in his ear after his speech and told him that he needed to clean up his comments if he doesn't want to lose even more seats than they're expecting to lose come November when the Mid Term elections roll around. I don't know how else to explain his complete turnaround when it comes to either trashing or courting Trump supporters. I don't know that any self respecting MAGA supporter would ever vote for Joey Bumbles Biden so I'll just put that out there. There's only one problem. The damage he's already done by giving that speech ain't getting unwatched, unseen, unheard, or unforgotten by anyone. How do you like them apples, you old coot?
I'll end this business with a couple of thoughts about Putin and the Nordstream pipeline. I don't know everything there is to know about the pipelne, but I think it supplies natural gas to any number of European countries. When the pipeline goes offline, it means that the supplies of natural gas no longer flow to the consumers across Europe. When supplies are cut off intentionally, it smacks of politicization and weaponization by people or persons responsible for sourcing the natural gas. When that person is Vladamir Putin, you know, or you should know, that his actions are inextricably linked to the Ukraine Russia conflict.
Maybe it has something to do with the European countries wanting to come together to cap the price of natural gas coming from Russia. I'm not entirely sure. How does one tell their natural gas provider that you are willing to pay only so much and not a penny more for the product that they control? I think the quick and dirty answer is, you don't. Maybe Vlad has decided to bring Europe to its knees by cutting off the supplies of natural gas. Who wouldn't want to spank the countries responsible for financing a proxy war that was killing your fellow Russians day in and day out in the hills, valleys, and plains across the country of Ukraine. I don't expect to sort it all out in this here diatribe, but I'm thinking that maybe the Europeans should just cut to the chase, invade Russia, and solve the natural gas supply issue once and for all. What's the alternative? Have half your population freeze to death and have the other half die of starvation? The mold has been cast. Pick your poison.
I am a little curious this morning as to what the financial markets are going to do today. We saw all the major indices plunge by some four percent last Friday, so we'll see if continues today. There is some consensus amongst the talking heads on the telly that the market topped last week after rallying several weeks in this inflationary bear market we find ourselves in. Powell's comments didn't help the market on Friday, so we'll see where the darn thing goes today. Is it possible that we lose another four percent today? That would be eight percent in two days. Probably not likely short of some calamitous event in the markets, but it is possible. There is always that business about the market being oversold or overbought and the pendulum swinging one way or another, but that speaks to probabilities and not much else. On your mark, get set, trade!
Like the missus, I enjoyed watching a few of the Little League World Series games on the telly over the last week or two. From the start, the team from Honolulu looked to be the dominant team, and the team favored to win the whole enchilada. As you may or may not know, the teams are broken down into two categories: The International teams and the teams from the USA. The winners from each of the two categories face off in the finals for the so-called "World Series." The Asian teams usually do quite well, but they were beaten by the team from Curacao this year. Curacao went into the final game yesterday against Honolulu expecting great things, but they were soundly trounced. It didn't help that Curacao's ace pitcher wasn't eligible to play in the game.
You knew there was a problem when the cameras from the networks stopped scanning the faces of the parents of the players from Curacao in the stands. That was not the case when, in the first inning, one of the players from Curacao scored a run by stealing a base when the ball got loose from one of the players from Honolulu. That seemed to capture in a nutshell the kind of magic that the players from Curacao needed to beat this team from Honolulu. Any hopes and dreams the boys from Curacao had of taking home the trophy quickly faded when the boys from Honolulu had two back-to-back home runs in their very next return to the batter's box. It was also the last time you saw any faces of the parents of the boys from Curacao on National television. Maybe that was for the best since the team from Honolulu went on to beat Curacao 13-3.
I was listening to one of my favorite morning talk show hosts this morning, and he's just back from a vacation with his family in Arizona. He commented that Arizona has basically been annexed by the Mexican Cartels. Illegal aliens were everywhere, and the danger from the Cartels, especially for those Arizonans living along the border, was very real. If you had any sense at all, you carried a weapon with you wherever you went. You protected your family at all costs. This is America. What has happened to our great country? That's me speaking. If that can happen in the state of Arizona, it can happen anywhere in our great country. It makes me sick to my stomach to think that we have a president and a political party that is responsible for this carnage, this invasion, this travesty of justice.
It's no wonder that republican candidates are ahead in the polls in Arizona. People want their fucking country back. They want the illegal aliens sent back to their country of origin, they want the flow of drugs across their border to come to a stop, and they want their politicians to grow a fucking spine and do something about the problems dropped on their doorsteps by the leftist democrats and their pathetic pied piper, Joey Bumbles Biden. Those of us not living in states along our southern border should take no comfort in the fact that we don't have illegals and drug runners running through our backyards at night. The Biden Administration is transporting thousands of illegals into every state in our union every night of the week, so nobody should be under the delusion that they won't be affected by this invasion.
I've seen quite a few tweets from Dr. Oz as of late about what he's doing out on the campaign trail. As you know, he's the Republican Senatorial candidate from Pennsylvania, and he's running against John Fetterman on the Democratic ticket. As you may also know, Fetterman had a stroke recently, and he's spent a total of 11 minutes on the campaign trail since his so-called recovery. I think that the Fetterman people think that they can run his campaign out of his basement as Joe Biden did during his 2020 race against Trump with similar results. The democrats don't want a voice in the senate with the candidate that they elect, they want a rubber stamp so they can get their radical agenda through Congress and onto the desk of someone they hope will be a democrat president.
If their Senator has to crawl on their hands and knees to put through their vote once in Washington, then so be it. The ends justify the means when it comes to the democrats. They play for keeps. His stroke aside, Fetterman is a radical, and the republicans need to make sure that the voters in Pennsylvania understand the consequences of sending someone like Fetterman to the United States Senate. Dr. Oz is a lot of things, but one thing he is not is radical. Is Pennsylvania not better off electing a RINO (Republican in name only) to the Senate instead of a socialist freak like Fetterman? They most assuredly are. They have a long history of voting for republican senators, so sending Oz to Washington shouldn't be a stretch. Let's do this, my friends.
I'll be heading off with the Ev man this morning to his appointment with his eye doctor. It's one of those appointments where they put that stuff in your eyes, and you're essentially blinded for about 4 hours. That might be a small exaggeration, but he didn't care for the experience the last time he had it done, so I'll be driving this time around. I've got a couple of other errands to run while he's recovering, so it should all work out. Did I mention that I bought a couple of high-intensity low-beam headlights for his car? I was driving it last week or so, and I thought his low beams were a little on the tired side. He has an older car which might help explain some of it, but the lenses are getting a bit frosted if that's the right word, so these new bulbs should help. I don't think he's out at night all that much, but he is out and about in the early morning hours quite often, so think of this as a risk mitigation measure.
I'm going to have to rethink my garden next year. It seems that we have a groundhog hereabouts that has eaten a lot of my tomatoes right off the damn vine. The little mother chewed right through the plastic fence I put up, and he's been helping himself to the fruits of my labor. He doesn't even wait for them to ripen. I'll be damned if I going to spend the kind of money one needs to spend to put up a sturdier fence just to keep animals out of my garden. It's nice to have homegrown tomatoes but not if I have to spend a king's ransom just to ensure that they reach maturity. I'll happily spend a few more sheckles at the local supermarket, where they feature tomatoes from this or that local farm. Take that, you little bastard! I have one or two plants that have been picked clean before I was able to grab even one tomato, and that irritates the hell out of me. If I were handy with a crossbow or if I thought my neighbors would ignore the sound of a shotgun discharging within earshot of their property, I might well dispatch the little bugger and never look back.
This whole business with Trump and the documents seized by the FBI when they raided his home at Mar-a-Lago a few weeks back gets more bizarre by the day. I don't know who's right or wrong in this Kabuki dance of a fuck-fest, but all of this talk about indicting Trump seems so far-fetched. You're telling me that you're going to indict Trump on a technicality over documents that he had stored at his home? The only thing that makes any sense is that the Biden-ista's are wanting to use the Justice Department to collar Biden's political opposition. What the fuck kind of world are we living in? In what universe is this allowed to happen in the greatest Republic on the face of the earth? It seems a reach at best, and it could well mean the end of the FBI as we know it as an institution once they realize that the American people are not buying what they're selling. They are already on thin ice after any number of missteps that, much to their dismay, have gone public and not in a good way.
Biden is running around making speeches and warning the general public about the dangers of the MAGA-Republicans. I gather that he's referring to Trump's supporters. Like a pyromaniac looking forward to starting his next blaze, Biden has lit the match by going public about the dangers to our republic from Trump supporters, and now, if he can get the Justice Department to put the cuffs on Trump, he will have put a match to the fuel thereby proving his case as Trump supporters take to the streets with their pitchforks and their passion. If the Biden-ista's have their way, it will be January 6th on steroids. Should the riots and mayhem not occur, Biden and his leftist followers will take a victory lap while declaring that the Trump era is over. With a lackluster response to the frogmarching of their political leader into the courtroom, Biden will insist that the general public is now in favor of his heavy-handed tactics and he has been vindicated in doing what he's done.
How far will the Bidenista's take this before the independents that they need to win some of the key congressional races in the upcoming midterms decide that they've seen enough? I looked at a handful of polls yesterday that show Trump beating Biden handily in three or four of the pivotal states that any presidential candidate needs to win in 2024. One poll showed Hershel Walker beating Warnock by a slim margin in the Georgia Senate race. With seventy-four percent of the public believing that our country is going in the wrong direction, it's no surprise that republican candidates are surging in the polls coast to coast. Biden was on the telly last night broadcasting his stump speech from Pennsylvania. If you can believe this, he was going on and on about his support for the police. This is the same ass clown whose party has long called for the defunding of the police. Crime rates have surged on the streets of America under Biden, yet there he was, declaring that Trump supporters posed the greatest danger to our Republic. We've got the video, Joey. Would you like to see it?
Supreme Court Justice, Sotomayor, recently upheld the NYC mandate that municipal workers be vaccinated against COVID. More accurately, she declined to block the city from enforcing its vaccine mandate. There may be other departments involved as well, but you get the point. I'm not sure that this makes any sense knowing what we all know by now that the more recent variants have been more of a nuisance than anything else. Mask mandates are either no longer in place or are not otherwise enforced in most places.
Are people dying from the virus from time to time? They are, but people are dying from a lot of things that are not otherwise mandated by the City or upheld by some greater authority, i.e., the Supreme Court. Why would Sotomayor come down on the side of the City when the science says that the City needn't have a mandate in place? Isn't it the Socialists who are always telling us to believe science? We should keep in mind that these so-called Socialists or liberals also believe in the authority of Big Government and that Big Government knows best when it comes to ruling and controlling the citizenry. Maybe none of this should come as a surprise.
I slept like shit last night. That P med has to be the culprit. As far as I can tell, it's doing squat for me. My plan is to stop taking it and move on to plan B. Anyway, I've been meaning to ask the missus to look at our electric bill and let me know what it looks like. I'm hearing here and there that rates are going up, but I have no idea since I never see that particular bill. I don't know that we're going into the energy dumpster the likes of what we're seeing in Europe, so that's good. With all of these green energy freaks wanting to shut down refineries and nuclear energy plants, it's no wonder really that rates are going up and brownouts and blackouts, which once seemed inconceivable here in the United States, are more likely than not. In the hottest month on the calendar, California is urging its citizens to turn their thermostats up to 85 to avoid putting additional strain on an already maxed-out power grid. How exactly do they plan to charge their Teslas? Raise your hand if this green energy thing isn't working for you.
We're heading into Labor Day weekend here in the US. Labor Day is typically the start of the Fall election season, so that should be interesting. It seems like the only tweets I'm seeing in my Twitter feed as of late are those from liberal candidates. Big Tech is doing its part to make sure that the voices of conservatives, or fascists, as Joe Biden would tell you, are suppressed or removed from any and all conversations. I heard yesterday that Google is shutting down certain outlets related to Trump's app, Truth Social, so that he and his fellow fascists don't have any opportunity to weigh in on matters. What I think they don't understand is that people, by and large, have made up their minds about what Biden's democrat party has done to our country, and they're going into the voting booths coast to coast come November to put a stop to all of it. It won't matter how many bots they employ to try to change minds. The carnage is real, and there will be a price to pay. People are hopping mad.
The bullshit coming out of Joey Bumbles Biden's mouth these days is an abomination. His comments about MAGA supporters being fascists reminds me of Hillary's referencing Trump supporters as "deplorables." And how about that clip of Biden in Pennsylvania the other day when he told a national audience that six police officers were killed during the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th? It was a fucking lie! Do you know that there are people out there who will believe this nonsense? If that doesn't get your dander up as a red-blooded American, I don't know what will. It's bad enough that he's a demented fuck-fest. We don't need the clown to be out on the stump disparaging half of America. I thought he ran on being the great uniter. Great uniter, my ass. The Biden Administration and every last asshat in Congress who has supported his leftist agenda needs to get the boot this November. We need to put a stop to this leftist insanity once and for all. I barely recognize this country of ours anymore. Do you know how painful that is to say out loud?
I spent a while with the Ev man today. We used our time together to tidy his place up ahead of our going off on vacation. I've come away from the experience thinking to myself that we need to work on his organizational skills when it comes to staying ahead of the things in his apartment that need staying ahead of. If I sound a bit cryptic here, it's intentional. I told him that it's not in his best interest to give anyone the impression that he's incapable of doing just that. That could take him in a direction that would not please him in the least. He knew precisely what I was talking about. He tends to dig himself a hole that he's inxapable of digging himself out if you get my meaning. I think he just taps out and looks to the referree (me?) to help him get up off the mat and back onto his feet. It's not exactly the proverbial point of no return but it's close. It's funny how that works sometimes. You get sucked into the black hole of life along with everything else around you and the next thing you know you're the frog in the pot of boiling water wondering how things went so sideways.
I just want to be clear. It wasn't all me. He was here and there picking up trash and sweeping up after me as I went from spot to spot in his small apartment with a sponge in hand. He always leaves me to do the dishes and that's probably a good thing. I can whip through a stack of dishes like a hot knife through butter. He has a dishwasher but some dishes needed soaking. I will say that I think his head was somewhere else today. Not that he was distracted but I think given his druthers, I think he would have been just as happy to lay on his couch with his headphones on. I'm saying that becasue that is precisely where I found him when I looked up from doing this and that. Or, maybe he was lying on his bed wondering how much longer I was going to be before I was finished doing what I was doing. This is me spitballing in the rear view mirror as it were. I sent him a message later in the day once back home telling him how I wished I had tasked him with putting away the dishes that I left in both the dishwaser and in the drying rack. He responded with a wistful, "Oh."
Bumbles Biden gave a speech from Independence Hall in Philidelphia last night. It was a planned political speech so, like any other speech Biden gives, I had zero interest in tuning in to watch or listen to it. I had the telly on so I saw glimpses of the backdrop and it looked like some half-cocked production out of a bad movie. The backdrop lighting was intended to do what I'm not sure. It had a dark blood-red coloring to it that I've since heard suggested that they are the colors of Antifa. Antifa, as you may or may not know, are the brownshirts of the Biden Administration. The speech itself, after my curiosity got the best of me and I was forced to look at a few clips after the fact, was in a word, Hitler-esque. It was deeply disturbing. Biden lashed out at MAGA republicans as the enemy of the state among other things. If you simply replaced the term "MAGA republicans" with the word "Jews", "Japanese", or any other targeted group in recent history in our country or elsewhere, the words coming out of Biden's mouth could only be interpreted as divisive if not a direct physical threat to 73 milliion supporters of one Donald J. Trump.
It was a speech that was unbecoming of an American President. It was beyond the pale in so many respects. I was embarassed for Biden and our country to think that his speech was being seen around the world as hateful and excoriating as it was. It would most certainly have some thinking that as a country we've lost our collective minds. To see an American president speaking in such dark terms about an opposing political party was perhaps remiscent of a speech one might expect from a Stalin, a Hitler, a Castro, or some other 3rd world dictator. One has to wonder if Biden's speech wasn't designed to be as devisive and derisive as it was. Is it not in their best interest as a political party to demonize their political enemies? Is it not in their best interests to cast their opposition as less than human thereby making them easy targets for every Bidenista wanting to do the implied bidding of their fearless leader? Would igniting a civil war give Biden what he and his minions need to cancel elections and impose martial law upon our citizenry? Houston, we have a fucking problem.
Make no mistake about it. Biden's followers want him waging war on his political enemies. This is who they are. This is what they do. There is nothing they won't do to hang on to political power. The ends always justify the means when it comes to the democrats. I hesitate to throw every last democrat under the bus because the democrat party of today in America is not your grandfather's democrat party. This is a more Marxist democrat party that subscribes to the vilest tenets of their ideology and we're seeing precisely what Ronald Reagan warned us about so many years ago when he said that "the only permanent danger to the hope that is America comes from within."
I want to be careful here as well to not give the impression that what we're seeing and hearing from Biden is actually something that Biden subscribes to. He's been co-opted somehow. I don't know what drugs he's on, I don't who's pulling the strings behind the curtain, nobody knows how compromised he is by internal or external forces. We do know he suffers from late stage dementia so most of what comes out of his mouth is not of his creation. Whatever and whomever it is may well be more insidious and more dangerous than any of us realize.
Now that I have a target on my back as a MAGA republican thanks to Joey Bumbles Biden and his Hitlerean speech last night from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, I suppose I should watch my back. I'll have to be careful who I confide in and who I associate with as we get closer to the Mid Term elections. I'll not wear my affection for the MAGA crowd on my sleeve nor will I slap stickers on my car that might trigger an anti-MAGA brownshirt into doing something that the two or more of us might regret. If I had something to lock and load I might just do that but, alas, I do not. I'll not tip my hand while tweeting nor will I look to antagonize those who voice their favor for the democrats in either the Mid Term or 2024 presidential elections. As much as I disdain them and their party, whatever name that party goes by these days, I'll not lash out like a petulant child when they do what they do. I will rise above it all. I will not give them a reason to tag me as an insurrectionist.
Trump has a rally in Pennsylvania tonight to support Dr. Oz and Colonel Mastriano. It should be a rally for the ages. We'll be on the road for most of the day so I'll look forward to settling in later this evening to watch the rally. Trump's support and subsequent rallies for the people he supports typically helps them over the finish line. We're still a good sixty days out from the election so lots can happen. I'll try not to get too far over my skis with wild eyed speculation since Pennsylvania is a must-win state if we're to win back the House and Senate from the leftists. I'm hearing that they're expecting some fifteen thousand attendees and that compares favorably to the 275 people that barely filled a gym just outside Philadelphia during Biden's visit. In other words, it's all about Pennsylvania. As goes Pennsylvania, so goes the Mid Term elections.
Imagine that. The day after Biden gives a disturbingly dystopian speech from Indpendence Hall in Pennsylvania where he laid out his case against MAGA republicans, the stupid bastard walks it all back just a day later. Does the damn fool even know what the term MAGA stands for? It means Make America Great Again. Anyway, someone got in his ear after his speech and told him that he needed to clean up his comments if he doesn't want to lose even more seats than they're expecting to lose come November when the Mid Term elections roll around. I don't know how else to explain his complete turnaround when it comes to either trashing or courting Trump supporters. I don't know that any self respecting MAGA supporter would ever vote for Joey Bumbles Biden so I'll just put that out there. There's only one problem. The damage he's already done by giving that speech ain't getting unwatched, unseen, unheard, or unforgotten by anyone. How do you like them apples, you old coot?
I'll end this business with a couple of thoughts about Putin and the Nordstream pipeline. I don't know everything there is to know about the pipelne, but I think it supplies natural gas to any number of European countries. When the pipeline goes offline, it means that the supplies of natural gas no longer flow to the consumers across Europe. When supplies are cut off intentionally, it smacks of politicization and weaponization by people or persons responsible for sourcing the natural gas. When that person is Vladamir Putin, you know, or you should know, that his actions are inextricably linked to the Ukraine Russia conflict.
Maybe it has something to do with the European countries wanting to come together to cap the price of natural gas coming from Russia. I'm not entirely sure. How does one tell their natural gas provider that you are willing to pay only so much and not a penny more for the product that they control? I think the quick and dirty answer is, you don't. Maybe Vlad has decided to bring Europe to its knees by cutting off the supplies of natural gas. Who wouldn't want to spank the countries responsible for financing a proxy war that was killing your fellow Russians day in and day out in the hills, valleys, and plains across the country of Ukraine. I don't expect to sort it all out in this here diatribe, but I'm thinking that maybe the Europeans should just cut to the chase, invade Russia, and solve the natural gas supply issue once and for all. What's the alternative? Have half your population freeze to death and have the other half die of starvation? The mold has been cast. Pick your poison.
Come What May
28/08/22 07:10
I don't feel much like writing this week. Maybe I'll take the week off. I know myself well enough to know that if I do that, I'll likely not start up again. Then where would I be? I'd have to start anew somewhere down the road. Where, pray tell, would that be? It's' quite possible that the longer I go without writing, the longer it will take me to get up and running again. I might as well bite the bullet now and get this party started. I don't even have much to say this morning. Do I have anything to say? Just more pissing and moaning is what I'm seeing and hearing. Get focused, Johnny boy. You've got one job, so don't mess it up. Write about politics if you have to but just do it. Fucking do it!
The missus and I are watching this show on STARZ called "Becoming Elizabeth." You would be correct if you think it has to do with England, kings and queens, dukes and earls, and castles called Somerset. It appears historically accurate if what the missus tells me is on point. What strikes me as odd about the show is that the actors use the word "fuck" and its various versions quite often. I had to ask the resident historian, and yes, that's the missus, was that word even in the English lexicon back in the day? What if it wasn't? What would the point be of using a term commonly considered vulgar in a show that is otherwise prim and proper as it were? Me thinks a little more research is needed. God willing, I'll get to the bottom of this conundrum.
This is one of those mornings where I can just as easily go back to bed after doing this here journal. It's dark and overcast out of doors this morning, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that rain was in the forecast. We've had very little rain this summer, so getting rain today would be welcome. I can see myself passing on breakfast and just collapsing on the bed. Covers or no covers, I could be down for the count. Wake me up and eleven if I'm still asleep and not a moment sooner. I'm no longer the resident short-order cook, so I have no obligations one way or another to get up sooner. That was my choice, so I'll suffer the slings and arrows that go along with making that decision. Hate me if you must, but make your own fucking lunch. There's that word again.
Overall, I've been very pleased with the comings and goings of our local Hummingbird population this summer. I have a couple of feeders up, and I've done a good job, if I do say so myself, of keeping them filled and occasionally topped off with the freshest and sweetest water for my little buds. I love to watch them come to the feeder after I've filled it with cold sugar water from the fridge. I've often wondered how the water's coldness, seeing as no such thing is available in nature, can be so enticing to an animal like the Hummingbird, who is not otherwise accustomed to drinking chilled nectar. The truth is that you couldn't pry them off the feeder even if you tried, especially on the hotter summer days, the likes of which we've seen this summer in spades. In three weeks, they'll be gone only to return next year when and where we'll do this all over again.
It's good to know that the hottest summer days here on the coast are behind us. Well, if we do see more hot days, it's more than likely that they'll not last long. I welcome cooler days and nights, changes in the foliage, fewer and fewer tourists flocking to our town beaches, and less traffic on the roadways hereabouts. I think traffic has been down overall this summer due to $5 per gallon gas at the pump, although prices have come down a little in these last three or four weeks. It's no coincidence that things are improving as we get closer to the mid-term elections. Those mother fucking democrats are rigging the election game left and right. Don't look over here. Look over there. They are still raising interest rates in an inflationary environment, which can't help. It will accelerate layoffs, drive up unemployment rates, and it will have 401k owners on suicide watch. I'm not sure they have the necessary arrows in their quiver to win this battle. Maybe reducing student debt and providing another stimulus plan to the masses will get the job done. Remember, the ends always justify the means.
This morning, I read an article that spells out the Biden Administration's role in orchestrating the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. Wait one fucking minute. I thought they told us they had nothing to do with the raid. They have been strangely silent since the raid took place. Of course, Biden and his brownshirts had a role in the damn raid. That is what tyranny looks like. They jail their political opposition or, worse yet, poison them so they either can't run because they are in a medically induced coma or they no longer desire to run because of the danger it poses to them or their families. When will the Biden Administration be brought to heel for their transgressions against the American people and our Constitution? Does any of this warrant impeachment? I guess that's up to the political party currently in charge in the House. Since the democrats have the majority, you'll not see articles of impeachment anytime soon. So, this treachery goes on indefinitely? Sadly, yes.
Mrs. G mentioned that the financial markets were doing better this past weekend when we were over for a visit. I'm sure that she's seen her investments come back from the precipice, which is a good thing as far as she's concerned. I wanted to tell her that we're still in a bear market, and we've likely not seen the lows put in yet. I wanted to say to her that the bear market is a process, just as a bull market is a process. I wanted to tell her that as long as we're seeing the kind of froth and speculation in the market at present, that is another indication that a low has yet to be put in. She's not a bridge jumper, so seeing lower lows is probably not the worst thing for her. I'm not sure if she knows what a bear market rally is, so I didn't bother telling her that the current bear market rally is getting a little long in the tooth. We're fourteen percent off the lows, and that's about average for a bear market rally. If I'm right about any of this, we're going to hades sooner or later. Whatever you think, it will be worse. Oh, and I told her none of this. Live and learn.
We had primary races last night in NY and Florida. All Trump-endorsed candidates won easily and quickly. There were a couple of bell weather races that democrats won. I'm not sure that bodes well for any so-called red wave come November. It seems that the abortion issue has the leftists getting out to the polls while inflation is maybe less of a driver. Wake the fuck up, people. Abortions are a local issue now. Why are congressional candidates running on abortion issues? Perhaps they think they can get abortion codified at the national level. Here we go again with the "this is my body, and I'll do with it as I please" crowd. Whatever happened to the sanctity of the individual (fetus)? Anyway, without Trump getting behind any number of these candidates in the Fall, we could see disappointing results. That is unacceptable with the fool, Bumbles Biden, in the White House. Does anybody fucking care that we have an invasion on our southern border because of Biden?
Nothing is worse than waking up the morning after and learning that your candidate or candidates failed to win their races or races. I know there's a message in there somewhere, and it's a message that could be a problem were it to go countrywide. I'll have to avoid listening to progressives on the radio today because there is nothing worse than a gloating leftist. They have to be licking their chops after last night. Mind you, not so much in the state of Florida because Florida is becoming redder and redder when it comes to its politics. I'm worried about those states where the margins are tighter and what that might mean for Senate races and House seats. I don't want to see any seats go from solid red to leaning red, or worse yet, solid red to leaning blue. I will be listening to the conservatives on the radio today. Maybe I can glean a glimmer of hope, or someone can talk me down off the cliff after last night. It's all about Trump now. I know it, and the democrats know it. What will they do?
I'm still trying to get my brain around this clown, John Fetterman. He's running for the Senate in Pennsylvania against the republican candidate, Dr. Oz. The missus says that Dr. Oz is a quack, but that's a story for another day. He's an accomplished heart surgeon, a well-established author, and a media guy in his own right. Who cares if he doesn't live in the state of Pennsylvania? The Fetterman guy is a hot mess. But it's worse than that. He had a severe stroke recently, and I think he's been on the campaign trail for a total of fifteen minutes since "recovering" from his stroke. The videos of his campaigning are hard to watch. It's one of those Biden deals where it has you wondering why his loved ones are allowing him to go on with his campaign, knowing what they know about his obvious medical shortcomings. It seems almost selfish on their part. Like Jill Biden, Fetterman's spouse isn't about to let her husband's medical condition get in the way of her hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Come hell or high water; she's going to be the wife of a United States Senator.
Not if Sean Hannity has anything to say about it, is what I would say. I believe Hannity is responsible for getting Trump to endorse Oz in the Senate race. Hannity goes on air every night now, saying one thing or another about Fetterman and playing every video clip available. Of course, none of the clips are in the least bit flattering, but that's the point. It seems odd to see a high-profile talk show host like Hannity take such a personal interest in a person running for the Senate, but I think it may tie back to promises made to Trump in exchange for Trump's endorsement of Oz. Hannity has even challenged Fetterman to come on his show and debate him on God only knows what. Do the two men have a history that I'm unaware of? It seems they do if you listen to Hannity's ranting and raving. It looks pretty personal at times. I can't imagine Fetterman accepting the challenge, and Hannity will play that card until the cows come home. Hannity even threatened to show up at one or more of Fetterman's rallies to confront him. I'm not sure Fetterman has several rallies in him. Here we go again with the running from the basement business.
This morning, I'm reading a story about the United States sending another delegation over to Taiwan. This comes on the heels of Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in the last month. I think there may have been another visitation between the two. Is this Biden deliberately poking Communist China with these visits? Is this America putting her best foot forward and telling the Communists in China to take their bullshit about Taiwan being one of their provinces and sticking it where the sun don't shine? I think all of that is possible. I don't know where it all ends up, and I'm not even sure who's right about who has what rights when it comes to Taiwan. I know that Taiwan manufactures most of the silicon chips used in everything we Americans use daily, from toasters to automobiles. It wouldn't take much to cut off that supply if China decided that the United States was meddling in its affairs. It seems all very non-negotiable to me if we're to believe China's rhetoric. Is fighting Taiwan's war for them, or coming to their defense, worth even one American life were it to come to that? I don't even know where I'm going with all of this.
I keep thinking about the Mar-a-Lago raid by the FBI. If Trump had documents that he, for whatever reason, wanted to keep to himself and not send to the National Archives, why would he keep them at Mar-a-Lago? Why would he keep them in a place that would more than likely be the first place that the government would come looking if it wanted to get those documents back? Hell, Trump could store them anywhere. What would stop Trump from making copies of the documents he wanted, and he could turn over the originals to the National Archives? Or, he could keep the originals and turn over the copies. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that Trump baited the FBI into raiding his home for political advantage. It also wouldn't surprise me to know that he made one or more documents available to the FBI raiders that would ultimately come back to bite them somehow. Take that, you mother fuckers. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it. These are things that I can see Trump saying and doing. They had their turn, and now he has his. Revenge is best-served cold?
We all know what Bumbles Biden is doing with this forgiveness of college debt thing. He's buying votes ahead of one of the most important elections in the history of our country. We've never been in greater peril as a country under Bumbles Biden, and people are likely to run, not walk, to the polls in November to vote the democrat bastards out. I'm not sure what the calculus is, but Biden and his corrupt administration seem to think that if they buy a few votes, they can somehow stem the bleeding. I hope he's wrong. I hope he's spectacularly wrong. Maybe he knows that the House of Representatives is a lost cause, but maybe he thinks that he can salvage a few senate seats.
Who the fuck knows what that lame brain is thinking. Is there even any truth to the proposition that people whose debt he's forgiven are going to go out and vote for him? I suppose he could dangle the ten-thousand-dollar figure out there as a carrot with the implied promise that he'll be doing even more if they vote for him and his political party. It's brazen, and it's also illegal. He has no such authority. We have Pelosi on video saying as much. Only Congress can do this. Somebody, anybody, sue this POS Potus. I'm talking to you, the Republican party. Are you fearful that pushing back will get you in hot water with your constituents who may need a little debt relief? I can tell you that the guy or gal who never got a college loan because he or she had to work to support their family instead of going to college is going to sing your praises for standing up for them. Suffer the damn slings and arrows and do your damn job. This is what we sent you to Washington to do.
My goal was to drive 100 miles. I took the Ev man's car in for his annual inspection and knew it would be a shit-fest. Not because there was anything wrong with his car, mind you, but because he has an issue with his "check engine" light that stems from God only knows what. This is a recurring theme with annual inspections where the engine light on his car is an issue. They passed everything else but asked that I put a few miles on the vehicle to see if the light would come back on after being reset in the shop. I'm going to ask that they refresh my memory today when I return the car to the shop as to what exactly I'm trying to accomplish when I'm out there putting miles on the car as I did last evening. I put 95 miles on the vehicle and the engine light never returned. I think that's a good thing. Will they now give me a sticker for the car or will they insist that I put even more miles on the vehicle? What if the engine light did come back on? Then what? Like I said, a shit fest.
Is it true that the 1.4 billion dollar lottery winner hasn't come forward since the winning ticket was announced four weeks ago? It seems inconceivable. The store that sold the ticket should put the video of customers coming and going into the store on the day the ticket was sold on a loop to see if they can't jog a memory or two. At a minimum, you would think that the winners might notify the agency that manages the ticket sales that they have the winning ticket and they're working with their attorney to put their affairs in order before taking possession of the monies. I think the winning ticket was sold in a state where the winner or winners can choose to remain anonymous. Not that it matters in this case but who knows? If there were multiple winners because a group of people went in on purchasing the ticket, we would have heard from one or more of them by now. I'm just spitballing here because that's a lot of dough to leave on the table. It seems to me there ought to be a way to figure out who bought the damn ticket. All I know for sure is that it wasn't me.
What the hell is going on in Europe with energy? What is this I'm reading where folks will have a long cold winter with many losing their lives because they can't afford to heat their homes? Boris Johnson is telling his Brits that they will have to bite the bullet when it comes to supporting Ukraine, even if that means they will struggle to survive the coming winter due to the escalating price of fuel supplies. Pubs across the fruited plains in Britain have announced that they may close 60-70% of their pubs due to the cost and availability of fuel. Macron says that the days of abundance are coming to an end, and sacrifices will be required of the good people of France in order to fight back against the instabilities of the war in Ukraine, rising prices of fuel, climate change, and inflation. I'm paraphrasing here and there, but you get the gist. How is the movement to "Green Energy" working out for you over there? Is it fair to say that they only have themselves to blame? It's time to let Ukraine fight its war with Russia. Joey "Bumbles" Biden, are you listening?
Imagine shorting the financial markets yesterday, thinking that Jerome Powell's speech would be dovish. That would have been a good play, given what happened in the markets. Every other word coming out of his mouth in his speech from Wyoming yesterday included the word "pain." That is a word you've seldom heard from any Fed heads. We're coming up on mid-term elections for chrissakes. Joey Biden wants people to go to the polls in November with the financial winds at their backs. That will never happen if the Feds go all hawkish and raise interest rates like there's no tomorrow. Who does that to his boss when his boss is already struggling to get his political party in Congress across the finish line? Mr. Powell seems to think killing inflation in the crib is more important than any election. Maybe he has visions of people needing to bring wheelbarrows full of cash to buy a loaf of bread. It's the kind of stuff that keeps Fed heads up at night.
The markets tanked on his speech from Woods Hole, Wyoming. Every index was down between three and four percent. There was nowhere to hide. Powell never explained what he meant by "pain," but the general interpretation was that it meant you would be poorer. You would have less of everything, and you would learn to make do. The consensus is that we're in stage two of a four-stage inflationary bear market. This latest bear market rally has given folks roughly fourteen percent of their money back off the lows and renewed hopes that we're on track for a new bull market run. Was the plunge in the market yesterday the end of the current bear market rally? Is it just the beginning of another market routing, the likes of which we saw earlier in the year? Some say there wasn't enough panic in the market move yesterday, and without panic selling, the prospects that a continuation of the current bear market rally is still on the table. Interesting.
The missus picked up some rocky road ice cream yesterday at a local ice cream joint. It was pretty good, but I hate having it around the house. Not because it doesn't taste good but because it tastes too good. I'm not a big consumer of ice cream, but it will do in a pinch. Just so you know, eating ice cream is not a guilt-free indulgence. One thing I like about this ice cream is that it's pretty darn rich. When you consider that it's loaded with nuts, marshmallows, and chocolate chips, it makes for a meal in and of itself. One scoop is all you need. The missus is lamenting that we have so much left over after having a portion or two for dessert last night. She's saying they had so many flavors that she might have rather had instead of getting as much of the rocky road as we did. You only live once, little darlings. Enjoy what you have on hand, and stop looking in the rearview mirror. There is always tomorrow until there isn't.
I read somewhere that the two people who tried to sell Ashley Biden's diary have now been sentenced to prison. That's right; I said Ashley Biden. She is the daughter of the current president of the United States, Joey Bumbles Biden. I think they found the damn diary under a mattress in a halfway house where Ashley Biden had spent time recovering from this or that addiction. Since when is selling a journal that you found somewhere a crime? Does this have anything to do with the entries in the diary referencing Joey Biden taking showers with his young daughter? How sick is that? We Americans have long been aware of Biden's sniffing this or that young child and often while on camera, which tells you the depths and depravity of his predilections when and where children are involved. But, with your daughter? In any other world, that is what they call incest. Imagine a world where someone found Ivanka Trump's diary with similar notations. All hell would break loose in the media. When it comes to the Bidens, it's fucking crickets. Do we or do we not have a Department of Justice?
We're coming up on the month of September in a few days. I love September! I'm just putting that out there. We're done with the hot days of summer and we're on to the refreshingly cool days of early Fall. The summer crowds will thin considerably over the next few days as schools start their Fall sessions. Moms and dads who stayed away from the beach during the summer because of the crowds may come around here and there but we're otherwise left with the early evening dog walkers and the people probing the sands along the shore with their metal detectors looking for buried treasure. You couldn't ask for anything more if you're a bicyclist. It's time to simply enjoy the rarified air that comes along with a bike ride along the ocean. With fewer distrations and fewer dangers thanks to the absence of cars and people, it's easier to concentrate on the nautral beauty of one's surroundings. Headwinds while riding will be less daunting and tailwinds will be more than welcome as usual. That's just the way I like it.
We'll be heading off on vacation soon. I sure hope there's a good place to do my journal up there. I don't need much. I just need a place off the beaten track where I won't bother anyone when I'm whacking away at the keys on my keyboard in the early hours of the morning. I'll wear headphones if I have to if I want to listen to a little background music while I write. It shouldn't be all that difficult. I have a compliant fam who is used to me doing what I do when it comes to this here journal. They give me the space and the time to get done what I need to get done. I'm getting better too at working around distractions when people are around when I write. Do what you have to do, little babies. You know where to find me if you need me. Oddly enough, there may be a few more demands on my time when vacation finally rolls around so I'll need to prepare myself for that eventuality. If that means getting up even earlier, so be it.
The missus tells me that we're in for a few days of temperatures in the upper eighties this coming week. I do not like hot weather, no I do not. I thought we had seen the last of the dog days of summer but it seems we have not. We're a couple of days out from September so it can't last long. Right? It's a little like getting a snow storm in April. It's inconvenient and not much fun, especially after a long and snowy winter, but you know the snow won't last long and you know better days are right around the corner. I don't know yet what weather awaits us when we're on vacation but storm systems come and go very quickly where we're going so trying to predict anything is a fool's errand. You take it as it comes. That said, an endless succession of rainy days would not be welcome since we'd like to get in a little boating. The Ev man could use some time behind the wheel and we're happy to turn the navigating over to him for as long as he likes. This is what good parenting looks like.
The missus and I are watching this show on STARZ called "Becoming Elizabeth." You would be correct if you think it has to do with England, kings and queens, dukes and earls, and castles called Somerset. It appears historically accurate if what the missus tells me is on point. What strikes me as odd about the show is that the actors use the word "fuck" and its various versions quite often. I had to ask the resident historian, and yes, that's the missus, was that word even in the English lexicon back in the day? What if it wasn't? What would the point be of using a term commonly considered vulgar in a show that is otherwise prim and proper as it were? Me thinks a little more research is needed. God willing, I'll get to the bottom of this conundrum.
This is one of those mornings where I can just as easily go back to bed after doing this here journal. It's dark and overcast out of doors this morning, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that rain was in the forecast. We've had very little rain this summer, so getting rain today would be welcome. I can see myself passing on breakfast and just collapsing on the bed. Covers or no covers, I could be down for the count. Wake me up and eleven if I'm still asleep and not a moment sooner. I'm no longer the resident short-order cook, so I have no obligations one way or another to get up sooner. That was my choice, so I'll suffer the slings and arrows that go along with making that decision. Hate me if you must, but make your own fucking lunch. There's that word again.
Overall, I've been very pleased with the comings and goings of our local Hummingbird population this summer. I have a couple of feeders up, and I've done a good job, if I do say so myself, of keeping them filled and occasionally topped off with the freshest and sweetest water for my little buds. I love to watch them come to the feeder after I've filled it with cold sugar water from the fridge. I've often wondered how the water's coldness, seeing as no such thing is available in nature, can be so enticing to an animal like the Hummingbird, who is not otherwise accustomed to drinking chilled nectar. The truth is that you couldn't pry them off the feeder even if you tried, especially on the hotter summer days, the likes of which we've seen this summer in spades. In three weeks, they'll be gone only to return next year when and where we'll do this all over again.
It's good to know that the hottest summer days here on the coast are behind us. Well, if we do see more hot days, it's more than likely that they'll not last long. I welcome cooler days and nights, changes in the foliage, fewer and fewer tourists flocking to our town beaches, and less traffic on the roadways hereabouts. I think traffic has been down overall this summer due to $5 per gallon gas at the pump, although prices have come down a little in these last three or four weeks. It's no coincidence that things are improving as we get closer to the mid-term elections. Those mother fucking democrats are rigging the election game left and right. Don't look over here. Look over there. They are still raising interest rates in an inflationary environment, which can't help. It will accelerate layoffs, drive up unemployment rates, and it will have 401k owners on suicide watch. I'm not sure they have the necessary arrows in their quiver to win this battle. Maybe reducing student debt and providing another stimulus plan to the masses will get the job done. Remember, the ends always justify the means.
This morning, I read an article that spells out the Biden Administration's role in orchestrating the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. Wait one fucking minute. I thought they told us they had nothing to do with the raid. They have been strangely silent since the raid took place. Of course, Biden and his brownshirts had a role in the damn raid. That is what tyranny looks like. They jail their political opposition or, worse yet, poison them so they either can't run because they are in a medically induced coma or they no longer desire to run because of the danger it poses to them or their families. When will the Biden Administration be brought to heel for their transgressions against the American people and our Constitution? Does any of this warrant impeachment? I guess that's up to the political party currently in charge in the House. Since the democrats have the majority, you'll not see articles of impeachment anytime soon. So, this treachery goes on indefinitely? Sadly, yes.
Mrs. G mentioned that the financial markets were doing better this past weekend when we were over for a visit. I'm sure that she's seen her investments come back from the precipice, which is a good thing as far as she's concerned. I wanted to tell her that we're still in a bear market, and we've likely not seen the lows put in yet. I wanted to say to her that the bear market is a process, just as a bull market is a process. I wanted to tell her that as long as we're seeing the kind of froth and speculation in the market at present, that is another indication that a low has yet to be put in. She's not a bridge jumper, so seeing lower lows is probably not the worst thing for her. I'm not sure if she knows what a bear market rally is, so I didn't bother telling her that the current bear market rally is getting a little long in the tooth. We're fourteen percent off the lows, and that's about average for a bear market rally. If I'm right about any of this, we're going to hades sooner or later. Whatever you think, it will be worse. Oh, and I told her none of this. Live and learn.
We had primary races last night in NY and Florida. All Trump-endorsed candidates won easily and quickly. There were a couple of bell weather races that democrats won. I'm not sure that bodes well for any so-called red wave come November. It seems that the abortion issue has the leftists getting out to the polls while inflation is maybe less of a driver. Wake the fuck up, people. Abortions are a local issue now. Why are congressional candidates running on abortion issues? Perhaps they think they can get abortion codified at the national level. Here we go again with the "this is my body, and I'll do with it as I please" crowd. Whatever happened to the sanctity of the individual (fetus)? Anyway, without Trump getting behind any number of these candidates in the Fall, we could see disappointing results. That is unacceptable with the fool, Bumbles Biden, in the White House. Does anybody fucking care that we have an invasion on our southern border because of Biden?
Nothing is worse than waking up the morning after and learning that your candidate or candidates failed to win their races or races. I know there's a message in there somewhere, and it's a message that could be a problem were it to go countrywide. I'll have to avoid listening to progressives on the radio today because there is nothing worse than a gloating leftist. They have to be licking their chops after last night. Mind you, not so much in the state of Florida because Florida is becoming redder and redder when it comes to its politics. I'm worried about those states where the margins are tighter and what that might mean for Senate races and House seats. I don't want to see any seats go from solid red to leaning red, or worse yet, solid red to leaning blue. I will be listening to the conservatives on the radio today. Maybe I can glean a glimmer of hope, or someone can talk me down off the cliff after last night. It's all about Trump now. I know it, and the democrats know it. What will they do?
I'm still trying to get my brain around this clown, John Fetterman. He's running for the Senate in Pennsylvania against the republican candidate, Dr. Oz. The missus says that Dr. Oz is a quack, but that's a story for another day. He's an accomplished heart surgeon, a well-established author, and a media guy in his own right. Who cares if he doesn't live in the state of Pennsylvania? The Fetterman guy is a hot mess. But it's worse than that. He had a severe stroke recently, and I think he's been on the campaign trail for a total of fifteen minutes since "recovering" from his stroke. The videos of his campaigning are hard to watch. It's one of those Biden deals where it has you wondering why his loved ones are allowing him to go on with his campaign, knowing what they know about his obvious medical shortcomings. It seems almost selfish on their part. Like Jill Biden, Fetterman's spouse isn't about to let her husband's medical condition get in the way of her hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Come hell or high water; she's going to be the wife of a United States Senator.
Not if Sean Hannity has anything to say about it, is what I would say. I believe Hannity is responsible for getting Trump to endorse Oz in the Senate race. Hannity goes on air every night now, saying one thing or another about Fetterman and playing every video clip available. Of course, none of the clips are in the least bit flattering, but that's the point. It seems odd to see a high-profile talk show host like Hannity take such a personal interest in a person running for the Senate, but I think it may tie back to promises made to Trump in exchange for Trump's endorsement of Oz. Hannity has even challenged Fetterman to come on his show and debate him on God only knows what. Do the two men have a history that I'm unaware of? It seems they do if you listen to Hannity's ranting and raving. It looks pretty personal at times. I can't imagine Fetterman accepting the challenge, and Hannity will play that card until the cows come home. Hannity even threatened to show up at one or more of Fetterman's rallies to confront him. I'm not sure Fetterman has several rallies in him. Here we go again with the running from the basement business.
This morning, I'm reading a story about the United States sending another delegation over to Taiwan. This comes on the heels of Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in the last month. I think there may have been another visitation between the two. Is this Biden deliberately poking Communist China with these visits? Is this America putting her best foot forward and telling the Communists in China to take their bullshit about Taiwan being one of their provinces and sticking it where the sun don't shine? I think all of that is possible. I don't know where it all ends up, and I'm not even sure who's right about who has what rights when it comes to Taiwan. I know that Taiwan manufactures most of the silicon chips used in everything we Americans use daily, from toasters to automobiles. It wouldn't take much to cut off that supply if China decided that the United States was meddling in its affairs. It seems all very non-negotiable to me if we're to believe China's rhetoric. Is fighting Taiwan's war for them, or coming to their defense, worth even one American life were it to come to that? I don't even know where I'm going with all of this.
I keep thinking about the Mar-a-Lago raid by the FBI. If Trump had documents that he, for whatever reason, wanted to keep to himself and not send to the National Archives, why would he keep them at Mar-a-Lago? Why would he keep them in a place that would more than likely be the first place that the government would come looking if it wanted to get those documents back? Hell, Trump could store them anywhere. What would stop Trump from making copies of the documents he wanted, and he could turn over the originals to the National Archives? Or, he could keep the originals and turn over the copies. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that Trump baited the FBI into raiding his home for political advantage. It also wouldn't surprise me to know that he made one or more documents available to the FBI raiders that would ultimately come back to bite them somehow. Take that, you mother fuckers. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it. These are things that I can see Trump saying and doing. They had their turn, and now he has his. Revenge is best-served cold?
We all know what Bumbles Biden is doing with this forgiveness of college debt thing. He's buying votes ahead of one of the most important elections in the history of our country. We've never been in greater peril as a country under Bumbles Biden, and people are likely to run, not walk, to the polls in November to vote the democrat bastards out. I'm not sure what the calculus is, but Biden and his corrupt administration seem to think that if they buy a few votes, they can somehow stem the bleeding. I hope he's wrong. I hope he's spectacularly wrong. Maybe he knows that the House of Representatives is a lost cause, but maybe he thinks that he can salvage a few senate seats.
Who the fuck knows what that lame brain is thinking. Is there even any truth to the proposition that people whose debt he's forgiven are going to go out and vote for him? I suppose he could dangle the ten-thousand-dollar figure out there as a carrot with the implied promise that he'll be doing even more if they vote for him and his political party. It's brazen, and it's also illegal. He has no such authority. We have Pelosi on video saying as much. Only Congress can do this. Somebody, anybody, sue this POS Potus. I'm talking to you, the Republican party. Are you fearful that pushing back will get you in hot water with your constituents who may need a little debt relief? I can tell you that the guy or gal who never got a college loan because he or she had to work to support their family instead of going to college is going to sing your praises for standing up for them. Suffer the damn slings and arrows and do your damn job. This is what we sent you to Washington to do.
My goal was to drive 100 miles. I took the Ev man's car in for his annual inspection and knew it would be a shit-fest. Not because there was anything wrong with his car, mind you, but because he has an issue with his "check engine" light that stems from God only knows what. This is a recurring theme with annual inspections where the engine light on his car is an issue. They passed everything else but asked that I put a few miles on the vehicle to see if the light would come back on after being reset in the shop. I'm going to ask that they refresh my memory today when I return the car to the shop as to what exactly I'm trying to accomplish when I'm out there putting miles on the car as I did last evening. I put 95 miles on the vehicle and the engine light never returned. I think that's a good thing. Will they now give me a sticker for the car or will they insist that I put even more miles on the vehicle? What if the engine light did come back on? Then what? Like I said, a shit fest.
Is it true that the 1.4 billion dollar lottery winner hasn't come forward since the winning ticket was announced four weeks ago? It seems inconceivable. The store that sold the ticket should put the video of customers coming and going into the store on the day the ticket was sold on a loop to see if they can't jog a memory or two. At a minimum, you would think that the winners might notify the agency that manages the ticket sales that they have the winning ticket and they're working with their attorney to put their affairs in order before taking possession of the monies. I think the winning ticket was sold in a state where the winner or winners can choose to remain anonymous. Not that it matters in this case but who knows? If there were multiple winners because a group of people went in on purchasing the ticket, we would have heard from one or more of them by now. I'm just spitballing here because that's a lot of dough to leave on the table. It seems to me there ought to be a way to figure out who bought the damn ticket. All I know for sure is that it wasn't me.
What the hell is going on in Europe with energy? What is this I'm reading where folks will have a long cold winter with many losing their lives because they can't afford to heat their homes? Boris Johnson is telling his Brits that they will have to bite the bullet when it comes to supporting Ukraine, even if that means they will struggle to survive the coming winter due to the escalating price of fuel supplies. Pubs across the fruited plains in Britain have announced that they may close 60-70% of their pubs due to the cost and availability of fuel. Macron says that the days of abundance are coming to an end, and sacrifices will be required of the good people of France in order to fight back against the instabilities of the war in Ukraine, rising prices of fuel, climate change, and inflation. I'm paraphrasing here and there, but you get the gist. How is the movement to "Green Energy" working out for you over there? Is it fair to say that they only have themselves to blame? It's time to let Ukraine fight its war with Russia. Joey "Bumbles" Biden, are you listening?
Imagine shorting the financial markets yesterday, thinking that Jerome Powell's speech would be dovish. That would have been a good play, given what happened in the markets. Every other word coming out of his mouth in his speech from Wyoming yesterday included the word "pain." That is a word you've seldom heard from any Fed heads. We're coming up on mid-term elections for chrissakes. Joey Biden wants people to go to the polls in November with the financial winds at their backs. That will never happen if the Feds go all hawkish and raise interest rates like there's no tomorrow. Who does that to his boss when his boss is already struggling to get his political party in Congress across the finish line? Mr. Powell seems to think killing inflation in the crib is more important than any election. Maybe he has visions of people needing to bring wheelbarrows full of cash to buy a loaf of bread. It's the kind of stuff that keeps Fed heads up at night.
The markets tanked on his speech from Woods Hole, Wyoming. Every index was down between three and four percent. There was nowhere to hide. Powell never explained what he meant by "pain," but the general interpretation was that it meant you would be poorer. You would have less of everything, and you would learn to make do. The consensus is that we're in stage two of a four-stage inflationary bear market. This latest bear market rally has given folks roughly fourteen percent of their money back off the lows and renewed hopes that we're on track for a new bull market run. Was the plunge in the market yesterday the end of the current bear market rally? Is it just the beginning of another market routing, the likes of which we saw earlier in the year? Some say there wasn't enough panic in the market move yesterday, and without panic selling, the prospects that a continuation of the current bear market rally is still on the table. Interesting.
The missus picked up some rocky road ice cream yesterday at a local ice cream joint. It was pretty good, but I hate having it around the house. Not because it doesn't taste good but because it tastes too good. I'm not a big consumer of ice cream, but it will do in a pinch. Just so you know, eating ice cream is not a guilt-free indulgence. One thing I like about this ice cream is that it's pretty darn rich. When you consider that it's loaded with nuts, marshmallows, and chocolate chips, it makes for a meal in and of itself. One scoop is all you need. The missus is lamenting that we have so much left over after having a portion or two for dessert last night. She's saying they had so many flavors that she might have rather had instead of getting as much of the rocky road as we did. You only live once, little darlings. Enjoy what you have on hand, and stop looking in the rearview mirror. There is always tomorrow until there isn't.
I read somewhere that the two people who tried to sell Ashley Biden's diary have now been sentenced to prison. That's right; I said Ashley Biden. She is the daughter of the current president of the United States, Joey Bumbles Biden. I think they found the damn diary under a mattress in a halfway house where Ashley Biden had spent time recovering from this or that addiction. Since when is selling a journal that you found somewhere a crime? Does this have anything to do with the entries in the diary referencing Joey Biden taking showers with his young daughter? How sick is that? We Americans have long been aware of Biden's sniffing this or that young child and often while on camera, which tells you the depths and depravity of his predilections when and where children are involved. But, with your daughter? In any other world, that is what they call incest. Imagine a world where someone found Ivanka Trump's diary with similar notations. All hell would break loose in the media. When it comes to the Bidens, it's fucking crickets. Do we or do we not have a Department of Justice?
We're coming up on the month of September in a few days. I love September! I'm just putting that out there. We're done with the hot days of summer and we're on to the refreshingly cool days of early Fall. The summer crowds will thin considerably over the next few days as schools start their Fall sessions. Moms and dads who stayed away from the beach during the summer because of the crowds may come around here and there but we're otherwise left with the early evening dog walkers and the people probing the sands along the shore with their metal detectors looking for buried treasure. You couldn't ask for anything more if you're a bicyclist. It's time to simply enjoy the rarified air that comes along with a bike ride along the ocean. With fewer distrations and fewer dangers thanks to the absence of cars and people, it's easier to concentrate on the nautral beauty of one's surroundings. Headwinds while riding will be less daunting and tailwinds will be more than welcome as usual. That's just the way I like it.
We'll be heading off on vacation soon. I sure hope there's a good place to do my journal up there. I don't need much. I just need a place off the beaten track where I won't bother anyone when I'm whacking away at the keys on my keyboard in the early hours of the morning. I'll wear headphones if I have to if I want to listen to a little background music while I write. It shouldn't be all that difficult. I have a compliant fam who is used to me doing what I do when it comes to this here journal. They give me the space and the time to get done what I need to get done. I'm getting better too at working around distractions when people are around when I write. Do what you have to do, little babies. You know where to find me if you need me. Oddly enough, there may be a few more demands on my time when vacation finally rolls around so I'll need to prepare myself for that eventuality. If that means getting up even earlier, so be it.
The missus tells me that we're in for a few days of temperatures in the upper eighties this coming week. I do not like hot weather, no I do not. I thought we had seen the last of the dog days of summer but it seems we have not. We're a couple of days out from September so it can't last long. Right? It's a little like getting a snow storm in April. It's inconvenient and not much fun, especially after a long and snowy winter, but you know the snow won't last long and you know better days are right around the corner. I don't know yet what weather awaits us when we're on vacation but storm systems come and go very quickly where we're going so trying to predict anything is a fool's errand. You take it as it comes. That said, an endless succession of rainy days would not be welcome since we'd like to get in a little boating. The Ev man could use some time behind the wheel and we're happy to turn the navigating over to him for as long as he likes. This is what good parenting looks like.
Summer Doldrums
21/08/22 07:01
Here we go again, folks. Let's do this. Or, as they say in the deep south, let's git er done. I've got to get a lot of ink down on paper between now and next Sunday, so there's no time to waste. It would help if I could find some good music to have on in the background. Even that seems to be hard to find this morning. It's a cool morning, though, so that's a relief. I won't say that we've seen all we're going to see of the hotter days one typically sees in the summer, but we are in mid-August, so we should expect to see temperatures moderate somewhat. I have this grammar checker on in the background, and it keeps throwing in commas here, there, and everywhere. One too many, in my honest opinion. Not that I have any other kind of opinion, mind you.
This summer seems to be one for the ages regarding technology issues hereabouts. An electrical storm blew two of my Apple TVs, and it fried a couple of ports on my router. A few days ago, I noticed that my Ooma Telo had died. The lights went out, and if you are familiar with Ooma devices, you know what I mean. No amount of powering and repowering would bring it back to life. I figured she was dead and just set about replacing the device. I don't think the problem had anything to do with the same electrical storm that killed my TVs, but we used the telephone for a while after the storm, so maybe it was a delayed reaction. Maybe not. Anyway, the Ev man had a spare Telo device that he wasn't using, so I swapped it out, discussed switching the devices with Ooma tech support, and we're now back in business.
I have a few traps out for Mr. Mousey, but he's avoided them thus far. He's one lucky little fuck, if I do say so myself. I've set a few traps outside the room where I'm sitting, but I've seen no action. That suggests to me, wrongly perhaps, that my mouse problem is contained and I don't have a more significant problem on my hands. I'm still unsure how this little fella got into my house, so I'll need to give that one a little more thought. Is there a hole somewhere that needs plugging? Did he come in with a load of laundry I brought in off the line? Maybe he nestled into what he thought was a snug rug and a place to rest his weary little head while nobody was looking. If he thought he would go undetected for long, he has another thing coming. I've got news for you, little guy. I've got your number. It's just a matter of time now.
The missus and I just finished watching an Apple TV series entitled "Black Bird." It's a six-part series about a convicted drug and gun runner (Jimmy Keene) who is offered a deal of commutation by the FBI if he agrees to go undercover to elicit a confession from a serial killer who is about to be released from prison on a technicality. It's based on the true life story of Larry Hall, who, despite never having found the bodies of his victims, is allegedly responsible for the disappearance and deaths of 21 young women. It is not the kind of show the missus is known to enjoy watching, so I suspect she closed her eyes for much of it. The production quality was quite good, though, and the undercover aspects of the story were believable and well done.
Performances by Greg Kinnear of SNL fame and his FBI counterpart, whose name escapes me at the moment, made the show all that much more realistic and intriguing. The kicker is that Hall was ultimately sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping and not murder since he never revealed where any of his victims were buried. Keene offers his services to law enforcement these days as a serial killer profiler. However, I'm not sure that doing what he did as an undercover informant qualifies him as a profiler. It was a little unclear in the show as to just how long it took Keene to extract the confession, and you have to consider that when looking at the bigger picture. He had been sentenced to ten years in prison for his drug offenses, so, all things considered, was what he had to endure as an undercover agent worth it? Would he do it all over again? Anyways, not a bad show. It was a little hard for the missus to watch, but she got through it.
Today is Primary Day in Alaska and Wyoming. I'll be pulling for Liz Cheney's and Lisa Murkowski's opponents. The Alaska race is a little more complicated because the two candidates with the most votes get on the ballot in November. Wyoming is cut and dry. Either you win, or you lose. Both races are in western time zones, so I'll likely not be awake when the races are called. This is one of those nights, though, where I can see myself getting up in the middle of the night so I can go online to see if my candidates won. The latest polls have Cheney's opponent up by 30 points, so maybe I don't need to worry about that one. That bitch will likely reappear on some liberal network as a conservative talking head. Good riddance. I believe Murkowski's challenger is ahead as well, so only good things can happen if that's true. We'll have to wait until the general election in November to celebrate.
We sure could use some rain hereabouts. It's dry as a bone out there. I can't remember the last time it rained. We don't have a problem with forest fires in my little corner of the world, but if we did, this would be ground zero. Sometimes, I like rainy days because they give me an excuse not to get out and about on my bike. Conversely, days when we have no rain push me to go riding if for no other reason than to take advantage of the good weather while it's there for the taking. Our lawn is predictably patchy given the relentlessly hot days we've had as of late, so mowing the lawn, while still necessary, will not take as long because there will be less area to cut. Is this too much nitty gritty? Too much detail? Despite the heat and the lack of rain, seasonal changes are underway here along the seacoast. Certain trees have already begun to shed their leaves, and other ground-covering vines and plants are turning various shades of red, orange, and yellow. Is there any doubt that September is right around the corner?
I watched Tucker (FOX) last night, and he was rattling off the number of people in Trump's orbit who have been arrested or accosted since Trump came down the escalator in 2016. It was an astoundingly long list. The point he was making was not necessarily about Trump. It was about one political party using our Justice Department to wage a Jihad against their political opponents. It was about the lack of a double standard of applying justice based not on the crime allegedly committed but rather on the political party of the "criminal." He was clear about which party was at the heart of this deception and what we stand to lose as a country should this be allowed to continue. We are no better than a banana republic without free and fair elections. Those are my words, not his. Tucker was also clear in making the point that any indictment of Trump by Biden's Justice Department was more about preventing him from becoming president than any crime that Trump may or may not have committed.
Tucker was also clear about the remedies available to the American people. To paraphrase, he said that people could make the necessary changes at the ballot box. If we carry that thought to its logical conclusion, we should see a red wave, the likes of which we've never seen come election day in November. Republicans, by and large, do not vent their anger in public and prefer to let out their frustrations in the voting booth. In primary after primary this season, we've seen Trump's candidates win repeatedly. This may explain why Biden wants to put Trump behind bars so badly. He doesn't care that it looks political. He's dead-man-walking in terms of the number of days he has in office until the end of his first and only term. We also know that Biden is just a figurehead. He's the proverbial fool on the hill who gets to read his cue cards and return to his vacation home in Delaware after working a four-day week. Pathetic.
Just a quick update on Liz Cheney. She got her butt kicked last night in the Wyoming primary. Trump can now claim credit for taking down the Cheney, Bush, Clinton, and McCain dynasties. It's pretty damn impressive any way you slice it. Cheney isn't giving up on her goal of ensuring that Trump never gets the chance to sit in the Oval Office again. In her concession speech, which I've only heard people making a passing reference to, she said something about running for president as an independent if that is what it takes to take Trump down. She's just a bitter old twat. Trump gave her the spanking of her life, and she wants her revenge. I hope her old man, Dick Cheney, is also taking notes because he didn't help his daughter's cause by doing television ads for her. It looked desperate, and it was desperate. I want to be careful here because Trump's work isn't finished as far as the primaries are concerned. Short term, we need to unseat Murkowski. Longer term, Mittens Romney.
The Ev man and I went to Staples yesterday to buy a chair for his desk here at our house. Staples had a pretty good selection, and we settled on just the right chair after trying out various chairs on the floor for ten to fifteen minutes. The one he liked the most was on sale, marked down to $109 from $179. I'm not sure it was the chair I'd want to sit in for hours on end, but he's not usually at our house for hours when he visits. An associate on the floor tipped us off on how to download an app to get a $10 discount, so we went back and forth with that until we got it downloaded. Well, if we save an additional $10, why not apply that to the $20 fee they charged to assemble the chair? Right? After paying at the register, we popped next door to Trader Joe's. Ev has never been to Trader Joe's, so I think he found it interesting. I also think he experienced a bit of sensory overload, which I totally understand. I could see it in his eyes. Restless. Uneasy. Anxious.
I can't decide if this hack I have is a known reaction to an ace inhibitor or just a garden variety cough. I was sorely tempted to have a good shot of Nyquil last night before bedtime to quell what I thought was a cough I had developed. Nyquil is some nasty shit, so I talked myself out of it. I envisioned what it was probably doing to my internal organs and decided that my cough was not far enough along to warrant taking any of the medication. Don't get me wrong. When the going gets rough, you don't give a shit what you put in your body. You want relief, whatever that looks like. Nyquil will provide you with a good night's sleep, and it will suppress the hell out of any cough that you might be experiencing. I know because I have used it over the years. Not a lot, but certainly when and where I needed something like Nyquil to help me get a good night's sleep. We'll see where all of this goes.
It bears mentioning that many democrats changed their registration to republican so they could bolster Cheney's chances of winning her primary in Wyoming last night. They sang her praises from the rooftops for all her hard work on the January 6 Committee. She was doing her best to indict Trump and his associates for their roles in the January 6 insurrection. Thankfully, there aren't enough democrats in Wyoming to make a difference even if every last democrat in the State changed their registration. The liberal media has never been a fan of the warmongering Cheneys, but they embraced Liz Cheney like a long-lost cousin when she joined forces with the democrats to take down Trump. It was a decision to save our democracy, or that is what she told anyone willing to listen. Liz Cheney was going to save the republican party and the world at large from people like Donald Trump, who she and her never-Trumper soulmates view as an existential threat to our republic. She'll be doing that from the outside starting in January of 2023. Thank you, Wyoming!
Finally. some rain. But, is it enough to give my garden a good watering? I just don't know. I'll have to see if we're expecting more rain today. I might actually be done watering my zucchini. I've had so much zucchini this year that I've had to throw a few of them away. I hate to throw away food, but what else was I going to do? Have them sit on the counter in my kitchen until they turned bad? I thought a little bit about donating the zucchini to a local homeless shelter, but truth be told, what the hell would they want with zucchini? There are only so many zucchini dishes that you can make, and none of them would be at the top of anyone's list of "gotta haves." I'm going to have to rethink zucchini next year. The plants take up too much space in the garden, and nobody wants the damn vegetables once they become available. So, that's that.
I'm trying to log on to a few things this morning, but I'm finding that the things I'm trying to log onto are offline, down, or otherwise not available. One or two things I can understand, but this seems to be more widespread. Then again, other things are totally available. It's starting to feel very personal. I'm seeing no tweets about the overall electrical grid, so it's not likely that we're under some attack by the Chinese or the Russians. If they're coming after me in particular for some reason, they're going to have their work cut out for them. Now you see me, now you don't. I'm only kidding. I'm making this stuff up as I go along because I have very little else on my mind this morning, and I'm needing to get at least three paragraphs down on paper before moving on with my morning activities. It is true, though, that I can't access a couple of online things that I look at every morning. It's probably nothing. Maybe the missus forgot to pay a bill somewhere.
There are a lot of stories in the news these days about alligator attacks. I'm talking about attacks in Florida, where alligators and humans quite often live in close proximity to each other. Every other senior living facility or golf course has an obligatory pond on the premises that is sufficiently large to conceal one or two 11-foot alligators. You ask the question, where do alligators live? The answer is obvious. Wherever the hell they want to, is the quick and easy answer. The same answer applies to the question, what do alligators eat? That's right, anything they want to. That includes dogs, cats, raccoons, small children, and the occasional senior citizen out for a stroll at dusk. Just because you can't see the critters doesn't mean that they aren't there, just beneath the surface, waiting for just the right moment. This is what they do. Read the fucking signs.
The missus tells me that my coughing at night is keeping her awake. Do you think that it's time for me to get my affairs in order? When I think about all the things I'm going to have to put together so the missus can get along without me once I'm gone, it's just crazy. I'm such a reliable crutch around this joint that the missus doesn't even wake up when our smoke alarm goes off anymore. Johnny Boy will take care of it. He knows how to do all those things. Will she post an ad in the local paper for a Mr. Fixit once I'm no longer in the picture? The Ev man will need to step up and lend a hand here and there. That's what children do in a pinch. Right? We're talking about things like turning the computer on and off and replacing batteries in flashlights and handheld television remotes. God help both of them if there is anything more demanding or more complex that needs remedying. There is only so much I can do from the great beyond.
The missus is in high cotton this time of the year. The Little League World Series is playing on ESPN, the sweetest corn on God's green earth is now available at roadside stands, watermelons are plentiful, and the beach is just a stone's throw away. I don't share her passion for any of the abovementioned items, but I am eating more corn this year than I have in years past for whatever reason. I should also say that I don't actively dislike any of the abovementioned either. I avoid watermelon because it is too sweet, and I avoid the beach because I'm not crazy about getting sand between my toes. I've given up on trying to get the missus to make sure that she doesn't drag beach sand into the car, but one look at the car mat tells you all you need to know about just how successful I've been at doing that. The sand is so fine that it gets into every damn nook and cranny, and it's impossible to eliminate altogether. Some wars just aren't worth fighting.
Tucker (FOX) was ringing the alarm bells last night about some Republican Senatorial candidates running for office. Many of them are polling poorly, and Tucker seems to think that they are not talking about the things people in America are concerned about, like crime, immigration, etc. He played one ad being run by Dr. Oz out of Pennsylvania that had to do with inflation as an example of what not to do. The ad was a bit of a flop, not because people aren't interested in inflation, but because Dr. Oz mispronounced the name of the popular store. It was a little akin to the ad run by George Bush a couple of decades back when he didn't know how much milk cost when asked by a reporter. The common man or woman looking at that ad couldn't relate to the reality that Bush was selling. Does anyone really think that Dr. Oz does his own food shopping? Anyway, let's hope someone in the various camps of these candidates was listening to Tucker last night. There's still time.
Mitch McConnell, the Minority Speaker of the House in the Senate, went on television and said something about winning back the House on Election Day in November but that the Senate was likely out of reach due to the quality of the candidates running. The senatorial candidates winning primaries across the land have been largely MAGA, and McConnell seems to think that MAGA isn't going to sell well in the general election. Of course, if MAGA does sell well on Election Day, his days as leader of the Senate are likely numbered. All Mitch wants is candidates that he can work with and who are willing to work with him. That means voting the way Mitch wants them to vote and towing the establishment line. Fuck the establishment, is what I say. We've had enough of "establishment," and "establishment" has not served us well. I hope that the American people agree with me and, thus far, these MAGA senatorial candidates are winning their primaries, so it's a good start.
I hope there's some truth to the rumor that fourteen FBI agents have come forward anonymously to tell Senator Grassley of Iowa all about the political shenanigans going on in their departments. I want these guys outing these rotten mother fuckers in their ranks until the cows come home. If the upper echelon in the FBI is hiding or suppressing intelligence reports on the Bidens as it relates to their crimes, then we need more whistle-blowers and not fewer whistle-blowers. I want them singing their little hearts out. I'm guessing that we're talking about the Bidens. Who else could it be? MIght it concern who or who isn't making decisions in the White House? Might it concern those parties in the White House that are really running the show? Maybe we can start with the fact that there is no way on God's green earth that Bumbling Joe Biden got eighty-one million votes. Just humor me here.
Say good night, little mousey. It took me a few nights, but I finally got it right, and now your little ass is mine. Could I have found a more humane way of dispatching a little fuck like you? Maybe. Did I want my pound of flesh at the end of the day? You bet your ass I did. I don't have anything against little mousies, per se, but I'll not tolerate one or more of them in my living quarters. How he got into our house is something I'll need to investigate further. Is there a hole or an entrance behind a couch, television, or maybe a bookshelf? How do I explain the fact that there is only one mouse? Well, one mouse that I know of. I've kept the door closed in the room I saw his sweet little face on day one so that he couldn't disappear into our house somewhere. That would have made his capture and death a more prolonged ordeal. I probably wouldn't have slept well knowing that he was out and about doing what little mousies do. The missus will be pleased to know he's dead and gone.
Governor DeSantis is going to state after state giving speeches on behalf of Trump's endorsed gubernatorial and senatorial candidates. I watched and listened to his speech on behalf of the gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania, and I thought he was more than engaging. He's pretty good on his feet. I'm not sure what I expected to see, but Trump is the gold standard, so that was the yardstick I used when watching DeSantis. I found myself asking the following question: If DeSantis didn't have bragging rights the way he has to all the good things that have happened to Florida on his watch, would he hold the kind of sway that he does within the Republican party? Would he be doing what he's doing to assist Trump's picks? And, if he's thinking about running for the presidency, why is he doing everything he can to help Trump's picks? If Trump's picks prevail, that helps Trump. Why would DeSantis want to help the man he wants to take down in the primaries? Or, does he?
The dirty little secret is that DeSantis is really out speaking on the stump to bolster his image as a national candidate. The fact that most people east of the Mason-Dixon line have never heard of DeSantis is something he needs to remedy. One way to do that is to get out on the stump and talk to the people who can elect you to the office one day. I thought his speech was about his record in Florida and a lot less about the candidates he was there to stump for. Did anyone else notice that? If he was supposed to be talking up Trump's candidates, why did he have so little to say about Trump's candidates? Maybe the idea was to simply roll out a template or blueprint that new governors could and should follow should they be elected. Perhaps the idea was to talk to people about what was possible, and who better to talk about it than the guy who has done it so successfully? This is what you're getting if you elect Trump's picks, and this is what success looks like.
It's hard to believe that Pennsylvania would send a clown the likes of John Fetterman to represent them in the US Senate. I mean, look at him. He's a hulk of a man, fully tattooed, bald, really just a lumbering progressive toadie for the left, and someone who lived in his parents basement until he turned fifty years old. It gets worse. He was also the mayor of some pee hole in the snow town in Pennsylvania with an annual salary of somewhere in the vicinity of $150 a month. His parents provided additional support to him in the amount of $50k a year. I'm not sure how he ended up as lieutenant Governor of the great state of Pennsylvania. This was all before he had a massive stroke. In recent videos I've seen of him on the stump, he's a stuttering mess. Not unlike Joey Bumbles Biden, I suppose. I read somewhere this morning where he released criminals from prison while in office. The article painted Fetterman as a Dukakis style nut job. I think the anti-Fetterman war is just getting started.
While we're on the subject of politics, I'm a little concerned about their being a third party on the 2024 ticket when we all get to go back to the polls to vote for president. I'm talkiing about someone who can siphon off enough votes to prevent Trump or DeSantis from beccome president. I don't know who that would be at this point but, were it to happen, I'd like to see the republicans work behind the scenes to find someone who can whittle away at the democrat vote instead of the other way around. Wasn't it Ross Perot who put Bill Clinon in office? That's the extent of my historical knowledge on such things. I know I'm getting out over my skis on this seeing as it's a while off but it will be here soon enough. Shorter term, we need to make sure that Oz beats Fetterman in Pennsylvania this Fall and that republicans beat the tar out of their progressive counterparts in any number of other races so we republicans can get back the majority in the Senate. That includes my man, Herschel Walker, in his race against Warnock in the great state of South Carolina.
Mrs G got out and about in her car this past week. This is the first time she's been behind the wheel in months since her surgery earlier this year. We kept her car at our house during her recovery and we drove it every few weeks just so that it didn't sit for too long. If we put a hundred miles on it, I'd be surprised. The only time I put gas in it is when we returned the car to her this past week. That little car of hers drives like a truck so it's not like we enjoyed taking it here and there. Anyway, Mrs G was feeling pretty good about the fact that she got out for a drive even if it was just a short drive. She also said something about the fact that her little walker was heavier than expected and it wasn't as easy putting it in her trunk as she thought it would be. Nobody said that any of this was going to be easy. It doesn't help that time isn't on her side.
Summer is getting a little long in the tooth hereabouts. I was hoping to see some amelioration in the number of cars (traffic) and people when I was on my bike ride yesterday but no such luck. I had to do the usual weaving and whirling just to get through the area down around Jenness Beach. Cars parked along the roadway present all kinds of dangers including children escaping the grasp of their parents and coming onto the roadway at inopportune times. It's the cars that are coming and going along the boulevard that make matters infinitely worse since you can never quite predict what they are going to do when come up on you from behind. Will they become distracted and put you in danger? Will they slow down as they should and look for just the right opportunity to pass you by? A week or two more of this madness won't kill me, or will it?
This summer seems to be one for the ages regarding technology issues hereabouts. An electrical storm blew two of my Apple TVs, and it fried a couple of ports on my router. A few days ago, I noticed that my Ooma Telo had died. The lights went out, and if you are familiar with Ooma devices, you know what I mean. No amount of powering and repowering would bring it back to life. I figured she was dead and just set about replacing the device. I don't think the problem had anything to do with the same electrical storm that killed my TVs, but we used the telephone for a while after the storm, so maybe it was a delayed reaction. Maybe not. Anyway, the Ev man had a spare Telo device that he wasn't using, so I swapped it out, discussed switching the devices with Ooma tech support, and we're now back in business.
I have a few traps out for Mr. Mousey, but he's avoided them thus far. He's one lucky little fuck, if I do say so myself. I've set a few traps outside the room where I'm sitting, but I've seen no action. That suggests to me, wrongly perhaps, that my mouse problem is contained and I don't have a more significant problem on my hands. I'm still unsure how this little fella got into my house, so I'll need to give that one a little more thought. Is there a hole somewhere that needs plugging? Did he come in with a load of laundry I brought in off the line? Maybe he nestled into what he thought was a snug rug and a place to rest his weary little head while nobody was looking. If he thought he would go undetected for long, he has another thing coming. I've got news for you, little guy. I've got your number. It's just a matter of time now.
The missus and I just finished watching an Apple TV series entitled "Black Bird." It's a six-part series about a convicted drug and gun runner (Jimmy Keene) who is offered a deal of commutation by the FBI if he agrees to go undercover to elicit a confession from a serial killer who is about to be released from prison on a technicality. It's based on the true life story of Larry Hall, who, despite never having found the bodies of his victims, is allegedly responsible for the disappearance and deaths of 21 young women. It is not the kind of show the missus is known to enjoy watching, so I suspect she closed her eyes for much of it. The production quality was quite good, though, and the undercover aspects of the story were believable and well done.
Performances by Greg Kinnear of SNL fame and his FBI counterpart, whose name escapes me at the moment, made the show all that much more realistic and intriguing. The kicker is that Hall was ultimately sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping and not murder since he never revealed where any of his victims were buried. Keene offers his services to law enforcement these days as a serial killer profiler. However, I'm not sure that doing what he did as an undercover informant qualifies him as a profiler. It was a little unclear in the show as to just how long it took Keene to extract the confession, and you have to consider that when looking at the bigger picture. He had been sentenced to ten years in prison for his drug offenses, so, all things considered, was what he had to endure as an undercover agent worth it? Would he do it all over again? Anyways, not a bad show. It was a little hard for the missus to watch, but she got through it.
Today is Primary Day in Alaska and Wyoming. I'll be pulling for Liz Cheney's and Lisa Murkowski's opponents. The Alaska race is a little more complicated because the two candidates with the most votes get on the ballot in November. Wyoming is cut and dry. Either you win, or you lose. Both races are in western time zones, so I'll likely not be awake when the races are called. This is one of those nights, though, where I can see myself getting up in the middle of the night so I can go online to see if my candidates won. The latest polls have Cheney's opponent up by 30 points, so maybe I don't need to worry about that one. That bitch will likely reappear on some liberal network as a conservative talking head. Good riddance. I believe Murkowski's challenger is ahead as well, so only good things can happen if that's true. We'll have to wait until the general election in November to celebrate.
We sure could use some rain hereabouts. It's dry as a bone out there. I can't remember the last time it rained. We don't have a problem with forest fires in my little corner of the world, but if we did, this would be ground zero. Sometimes, I like rainy days because they give me an excuse not to get out and about on my bike. Conversely, days when we have no rain push me to go riding if for no other reason than to take advantage of the good weather while it's there for the taking. Our lawn is predictably patchy given the relentlessly hot days we've had as of late, so mowing the lawn, while still necessary, will not take as long because there will be less area to cut. Is this too much nitty gritty? Too much detail? Despite the heat and the lack of rain, seasonal changes are underway here along the seacoast. Certain trees have already begun to shed their leaves, and other ground-covering vines and plants are turning various shades of red, orange, and yellow. Is there any doubt that September is right around the corner?
I watched Tucker (FOX) last night, and he was rattling off the number of people in Trump's orbit who have been arrested or accosted since Trump came down the escalator in 2016. It was an astoundingly long list. The point he was making was not necessarily about Trump. It was about one political party using our Justice Department to wage a Jihad against their political opponents. It was about the lack of a double standard of applying justice based not on the crime allegedly committed but rather on the political party of the "criminal." He was clear about which party was at the heart of this deception and what we stand to lose as a country should this be allowed to continue. We are no better than a banana republic without free and fair elections. Those are my words, not his. Tucker was also clear in making the point that any indictment of Trump by Biden's Justice Department was more about preventing him from becoming president than any crime that Trump may or may not have committed.
Tucker was also clear about the remedies available to the American people. To paraphrase, he said that people could make the necessary changes at the ballot box. If we carry that thought to its logical conclusion, we should see a red wave, the likes of which we've never seen come election day in November. Republicans, by and large, do not vent their anger in public and prefer to let out their frustrations in the voting booth. In primary after primary this season, we've seen Trump's candidates win repeatedly. This may explain why Biden wants to put Trump behind bars so badly. He doesn't care that it looks political. He's dead-man-walking in terms of the number of days he has in office until the end of his first and only term. We also know that Biden is just a figurehead. He's the proverbial fool on the hill who gets to read his cue cards and return to his vacation home in Delaware after working a four-day week. Pathetic.
Just a quick update on Liz Cheney. She got her butt kicked last night in the Wyoming primary. Trump can now claim credit for taking down the Cheney, Bush, Clinton, and McCain dynasties. It's pretty damn impressive any way you slice it. Cheney isn't giving up on her goal of ensuring that Trump never gets the chance to sit in the Oval Office again. In her concession speech, which I've only heard people making a passing reference to, she said something about running for president as an independent if that is what it takes to take Trump down. She's just a bitter old twat. Trump gave her the spanking of her life, and she wants her revenge. I hope her old man, Dick Cheney, is also taking notes because he didn't help his daughter's cause by doing television ads for her. It looked desperate, and it was desperate. I want to be careful here because Trump's work isn't finished as far as the primaries are concerned. Short term, we need to unseat Murkowski. Longer term, Mittens Romney.
The Ev man and I went to Staples yesterday to buy a chair for his desk here at our house. Staples had a pretty good selection, and we settled on just the right chair after trying out various chairs on the floor for ten to fifteen minutes. The one he liked the most was on sale, marked down to $109 from $179. I'm not sure it was the chair I'd want to sit in for hours on end, but he's not usually at our house for hours when he visits. An associate on the floor tipped us off on how to download an app to get a $10 discount, so we went back and forth with that until we got it downloaded. Well, if we save an additional $10, why not apply that to the $20 fee they charged to assemble the chair? Right? After paying at the register, we popped next door to Trader Joe's. Ev has never been to Trader Joe's, so I think he found it interesting. I also think he experienced a bit of sensory overload, which I totally understand. I could see it in his eyes. Restless. Uneasy. Anxious.
I can't decide if this hack I have is a known reaction to an ace inhibitor or just a garden variety cough. I was sorely tempted to have a good shot of Nyquil last night before bedtime to quell what I thought was a cough I had developed. Nyquil is some nasty shit, so I talked myself out of it. I envisioned what it was probably doing to my internal organs and decided that my cough was not far enough along to warrant taking any of the medication. Don't get me wrong. When the going gets rough, you don't give a shit what you put in your body. You want relief, whatever that looks like. Nyquil will provide you with a good night's sleep, and it will suppress the hell out of any cough that you might be experiencing. I know because I have used it over the years. Not a lot, but certainly when and where I needed something like Nyquil to help me get a good night's sleep. We'll see where all of this goes.
It bears mentioning that many democrats changed their registration to republican so they could bolster Cheney's chances of winning her primary in Wyoming last night. They sang her praises from the rooftops for all her hard work on the January 6 Committee. She was doing her best to indict Trump and his associates for their roles in the January 6 insurrection. Thankfully, there aren't enough democrats in Wyoming to make a difference even if every last democrat in the State changed their registration. The liberal media has never been a fan of the warmongering Cheneys, but they embraced Liz Cheney like a long-lost cousin when she joined forces with the democrats to take down Trump. It was a decision to save our democracy, or that is what she told anyone willing to listen. Liz Cheney was going to save the republican party and the world at large from people like Donald Trump, who she and her never-Trumper soulmates view as an existential threat to our republic. She'll be doing that from the outside starting in January of 2023. Thank you, Wyoming!
Finally. some rain. But, is it enough to give my garden a good watering? I just don't know. I'll have to see if we're expecting more rain today. I might actually be done watering my zucchini. I've had so much zucchini this year that I've had to throw a few of them away. I hate to throw away food, but what else was I going to do? Have them sit on the counter in my kitchen until they turned bad? I thought a little bit about donating the zucchini to a local homeless shelter, but truth be told, what the hell would they want with zucchini? There are only so many zucchini dishes that you can make, and none of them would be at the top of anyone's list of "gotta haves." I'm going to have to rethink zucchini next year. The plants take up too much space in the garden, and nobody wants the damn vegetables once they become available. So, that's that.
I'm trying to log on to a few things this morning, but I'm finding that the things I'm trying to log onto are offline, down, or otherwise not available. One or two things I can understand, but this seems to be more widespread. Then again, other things are totally available. It's starting to feel very personal. I'm seeing no tweets about the overall electrical grid, so it's not likely that we're under some attack by the Chinese or the Russians. If they're coming after me in particular for some reason, they're going to have their work cut out for them. Now you see me, now you don't. I'm only kidding. I'm making this stuff up as I go along because I have very little else on my mind this morning, and I'm needing to get at least three paragraphs down on paper before moving on with my morning activities. It is true, though, that I can't access a couple of online things that I look at every morning. It's probably nothing. Maybe the missus forgot to pay a bill somewhere.
There are a lot of stories in the news these days about alligator attacks. I'm talking about attacks in Florida, where alligators and humans quite often live in close proximity to each other. Every other senior living facility or golf course has an obligatory pond on the premises that is sufficiently large to conceal one or two 11-foot alligators. You ask the question, where do alligators live? The answer is obvious. Wherever the hell they want to, is the quick and easy answer. The same answer applies to the question, what do alligators eat? That's right, anything they want to. That includes dogs, cats, raccoons, small children, and the occasional senior citizen out for a stroll at dusk. Just because you can't see the critters doesn't mean that they aren't there, just beneath the surface, waiting for just the right moment. This is what they do. Read the fucking signs.
The missus tells me that my coughing at night is keeping her awake. Do you think that it's time for me to get my affairs in order? When I think about all the things I'm going to have to put together so the missus can get along without me once I'm gone, it's just crazy. I'm such a reliable crutch around this joint that the missus doesn't even wake up when our smoke alarm goes off anymore. Johnny Boy will take care of it. He knows how to do all those things. Will she post an ad in the local paper for a Mr. Fixit once I'm no longer in the picture? The Ev man will need to step up and lend a hand here and there. That's what children do in a pinch. Right? We're talking about things like turning the computer on and off and replacing batteries in flashlights and handheld television remotes. God help both of them if there is anything more demanding or more complex that needs remedying. There is only so much I can do from the great beyond.
The missus is in high cotton this time of the year. The Little League World Series is playing on ESPN, the sweetest corn on God's green earth is now available at roadside stands, watermelons are plentiful, and the beach is just a stone's throw away. I don't share her passion for any of the abovementioned items, but I am eating more corn this year than I have in years past for whatever reason. I should also say that I don't actively dislike any of the abovementioned either. I avoid watermelon because it is too sweet, and I avoid the beach because I'm not crazy about getting sand between my toes. I've given up on trying to get the missus to make sure that she doesn't drag beach sand into the car, but one look at the car mat tells you all you need to know about just how successful I've been at doing that. The sand is so fine that it gets into every damn nook and cranny, and it's impossible to eliminate altogether. Some wars just aren't worth fighting.
Tucker (FOX) was ringing the alarm bells last night about some Republican Senatorial candidates running for office. Many of them are polling poorly, and Tucker seems to think that they are not talking about the things people in America are concerned about, like crime, immigration, etc. He played one ad being run by Dr. Oz out of Pennsylvania that had to do with inflation as an example of what not to do. The ad was a bit of a flop, not because people aren't interested in inflation, but because Dr. Oz mispronounced the name of the popular store. It was a little akin to the ad run by George Bush a couple of decades back when he didn't know how much milk cost when asked by a reporter. The common man or woman looking at that ad couldn't relate to the reality that Bush was selling. Does anyone really think that Dr. Oz does his own food shopping? Anyway, let's hope someone in the various camps of these candidates was listening to Tucker last night. There's still time.
Mitch McConnell, the Minority Speaker of the House in the Senate, went on television and said something about winning back the House on Election Day in November but that the Senate was likely out of reach due to the quality of the candidates running. The senatorial candidates winning primaries across the land have been largely MAGA, and McConnell seems to think that MAGA isn't going to sell well in the general election. Of course, if MAGA does sell well on Election Day, his days as leader of the Senate are likely numbered. All Mitch wants is candidates that he can work with and who are willing to work with him. That means voting the way Mitch wants them to vote and towing the establishment line. Fuck the establishment, is what I say. We've had enough of "establishment," and "establishment" has not served us well. I hope that the American people agree with me and, thus far, these MAGA senatorial candidates are winning their primaries, so it's a good start.
I hope there's some truth to the rumor that fourteen FBI agents have come forward anonymously to tell Senator Grassley of Iowa all about the political shenanigans going on in their departments. I want these guys outing these rotten mother fuckers in their ranks until the cows come home. If the upper echelon in the FBI is hiding or suppressing intelligence reports on the Bidens as it relates to their crimes, then we need more whistle-blowers and not fewer whistle-blowers. I want them singing their little hearts out. I'm guessing that we're talking about the Bidens. Who else could it be? MIght it concern who or who isn't making decisions in the White House? Might it concern those parties in the White House that are really running the show? Maybe we can start with the fact that there is no way on God's green earth that Bumbling Joe Biden got eighty-one million votes. Just humor me here.
Say good night, little mousey. It took me a few nights, but I finally got it right, and now your little ass is mine. Could I have found a more humane way of dispatching a little fuck like you? Maybe. Did I want my pound of flesh at the end of the day? You bet your ass I did. I don't have anything against little mousies, per se, but I'll not tolerate one or more of them in my living quarters. How he got into our house is something I'll need to investigate further. Is there a hole or an entrance behind a couch, television, or maybe a bookshelf? How do I explain the fact that there is only one mouse? Well, one mouse that I know of. I've kept the door closed in the room I saw his sweet little face on day one so that he couldn't disappear into our house somewhere. That would have made his capture and death a more prolonged ordeal. I probably wouldn't have slept well knowing that he was out and about doing what little mousies do. The missus will be pleased to know he's dead and gone.
Governor DeSantis is going to state after state giving speeches on behalf of Trump's endorsed gubernatorial and senatorial candidates. I watched and listened to his speech on behalf of the gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania, and I thought he was more than engaging. He's pretty good on his feet. I'm not sure what I expected to see, but Trump is the gold standard, so that was the yardstick I used when watching DeSantis. I found myself asking the following question: If DeSantis didn't have bragging rights the way he has to all the good things that have happened to Florida on his watch, would he hold the kind of sway that he does within the Republican party? Would he be doing what he's doing to assist Trump's picks? And, if he's thinking about running for the presidency, why is he doing everything he can to help Trump's picks? If Trump's picks prevail, that helps Trump. Why would DeSantis want to help the man he wants to take down in the primaries? Or, does he?
The dirty little secret is that DeSantis is really out speaking on the stump to bolster his image as a national candidate. The fact that most people east of the Mason-Dixon line have never heard of DeSantis is something he needs to remedy. One way to do that is to get out on the stump and talk to the people who can elect you to the office one day. I thought his speech was about his record in Florida and a lot less about the candidates he was there to stump for. Did anyone else notice that? If he was supposed to be talking up Trump's candidates, why did he have so little to say about Trump's candidates? Maybe the idea was to simply roll out a template or blueprint that new governors could and should follow should they be elected. Perhaps the idea was to talk to people about what was possible, and who better to talk about it than the guy who has done it so successfully? This is what you're getting if you elect Trump's picks, and this is what success looks like.
It's hard to believe that Pennsylvania would send a clown the likes of John Fetterman to represent them in the US Senate. I mean, look at him. He's a hulk of a man, fully tattooed, bald, really just a lumbering progressive toadie for the left, and someone who lived in his parents basement until he turned fifty years old. It gets worse. He was also the mayor of some pee hole in the snow town in Pennsylvania with an annual salary of somewhere in the vicinity of $150 a month. His parents provided additional support to him in the amount of $50k a year. I'm not sure how he ended up as lieutenant Governor of the great state of Pennsylvania. This was all before he had a massive stroke. In recent videos I've seen of him on the stump, he's a stuttering mess. Not unlike Joey Bumbles Biden, I suppose. I read somewhere this morning where he released criminals from prison while in office. The article painted Fetterman as a Dukakis style nut job. I think the anti-Fetterman war is just getting started.
While we're on the subject of politics, I'm a little concerned about their being a third party on the 2024 ticket when we all get to go back to the polls to vote for president. I'm talkiing about someone who can siphon off enough votes to prevent Trump or DeSantis from beccome president. I don't know who that would be at this point but, were it to happen, I'd like to see the republicans work behind the scenes to find someone who can whittle away at the democrat vote instead of the other way around. Wasn't it Ross Perot who put Bill Clinon in office? That's the extent of my historical knowledge on such things. I know I'm getting out over my skis on this seeing as it's a while off but it will be here soon enough. Shorter term, we need to make sure that Oz beats Fetterman in Pennsylvania this Fall and that republicans beat the tar out of their progressive counterparts in any number of other races so we republicans can get back the majority in the Senate. That includes my man, Herschel Walker, in his race against Warnock in the great state of South Carolina.
Mrs G got out and about in her car this past week. This is the first time she's been behind the wheel in months since her surgery earlier this year. We kept her car at our house during her recovery and we drove it every few weeks just so that it didn't sit for too long. If we put a hundred miles on it, I'd be surprised. The only time I put gas in it is when we returned the car to her this past week. That little car of hers drives like a truck so it's not like we enjoyed taking it here and there. Anyway, Mrs G was feeling pretty good about the fact that she got out for a drive even if it was just a short drive. She also said something about the fact that her little walker was heavier than expected and it wasn't as easy putting it in her trunk as she thought it would be. Nobody said that any of this was going to be easy. It doesn't help that time isn't on her side.
Summer is getting a little long in the tooth hereabouts. I was hoping to see some amelioration in the number of cars (traffic) and people when I was on my bike ride yesterday but no such luck. I had to do the usual weaving and whirling just to get through the area down around Jenness Beach. Cars parked along the roadway present all kinds of dangers including children escaping the grasp of their parents and coming onto the roadway at inopportune times. It's the cars that are coming and going along the boulevard that make matters infinitely worse since you can never quite predict what they are going to do when come up on you from behind. Will they become distracted and put you in danger? Will they slow down as they should and look for just the right opportunity to pass you by? A week or two more of this madness won't kill me, or will it?
Clarion Call
14/08/22 07:10
I'm getting so tired of this heat and humidity. It looks like we're in for some relief a couple of days out, so that's a good thing. Every day has been in the high eighties with high humidity for the last couple of weeks. Our air conditioner has been working overtime, and while it's nice to have, I do wish we would get a break of sorts from the heat, so we wouldn't have to have the AC on all the time. If these green energy freaks get their way, we'll no longer be able to afford to turn on the air conditioning, and trying to survive brownouts will be an everyday occurrence. Oh, and if I see a wind turbine going up in my backyard, so help me, god, I'll tear the thing down myself.
The green energy zealots in Congress, and I'm referring to the democrat party as a whole in Congress, voted over the weekend to pass Biden's one trillion dollar Build-Back-Better bullshit of a bill. Not one republican voted for the bill. Have you ever seen a bigger group of sheep than what we're seeing today in the Democrat party? This bill gives billions away to green energy projects, raises taxes on millions of hard-working Americans and small corporations, and hires some 200k new IRS auditors who will descend on the good people of our country like a plague of locusts. God help the mom-and-pop operations that are barely surviving in Biden's America today as it is. I also can't imagine that the regulations coming out of this bill will favor, in any way, shape, or form, existing policies around domestic oil production. That means that every American will pay more at the pump when prices are already twice what they were two years ago.
What politician or politicains in their right mind pass a bill that raises taxes before a mid-term election and during a period of raging stagflation? The democrats think that this is just what the doctor ordered. They are collectively turning cartwheels in the halls of Congress after delivering the votes to pass this monstrosity of a bill. If the republicans and anyone else in our great country are looking for a reason to throw these fools out of office this November, this will be your chance. Do they seriously think that the American people approve of this tomfoolery? Is anyone listening to their constituents? Oh, right. I love paying $6 a gallon of gas at the pump. Everything goes on the credit card, so there's nothing to worry about. If it all comes crashing down sooner or later, I'm sure Bumbles Biden will sign off on another stimulus package to bail our sorry asses out.
I do think that the democrats believe this will light a fire under their voters so that many of them will carpool if they have to get to the polls in November. They'll be tripping over themselves to get to the polls to make sure that Joey Biden keeps democratic majorities in both houses so they can build on their so-called successes in reining in Climate Change and forging their dreams of a new Venezuala here in the United States. Well, the good people in our country might want to have a say in how that all plays out. They kinda liked things the way they were before Bumbles Biden got his 81 million votes in the 2020 elections. We were moving away from what the leftists hoped would be a liberal global world order, and Trump was indeed on his way to making America great again.
To hear the liberal media go on and on about Joey's long string of achievements after the passage of this bill is enough to make me sick. The fool can't find the men's room in the Oval Office, and you want me to believe that he even knows what the hell is going on? He was in seclusion in the White House these last seven days due to back-to-back bouts of Covid, or so they would have you believe. The minute he gets a clean bill of health, he's seen strolling across the lawn at the White House on his way to a helicopter which will take his sorry ass back to his beach house in Rehobeth, Deleware. How about standing in the breach and doing your fucking job? I take that back. Every day that he's sufficiently cogent enough to eat his oatmeal without wearing a bib, he should get the hell out of Dodge before he and his corrupt administration do even more damage to our great republic. Asta-fucking-la-vista!
Do you want to talk about the FBI raid on Trump's home in Mar-a-Lago? We all know what's going on here. If they can convict Trump for not turning over documents to the government following his stint as president, they can effectively stop him from running for president in 2024. That's the goal. Biden's brownshirts, doing what Stasi agents do on behalf of their party, were doing Biden's dirty work yesterday when 30 FBI agents stormed Trump's south Florida home. Trump's polling show that he would crush the pathetic demented Joe Biden, and the Democrats are not wanting to wait for the outcome of that election in 2024 to do what they can do to make sure that Trump never gets in the race from the jump. This is what third-world banana dictators do to their political opposition. We have clearly crossed the rubicon here in our once great Republic. Now I want to see who stands up against this tyranny and who doesn't. The world is watching.
I wish that people would stop comparing this to Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton. It's true that both Biden and Clinton are guilty of far more egregious crimes against the state, and it's true that neither has been held accountable. We also know that there is a double standard when it comes to who the Deep State targets and who they put in jail. If you're a Democrat, you will not be held accountable. If you're a republican or a Trump supporter, prepare to have the FBI show up on your doorstep, and you would be advised to have a plan in place where your family can go on without you once you are held without bail for an indeterminate amount of time in an undisclosed location. Ask any number of Trump advisors, friends, and business associates how that has worked out for them since Trump came down the escalator with Melania in 2015 and announced his run for the presidency.
But this is about preventing Trump from running in 2024, which makes this Mar-a-Lago raid different. This is about putting your political opposition in jail so they can't beat the bejesus out of you on Election Day. This is about the Deep State protecting their power and keeping people like Trump from coming into power and ripping out the rot of the Deep State root and branch. Trump did a good job of exposing the criminals in his first term, but he hired too many Deep State actors who, even now, look to stab him in the back as he prepares to make another presidential run. What I'd like to see now is the turning out of patriots at the polls coast to coast to send the message that what Biden and his corrupt administration are doing is not only wrong, but it's bad for our Republic.
If the Deep State was worried about America First populism taking hold in our country, and assuming they saw this as a direct threat to their holding power longer term, I think that horse has left the barn. Trump endorsees have been winning their primaries hand over fist since the primary season began. Every last one of them has been running against the establishment, and most all have beaten their opponents in the primaries like a rented mule. This is not going to end well for the democrats. They can put Trump away for the rest of his days, but his legacy will be carried on by the people he has chosen. Unless the democrats steal the election in the mid-terms, and they were successful in doing that in 2020, so we shouldn't put that past them, republicans will win back the Congress, and they can start to hold the Deep State responsible for their actions.
In light of what happened to Trump yesterday when they raided his home in Mar-a-Lago, this should tell us all we need to know about what Biden and his corrupt Administration are planning to do with the additional eighty thousand IRS employees they plan to hire after passing this latest boondoggle of a bill this past week. Obama unleashed a weaponized IRS on his political opponents when he was in office, and this looks like a stepped-up version of that very same plan. I don't know where all of this ends, but the trajectory of these constitutional travesties we're all witnessing is troubling indeed. The adage I'm reminded of when I look around is, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," Or, as Steve Bannon tells us day after day, "Elections have consequences, and stolen elections have catastrophic consequences." If there has ever been a clearer clarion call to get out to the polls and save our great country, this is it. It's now or never.
I threw in the towel yesterday and decided not to ride my bike. The consistently hot days that have spanned some ten days or so now, with temperatures approaching or exceeding ninety degrees every day, have finally taken their toll. My ride can be a challenge in and of itself but riding in the glaring hot sun with historic humidity levels is a horse of an entirely different color. More than anything, I think it was just the cumulative effects of the sun and the heat that had me throwing in the towel. You would think that riding earlier in the day would provide some relief, but you would be wrong. By "early," I'm talking about getting out on the road before nine in the morning. Was it just my body and my head telling me it was time to take a break? That is entirely possible. Today, the temperatures have cooled off, so I'm looking forward to getting back on my horse and doing what I love to do.
I feel like I'm running out of things to say this morning. I have something of a personal goal every week to publish so many pages, and if I don't get more done today, I'm just going to feel more pressure as the week goes on to get more of whatever down on paper. What if I run out of things to say? What if I get tired of saying the same old things day after day? It's been a long time since I stopped writing entirely, so I don't think I want to go down that road again. I don't know what I'm trying to accomplish anyway other than to get something, anything, down on paper every day. Some people want nothing more than to maybe read a good book every day, see a good television show, visit a favorite friend or two, or take their dog for a walk, but for me, it's all about the journal. Other times, when you've said everything there is to say on any given day, it's all about moving your body. There's a lot to be said for staying active. It's too easy when you're cooped up every day inside while trying to stay cool to lose a bit of toning around the edges, and that's not a road you want to find yourself going down. Like I said, getting back on the horse is important.
Man, my new Husky air compressor is just the fucking bee's knees. I bought it to replace an older air thingy that I used regularly to fill up my bicycle and car tires, and that sucker was getting a little long in the tooth. Well, maybe a lot long in the tooth. For the sake of forty dollars, I could have spent an eighth of the time I've spent waiting for my old air compressor to inflate my tires had I bought this Husky unit sooner. It really is unbelievable. I knew this new pump was working wonders on my bike because I've used it a few times already, but I wasn't sure how it would work on my car tires. My old Volvo has rims that aren't exactly airtight, so they require a topping off here and there on occasion. I did that for the first time yesterday using my new Husky, and it worked great. My days of going to the gas station and pumping quarters in the machine in order to inflate my tires are over. I can do what I need to do right here in my driveway with my new Husky pump. Just sayin'.
I told the missus the other day that I will not be making her salads for lunch anymore. I told her I was getting a little tired of being her short-order cook in so many words. This is not what I signed up for. Besides, not having to be home when she needs her lunch every day is liberating. I can be out and about doing whatever I want to, and I don't have to worry that the missus is not having a proper lunch because I'm not there to prepare it. Clearly, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, and I don't see it swinging back anytime soon. I suppose if there was a little more reciprocity in the preparing of meals hereabouts, I might feel a little less strongly about having to take these drastic measures. Would it be too much to ask to have her prepare a few finger sandwiches from time to time?
Is anybody out there celebrating the hiring of eighty-seven thousand new IRS agents? This little gem was stuck in the latest Bill passed by the democrats in Congress. You have to ask yourself, why would the democrats want to hire that many new IRS agents? Do they see these new IRS agents as Biden's new brownshirts? You know, the armed agents who show up on the doorsteps of the average American family wanting to pour over every aspect of their lives asking a lot of questions about political party affiliation, causes you've donated to, and other personal questions that are, quite frankly, none of their fucking business. But, it is their business now, thanks to the democrats who signed off on this Bill. Can the Republicans reverse this nonsense once they take back the House of Representatives this Fall? Send the lot of them packing before they sit down to their first tutorial as new IRS agents. With our nation, 30 trillion dollars in debt, don't tell me that this Bill is meant to increase revenues at a time when we're sending $5 billion a week to the shithole, Ukraine. That's a crock of hooey.
I was looking at a few gyms online yesterday, thinking I might like to get in shape before Winter rolls in. One gym, in particular, caught my eye since it was a lot less expensive than the others. Now that I have all this extra time on my hands since I'm not preparing meals for the missus, I don't really have a good reason not to join a gym if that is how I choose to spend my free time. There was only one problem. I started filling in the appropriate blanks until I got to the part of the form that asked about my gender. Say what? Had it been a simple binary question asking me to declare which of the two biological genders I was born into, I might have said, okay, that's not too intrusive a question. And, I would readily admit that some people might be confused when it comes to simple questions like that since they might identify as something other than what you might find on their birth certificate. I know, I know, it's confusing.
Who would be the wiser if I were to sign up online as a female but then appear in person as a male? Fine, pick one gender or the other and complete the form. Nobody cares. They used to care, but nobody cares anymore. Everyone is too damn scared of being accused of being transphobic. Is that even a word? The form gave me four choices and not just the two that would seem to be, well, normal. There were Male, Female, and Non-Binary, and I think the fourth choice was like, It's none of your fucking business. I think this place might be too woke for me. That's good to know because I'm a go-woke-go-broke kind of guy, and I won't have anything to do with them if I think they subscribe to this nonsense. I'm voting with my feet, and they'll not be getting my business. I'd like them to know that they are not getting my business because of their wokeness, but I'm not sure how to do that. Not that they would probably give a hoot.
The Ev man dropped off some wet clothes for us to wash for him last night. He should have brought them over sooner. You don't want to let those things sit around too long. I'm glad he finally got around to doing just that, and he tells us that things are now in order. We should probably work with him to get more towels, so he's taking care of water problems with towels instead of using dirty clothes. You live, and you learn, or so they say. I sent him a follow-up text a couple of hours after he left our house, telling him that we noticed that he might have been struggling a bit and to make sure that he was taking care of himself. His response was straight and to the point: "Bathroom smells better." That's the Ev man in a nutshell.
The missus and I had a lovely meal at the Great Bay Marina yesterday afternoon. We arrived well before the rush hour, so we had a good table, a great view, and an enjoyable walk down on the docks after our meal. It was fun looking at all the beautiful boats docked at this particular marina, and I couldn't help but imagine myself behind the wheel of one or more boats just for shits and giggles. This specific marina was a far cry from the cramped and swampy marinas, the likes of which we've become so familiar with over the past few years when visiting Lake George, NY. This was a deep water marina where boat slips were spacious and more accommodating to operators whose docking skills were marginal at best. Everything was so tidy. Everything was in its rightful place. It's a world that I'm familiar with but less so when it comes to boating on the open seas. I'm more of a lakes guy, so there's that. I can still dream, though. Right?
We're a few days out from the FBI's raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in South Florida, and the furor over what increasingly looks like a political hit job gets worse by the hour. You would think that someone, anyone, involved or responsible for raiding the home of a former president of the United States might step up to the plate in the wake of the raid to explain to the people of our great country why our Justice Department was acting like a rogue dictator in some South American shithole. It took the AG three days before he did a press conference. He did little in his pressor to assuage the concerns of a profoundly skeptical public who has seen this same rogue Justice department work in concert with the democrats since Trump came down the escalator in 2015 to announce his run for the presidency to destroy Trump and his movement.
What documents or state secrets could Trump possibly have in his possession that would warrant this kind of rogue action on the part of Biden's Justice Department? And, what makes them think that Trump would keep anything that valuable in a place where he knew someone might come looking for it? Trump has been out of office for nearly two years, so why hasn't someone come searching sooner if what they're looking for is so valuable? We can't be talking about love letters written on the back of bar napkins to Kim Jung Un, can we?
Was this a desperation move in the wake of a disastrous January 6 Committee to further taint Trump and the people he has endorsed in primaries across the country at a time when he and his endorsees have been surging in the polls against the feckless democrats? To be clear on the optics of what we're talking about here, the Biden Crime Family (Including Hunter) was seen boarding Airforce One for a flight to a vacation spot in South Carolina on the day that Trump's home was raided. The alleged criminals go their merry way while our "Justice" Department takes down their political opponents. They leak misinformation to the press to further implicate Trump that seems preposterous on its face. Espionage? Are they kidding? Having classified information at Mar-a-Lago about nuclear something or other? They have to be making this stuff up. They know that rump, in his official capacity as president, could declassify anything he chose to declassify. Right?
Man, these financial markets have been booming these last few weeks. Just yesterday, the S&P was up 1.7%. I guess the only question is, is this the official end of the bear market, or is this a raging bear market rally? If the latter, how much further do you think we have to go before the market gets back on track with the decline that was well underway before this rally began? You know what they say about bear market rallies. They get going pretty good, suck everyone into thinking that the worst of the bear market is over, and then all hell breaks loose to the downside. I'm happy for my peeps who saw their 401k plans decimated early in this bear market and now see much of that reversing. They can get on with their dreams of retiring early, resuming vacations that maybe they canceled, and start thinking about life getting back to normal. You know, the way it was before the shit hit the fan in early 2022. Who wouldn't like a repeat of 2021 when the S&P was up 28% by year-end?
Where the hell did that little bastard come from? There's a little mouse in my house, and I can't think of anything that focuses the mind more than having a little mouse in your house. He was walking around here in my back room like he owned the joint and right the hell in front of my eyes. He didn't seem to have a worry in the world. I worry that where you see one mouse, there are likely more. I have a few traps that I'll need to put out, and I'll see if I can't nip this problem in the bud. But I have to wonder, how did this little bastard get into our house? Did we bring him in with something else we were carrying? If that's the case, we can only hope that once we kill this little fucker we'll be one and done. Life is never that simple, but one can hope. I'll put out fifty traps if I have to if that is what it takes to get it done. I'll change the bait if peanut butter isn't doing the job. What else do little mousies like?
The CDC changed its guidance yesterday on what people exposed to Covid should be doing. Previously, people exposed to someone who tested positive were asked to quarantine for a few days or until they had successive negative test results. Now, you can skip the light fantastic and go about your life like you were never exposed. Are they now admitting their previous guidance was too heavy-handed or even unnecessary? What about all of the variants we've been warned about since all this bullshit began? I was in the doctor's office yesterday where masks were still required, so nothing has changed there.
The missus tells me that doctor's offices will likely never do away with the mask requirement Covid or no Covid. I can tell you that the doctor who spent time with me spent more time adjusting the stupid mask on his face than he did anything else. It wasn't even an N95 mask, so I'm not sure why he bothered. I felt sorry for him. He was a resident in his third year, and I'm pretty sure that he was thinking to himself, if I had known that I would be required to wear a mask to my job every day for the rest of my working life, I might have become a pipe fitter like my father and his father before him.
The missus couldn't be happier these days, and it has nothing to do with me. If it's August, it's time for Little League Baseball. We signed her up with ESPN plus, and she's watching Little League Baseball to her heart's content. I've set up her iPad so she can watch it while she works. It's muted, of course, but the announcers' words flash across the screen so she can read them at her leisure. Maybe she wants to catch the goings on out of the corner of her eye, and that's fine too. She doesn't have a favorite team yet, but I suspect that the closer we get to when and where teams head off to Williamsport, PA., that might change. She's rooting for the teams from our state to win, of course, but they lost too many games and will not be going to the finals in Williamsport. The Little League World Series will see a return of the international teams this year after two years of a hiatus due to Covid. It's all over in a couple of weeks, but with several daily games, the missus is in her summer sweet spot. That isn't to say that she doesn't do other things while watching her games.
We returned Mrs G's car to her yesterday. It's been sitting in our driveway for the better part of three months since Mrs G's operation. The plan was to drive it on occasion since it wasn't doing Mrs G much good sitting around her place where she was on the mend after her surgery. If we got it out of the driveway and on the road once or twice a month that would be overstating the number of times we actually drove the car. I guess that's better than not using it at all but it's still less than it should have been used. Now that Mrs G is feeling better, she'll have her own set of wheels to get out and about. There is no reason why she can't do her own food shopping or just take a Sunday ride in the country if that's what she feels like doing. She won't be nearly as ambulatory as she was prior to her surgery but that shouldn't prevent her from using her car. That's the plan as of today anyway. Keep on keeping on, Mrs G!
I'm sitting here on a Sunnday morning wondering if I have anything to look forward to in the next few days. You know, something tthat I can feel good about. I want a little more of that winning that Trump used to always talk about. He said, and I quote, "You are going to get so tired of winning." It was so true but I haven't had much to celebrate since Bumbles Biden got into office. I do more praying these days than celebrating. Praying that our good country doesn't collapse under the fraud that is the Biden Administration. Anyway, it's one day at a time. Actually, this coming Tuesday we'll see Liz Cheney get the boot in the republican primry in Wyoming. God willing, that is. She's been a rabid Trump hater like forever. The good people of Wyomng need a Congresswoman who is willing to do the work for the people of Wyomng and not a piece of shit like Cheney whose sole purpose in life seems to be to make sure that Trump never returns to the presidency. Trump won Wyoming by something close to a 70% to 30% margin. That's how you do it. Like I said, God willing.
The green energy zealots in Congress, and I'm referring to the democrat party as a whole in Congress, voted over the weekend to pass Biden's one trillion dollar Build-Back-Better bullshit of a bill. Not one republican voted for the bill. Have you ever seen a bigger group of sheep than what we're seeing today in the Democrat party? This bill gives billions away to green energy projects, raises taxes on millions of hard-working Americans and small corporations, and hires some 200k new IRS auditors who will descend on the good people of our country like a plague of locusts. God help the mom-and-pop operations that are barely surviving in Biden's America today as it is. I also can't imagine that the regulations coming out of this bill will favor, in any way, shape, or form, existing policies around domestic oil production. That means that every American will pay more at the pump when prices are already twice what they were two years ago.
What politician or politicains in their right mind pass a bill that raises taxes before a mid-term election and during a period of raging stagflation? The democrats think that this is just what the doctor ordered. They are collectively turning cartwheels in the halls of Congress after delivering the votes to pass this monstrosity of a bill. If the republicans and anyone else in our great country are looking for a reason to throw these fools out of office this November, this will be your chance. Do they seriously think that the American people approve of this tomfoolery? Is anyone listening to their constituents? Oh, right. I love paying $6 a gallon of gas at the pump. Everything goes on the credit card, so there's nothing to worry about. If it all comes crashing down sooner or later, I'm sure Bumbles Biden will sign off on another stimulus package to bail our sorry asses out.
I do think that the democrats believe this will light a fire under their voters so that many of them will carpool if they have to get to the polls in November. They'll be tripping over themselves to get to the polls to make sure that Joey Biden keeps democratic majorities in both houses so they can build on their so-called successes in reining in Climate Change and forging their dreams of a new Venezuala here in the United States. Well, the good people in our country might want to have a say in how that all plays out. They kinda liked things the way they were before Bumbles Biden got his 81 million votes in the 2020 elections. We were moving away from what the leftists hoped would be a liberal global world order, and Trump was indeed on his way to making America great again.
To hear the liberal media go on and on about Joey's long string of achievements after the passage of this bill is enough to make me sick. The fool can't find the men's room in the Oval Office, and you want me to believe that he even knows what the hell is going on? He was in seclusion in the White House these last seven days due to back-to-back bouts of Covid, or so they would have you believe. The minute he gets a clean bill of health, he's seen strolling across the lawn at the White House on his way to a helicopter which will take his sorry ass back to his beach house in Rehobeth, Deleware. How about standing in the breach and doing your fucking job? I take that back. Every day that he's sufficiently cogent enough to eat his oatmeal without wearing a bib, he should get the hell out of Dodge before he and his corrupt administration do even more damage to our great republic. Asta-fucking-la-vista!
Do you want to talk about the FBI raid on Trump's home in Mar-a-Lago? We all know what's going on here. If they can convict Trump for not turning over documents to the government following his stint as president, they can effectively stop him from running for president in 2024. That's the goal. Biden's brownshirts, doing what Stasi agents do on behalf of their party, were doing Biden's dirty work yesterday when 30 FBI agents stormed Trump's south Florida home. Trump's polling show that he would crush the pathetic demented Joe Biden, and the Democrats are not wanting to wait for the outcome of that election in 2024 to do what they can do to make sure that Trump never gets in the race from the jump. This is what third-world banana dictators do to their political opposition. We have clearly crossed the rubicon here in our once great Republic. Now I want to see who stands up against this tyranny and who doesn't. The world is watching.
I wish that people would stop comparing this to Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton. It's true that both Biden and Clinton are guilty of far more egregious crimes against the state, and it's true that neither has been held accountable. We also know that there is a double standard when it comes to who the Deep State targets and who they put in jail. If you're a Democrat, you will not be held accountable. If you're a republican or a Trump supporter, prepare to have the FBI show up on your doorstep, and you would be advised to have a plan in place where your family can go on without you once you are held without bail for an indeterminate amount of time in an undisclosed location. Ask any number of Trump advisors, friends, and business associates how that has worked out for them since Trump came down the escalator with Melania in 2015 and announced his run for the presidency.
But this is about preventing Trump from running in 2024, which makes this Mar-a-Lago raid different. This is about putting your political opposition in jail so they can't beat the bejesus out of you on Election Day. This is about the Deep State protecting their power and keeping people like Trump from coming into power and ripping out the rot of the Deep State root and branch. Trump did a good job of exposing the criminals in his first term, but he hired too many Deep State actors who, even now, look to stab him in the back as he prepares to make another presidential run. What I'd like to see now is the turning out of patriots at the polls coast to coast to send the message that what Biden and his corrupt administration are doing is not only wrong, but it's bad for our Republic.
If the Deep State was worried about America First populism taking hold in our country, and assuming they saw this as a direct threat to their holding power longer term, I think that horse has left the barn. Trump endorsees have been winning their primaries hand over fist since the primary season began. Every last one of them has been running against the establishment, and most all have beaten their opponents in the primaries like a rented mule. This is not going to end well for the democrats. They can put Trump away for the rest of his days, but his legacy will be carried on by the people he has chosen. Unless the democrats steal the election in the mid-terms, and they were successful in doing that in 2020, so we shouldn't put that past them, republicans will win back the Congress, and they can start to hold the Deep State responsible for their actions.
In light of what happened to Trump yesterday when they raided his home in Mar-a-Lago, this should tell us all we need to know about what Biden and his corrupt Administration are planning to do with the additional eighty thousand IRS employees they plan to hire after passing this latest boondoggle of a bill this past week. Obama unleashed a weaponized IRS on his political opponents when he was in office, and this looks like a stepped-up version of that very same plan. I don't know where all of this ends, but the trajectory of these constitutional travesties we're all witnessing is troubling indeed. The adage I'm reminded of when I look around is, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," Or, as Steve Bannon tells us day after day, "Elections have consequences, and stolen elections have catastrophic consequences." If there has ever been a clearer clarion call to get out to the polls and save our great country, this is it. It's now or never.
I threw in the towel yesterday and decided not to ride my bike. The consistently hot days that have spanned some ten days or so now, with temperatures approaching or exceeding ninety degrees every day, have finally taken their toll. My ride can be a challenge in and of itself but riding in the glaring hot sun with historic humidity levels is a horse of an entirely different color. More than anything, I think it was just the cumulative effects of the sun and the heat that had me throwing in the towel. You would think that riding earlier in the day would provide some relief, but you would be wrong. By "early," I'm talking about getting out on the road before nine in the morning. Was it just my body and my head telling me it was time to take a break? That is entirely possible. Today, the temperatures have cooled off, so I'm looking forward to getting back on my horse and doing what I love to do.
I feel like I'm running out of things to say this morning. I have something of a personal goal every week to publish so many pages, and if I don't get more done today, I'm just going to feel more pressure as the week goes on to get more of whatever down on paper. What if I run out of things to say? What if I get tired of saying the same old things day after day? It's been a long time since I stopped writing entirely, so I don't think I want to go down that road again. I don't know what I'm trying to accomplish anyway other than to get something, anything, down on paper every day. Some people want nothing more than to maybe read a good book every day, see a good television show, visit a favorite friend or two, or take their dog for a walk, but for me, it's all about the journal. Other times, when you've said everything there is to say on any given day, it's all about moving your body. There's a lot to be said for staying active. It's too easy when you're cooped up every day inside while trying to stay cool to lose a bit of toning around the edges, and that's not a road you want to find yourself going down. Like I said, getting back on the horse is important.
Man, my new Husky air compressor is just the fucking bee's knees. I bought it to replace an older air thingy that I used regularly to fill up my bicycle and car tires, and that sucker was getting a little long in the tooth. Well, maybe a lot long in the tooth. For the sake of forty dollars, I could have spent an eighth of the time I've spent waiting for my old air compressor to inflate my tires had I bought this Husky unit sooner. It really is unbelievable. I knew this new pump was working wonders on my bike because I've used it a few times already, but I wasn't sure how it would work on my car tires. My old Volvo has rims that aren't exactly airtight, so they require a topping off here and there on occasion. I did that for the first time yesterday using my new Husky, and it worked great. My days of going to the gas station and pumping quarters in the machine in order to inflate my tires are over. I can do what I need to do right here in my driveway with my new Husky pump. Just sayin'.
I told the missus the other day that I will not be making her salads for lunch anymore. I told her I was getting a little tired of being her short-order cook in so many words. This is not what I signed up for. Besides, not having to be home when she needs her lunch every day is liberating. I can be out and about doing whatever I want to, and I don't have to worry that the missus is not having a proper lunch because I'm not there to prepare it. Clearly, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, and I don't see it swinging back anytime soon. I suppose if there was a little more reciprocity in the preparing of meals hereabouts, I might feel a little less strongly about having to take these drastic measures. Would it be too much to ask to have her prepare a few finger sandwiches from time to time?
Is anybody out there celebrating the hiring of eighty-seven thousand new IRS agents? This little gem was stuck in the latest Bill passed by the democrats in Congress. You have to ask yourself, why would the democrats want to hire that many new IRS agents? Do they see these new IRS agents as Biden's new brownshirts? You know, the armed agents who show up on the doorsteps of the average American family wanting to pour over every aspect of their lives asking a lot of questions about political party affiliation, causes you've donated to, and other personal questions that are, quite frankly, none of their fucking business. But, it is their business now, thanks to the democrats who signed off on this Bill. Can the Republicans reverse this nonsense once they take back the House of Representatives this Fall? Send the lot of them packing before they sit down to their first tutorial as new IRS agents. With our nation, 30 trillion dollars in debt, don't tell me that this Bill is meant to increase revenues at a time when we're sending $5 billion a week to the shithole, Ukraine. That's a crock of hooey.
I was looking at a few gyms online yesterday, thinking I might like to get in shape before Winter rolls in. One gym, in particular, caught my eye since it was a lot less expensive than the others. Now that I have all this extra time on my hands since I'm not preparing meals for the missus, I don't really have a good reason not to join a gym if that is how I choose to spend my free time. There was only one problem. I started filling in the appropriate blanks until I got to the part of the form that asked about my gender. Say what? Had it been a simple binary question asking me to declare which of the two biological genders I was born into, I might have said, okay, that's not too intrusive a question. And, I would readily admit that some people might be confused when it comes to simple questions like that since they might identify as something other than what you might find on their birth certificate. I know, I know, it's confusing.
Who would be the wiser if I were to sign up online as a female but then appear in person as a male? Fine, pick one gender or the other and complete the form. Nobody cares. They used to care, but nobody cares anymore. Everyone is too damn scared of being accused of being transphobic. Is that even a word? The form gave me four choices and not just the two that would seem to be, well, normal. There were Male, Female, and Non-Binary, and I think the fourth choice was like, It's none of your fucking business. I think this place might be too woke for me. That's good to know because I'm a go-woke-go-broke kind of guy, and I won't have anything to do with them if I think they subscribe to this nonsense. I'm voting with my feet, and they'll not be getting my business. I'd like them to know that they are not getting my business because of their wokeness, but I'm not sure how to do that. Not that they would probably give a hoot.
The Ev man dropped off some wet clothes for us to wash for him last night. He should have brought them over sooner. You don't want to let those things sit around too long. I'm glad he finally got around to doing just that, and he tells us that things are now in order. We should probably work with him to get more towels, so he's taking care of water problems with towels instead of using dirty clothes. You live, and you learn, or so they say. I sent him a follow-up text a couple of hours after he left our house, telling him that we noticed that he might have been struggling a bit and to make sure that he was taking care of himself. His response was straight and to the point: "Bathroom smells better." That's the Ev man in a nutshell.
The missus and I had a lovely meal at the Great Bay Marina yesterday afternoon. We arrived well before the rush hour, so we had a good table, a great view, and an enjoyable walk down on the docks after our meal. It was fun looking at all the beautiful boats docked at this particular marina, and I couldn't help but imagine myself behind the wheel of one or more boats just for shits and giggles. This specific marina was a far cry from the cramped and swampy marinas, the likes of which we've become so familiar with over the past few years when visiting Lake George, NY. This was a deep water marina where boat slips were spacious and more accommodating to operators whose docking skills were marginal at best. Everything was so tidy. Everything was in its rightful place. It's a world that I'm familiar with but less so when it comes to boating on the open seas. I'm more of a lakes guy, so there's that. I can still dream, though. Right?
We're a few days out from the FBI's raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in South Florida, and the furor over what increasingly looks like a political hit job gets worse by the hour. You would think that someone, anyone, involved or responsible for raiding the home of a former president of the United States might step up to the plate in the wake of the raid to explain to the people of our great country why our Justice Department was acting like a rogue dictator in some South American shithole. It took the AG three days before he did a press conference. He did little in his pressor to assuage the concerns of a profoundly skeptical public who has seen this same rogue Justice department work in concert with the democrats since Trump came down the escalator in 2015 to announce his run for the presidency to destroy Trump and his movement.
What documents or state secrets could Trump possibly have in his possession that would warrant this kind of rogue action on the part of Biden's Justice Department? And, what makes them think that Trump would keep anything that valuable in a place where he knew someone might come looking for it? Trump has been out of office for nearly two years, so why hasn't someone come searching sooner if what they're looking for is so valuable? We can't be talking about love letters written on the back of bar napkins to Kim Jung Un, can we?
Was this a desperation move in the wake of a disastrous January 6 Committee to further taint Trump and the people he has endorsed in primaries across the country at a time when he and his endorsees have been surging in the polls against the feckless democrats? To be clear on the optics of what we're talking about here, the Biden Crime Family (Including Hunter) was seen boarding Airforce One for a flight to a vacation spot in South Carolina on the day that Trump's home was raided. The alleged criminals go their merry way while our "Justice" Department takes down their political opponents. They leak misinformation to the press to further implicate Trump that seems preposterous on its face. Espionage? Are they kidding? Having classified information at Mar-a-Lago about nuclear something or other? They have to be making this stuff up. They know that rump, in his official capacity as president, could declassify anything he chose to declassify. Right?
Man, these financial markets have been booming these last few weeks. Just yesterday, the S&P was up 1.7%. I guess the only question is, is this the official end of the bear market, or is this a raging bear market rally? If the latter, how much further do you think we have to go before the market gets back on track with the decline that was well underway before this rally began? You know what they say about bear market rallies. They get going pretty good, suck everyone into thinking that the worst of the bear market is over, and then all hell breaks loose to the downside. I'm happy for my peeps who saw their 401k plans decimated early in this bear market and now see much of that reversing. They can get on with their dreams of retiring early, resuming vacations that maybe they canceled, and start thinking about life getting back to normal. You know, the way it was before the shit hit the fan in early 2022. Who wouldn't like a repeat of 2021 when the S&P was up 28% by year-end?
Where the hell did that little bastard come from? There's a little mouse in my house, and I can't think of anything that focuses the mind more than having a little mouse in your house. He was walking around here in my back room like he owned the joint and right the hell in front of my eyes. He didn't seem to have a worry in the world. I worry that where you see one mouse, there are likely more. I have a few traps that I'll need to put out, and I'll see if I can't nip this problem in the bud. But I have to wonder, how did this little bastard get into our house? Did we bring him in with something else we were carrying? If that's the case, we can only hope that once we kill this little fucker we'll be one and done. Life is never that simple, but one can hope. I'll put out fifty traps if I have to if that is what it takes to get it done. I'll change the bait if peanut butter isn't doing the job. What else do little mousies like?
The CDC changed its guidance yesterday on what people exposed to Covid should be doing. Previously, people exposed to someone who tested positive were asked to quarantine for a few days or until they had successive negative test results. Now, you can skip the light fantastic and go about your life like you were never exposed. Are they now admitting their previous guidance was too heavy-handed or even unnecessary? What about all of the variants we've been warned about since all this bullshit began? I was in the doctor's office yesterday where masks were still required, so nothing has changed there.
The missus tells me that doctor's offices will likely never do away with the mask requirement Covid or no Covid. I can tell you that the doctor who spent time with me spent more time adjusting the stupid mask on his face than he did anything else. It wasn't even an N95 mask, so I'm not sure why he bothered. I felt sorry for him. He was a resident in his third year, and I'm pretty sure that he was thinking to himself, if I had known that I would be required to wear a mask to my job every day for the rest of my working life, I might have become a pipe fitter like my father and his father before him.
The missus couldn't be happier these days, and it has nothing to do with me. If it's August, it's time for Little League Baseball. We signed her up with ESPN plus, and she's watching Little League Baseball to her heart's content. I've set up her iPad so she can watch it while she works. It's muted, of course, but the announcers' words flash across the screen so she can read them at her leisure. Maybe she wants to catch the goings on out of the corner of her eye, and that's fine too. She doesn't have a favorite team yet, but I suspect that the closer we get to when and where teams head off to Williamsport, PA., that might change. She's rooting for the teams from our state to win, of course, but they lost too many games and will not be going to the finals in Williamsport. The Little League World Series will see a return of the international teams this year after two years of a hiatus due to Covid. It's all over in a couple of weeks, but with several daily games, the missus is in her summer sweet spot. That isn't to say that she doesn't do other things while watching her games.
We returned Mrs G's car to her yesterday. It's been sitting in our driveway for the better part of three months since Mrs G's operation. The plan was to drive it on occasion since it wasn't doing Mrs G much good sitting around her place where she was on the mend after her surgery. If we got it out of the driveway and on the road once or twice a month that would be overstating the number of times we actually drove the car. I guess that's better than not using it at all but it's still less than it should have been used. Now that Mrs G is feeling better, she'll have her own set of wheels to get out and about. There is no reason why she can't do her own food shopping or just take a Sunday ride in the country if that's what she feels like doing. She won't be nearly as ambulatory as she was prior to her surgery but that shouldn't prevent her from using her car. That's the plan as of today anyway. Keep on keeping on, Mrs G!
I'm sitting here on a Sunnday morning wondering if I have anything to look forward to in the next few days. You know, something tthat I can feel good about. I want a little more of that winning that Trump used to always talk about. He said, and I quote, "You are going to get so tired of winning." It was so true but I haven't had much to celebrate since Bumbles Biden got into office. I do more praying these days than celebrating. Praying that our good country doesn't collapse under the fraud that is the Biden Administration. Anyway, it's one day at a time. Actually, this coming Tuesday we'll see Liz Cheney get the boot in the republican primry in Wyoming. God willing, that is. She's been a rabid Trump hater like forever. The good people of Wyomng need a Congresswoman who is willing to do the work for the people of Wyomng and not a piece of shit like Cheney whose sole purpose in life seems to be to make sure that Trump never returns to the presidency. Trump won Wyoming by something close to a 70% to 30% margin. That's how you do it. Like I said, God willing.
Winners and Losers
07/08/22 06:49
Here we go, boys and girls! We got us another week on our hands. The only question I have this morning is whether or not the Chi-coms are going to blow Speaker Pelosi's plane out of the air when her plane approaches Taiwan. You don't know what to believe when you hear these stories. Would they be this bellicose were Trump sitting in the Oval Office instead of feckless Joe Biden? I highly doubt it. The Chi-coms own Joey and the Biden Crime Family, so why would they be pulling this stunt unless they're simply doing it because they want to show the world just how weak-kneed and feckless Joey is in the face of a challenge from an ascendant world power like China?
The Chinese should be calling in their chits after countless years of investing in the Biden family. Anyone who has been paying half a mind to all of the stories over the years about the many trips that Joey and his son, Hunter, have made to China can't be surprised that now that Joey is the President of the United States that they are, as they say in the business, exercising their options. Blowing Pelosi's plane out of the sky seems counter-intuitive when you consider the benefits they've accrued due to their relationship with the Bidens and the risks they now face should they get into a hot war with one of the world's greatest superpowers. Perhaps everything is not as it seems.
Then, you have all of this nonsensical back and forth business between Pelosi and Biden where she allegedly never told the White House that she was planning this trip. Biden is on the record as suggesting that this is not the best time for the Speaker of the House to be traveling to the country of Taiwan, considering China's objections to her visitation. All I can say is, color me skeptical. Someone is lying through their teeth. Someone is angling to gain favor one way or another here. It sure smells like a wag-the-dog situation to me. Is this a ploy engineered by the White House in conjunction with the Chinese to buoy Joey's ratings ahead of the Mid Term elections? Will Pelosi gain favor by her come-hell-or-high-water courageousness and, in turn, raise the prospects of her political party ahead of the very same Mid Terms? Who will get the last laugh?
Did anyone else notice that Tucker Carlson of FOX was in attendance with Trump at Trump's golf event this past weekend in Bedminster, New Jersey? What was that all about? It's difficult for Tucker to be a neutral arbiter of events on his nightly news show if he's publicly associating with political giants like Trump. I'm guessing that none of this was a coincidence. Tucker holds a particular sway inside the republican party, so who he hangs with in public is designed entirely for public consumption. He's done several interviews with some of the world's more conservative leaders somewhat recently, so maybe none of what we saw with he and Trump should surprise anyone. I can assure you of one thing. His spending time with Trump was not lost on the news media.
They will likely speculate on this or that, and someone will eventually get it right. How about a Trump-Carlson ticket in 2024? Interesting, right? I can see Carlson jumping on that bandwagon for the same reasons that Trump has given us over time as a reason for his involvement in running for the presidency; Someone has to save our damn country from these damn liberals. He's probably wealthy enough that he doesn't have to worry about giving up his gig on FOX should he run with Trump. FOX has become so anti-Trump that Carlon's ticket is likely to be punched sooner rather than later, given his preference for strong leaders like Trump. Maybe this is Trump's way of signaling to DeSantis that his bench of potential vice presidential candidates isn't as flimsy as previously reported.
The Ev man was over for dinner last night. He and I sat down to a game of chess after dinner. It was our first game ever. I've only started to play, but I think my game is improving with every game I play. I might be learning more from the games I lose than the games I win. The Ev man, on the other hand, is an old hand at playing chess. We used to take him for lessons as a child, and he did just fine. To quote one of his instructors back in the day, "I don't think Evan knows how good he is." He's been to more tournaments than we can count, and he was always a good sport regardless of whether he was winning or losing. I think he's not played in many years, and it showed in the first game he and I played. He won both games, but he won the second game more decisively. I suggested that he and I keep track of our wins and losses, and he agreed to do that once I win a game. Smaht.
I'm really kicking myself. I finally got one of my Apple TVs to start working again after it seemingly got fried in a recent storm. I don't know how I did it, and the fact that it started working again may have had nothing to do with what I did or did not do. If you've seen the blinking lights that never go solid on the lower right-hand side of your Apple TV, then you know what I'm talking about. I wasn't expecting the TV to start working again, so you can imagine my surprise when the light went solid. "We're in business again," I hollered to the missus. Instead of taking a victory lap, I should have done a couple of refreshes and maybe a new software installation. I did none of it, and within 24 hours, it was back in the blinking mode, which is where it is today. I can be such a damn fool sometimes. Just when I thought there was a God, there wasn't.
I don't understand Apple putting out a product like the Apple TV that is unfixable once it "breaks." Before the 4k models came out, you could do a little something with the USB plugs to get them going again. There is no way to update anything, much less fix anything, since it has no USB port. I mean, who manufactures a unit that sells for somewhere in the $150 range that is more or less disposable once it "breaks." That, my friends, is how you define an expensive doorstop. That is not the Apple I've come to know and love going back to the early days when Steve Jobs was wowing the world with his genius. I think he would not have approved the product I'm referring to here. He was passionate about design and function, and every product that went out the door at Apple carried his signature promise of reliability. I'm guessing that they are more interested in perpetuating the wokeness of their corporate culture these days than they are in seeing to the sustainability of their product line. That does not portend good things for their future (or mine). Sad.
Today's the day Pelosi arrives in Taiwan. I still think it's a ruse of sorts, although where it ends up is anyone's guess. I'm seeing a tweet this morning from Germany where they've promised to support Taiwan in the event of an invasion by the Chinese. This is new. What other countries will be weighing in? Are they aware that John Kirby stood at the podium at the White House yesterday and stated unequivocally that the United States does not support Taiwan's independence? This after Biden told the press recently that we would defend Taiwan against an attack by China. Of course, Bidden is a hot mess these days, cognitively speaking, so be careful when you hear him saying, "read my lips." That's me channeling George Bush, so there's that. Maybe the game being played by the White House is Trumpian in that the Chinese can't believe a word they hear coming from Biden, so that makes matters less predictable and not more predictable. They do not now, nor have they ever feared Joey "feckless" Biden, and that may be the card they play at the end of the day.
Today is Primary Day in a few states in the Mid West like Kansas, Arizona, and Michigan. I'm sitting here tonight in the Eastern Time Zone waiting and wondering how things will turn out for MAGA candidates like Kari Lake, Blake Masters, and that woman named Tudor who is running to replace the current governor of Michigan Gretchen Whitmer. These states are once or twice removed from my time zone, so it looks like it will be a late night. It's MAGA vs. The Establishment in every one of these races. The prevailing thought for the state of Arizona is that as Arizona goes, so goes the nation. If MAGA wins, it means good things for the country going forward. Every republican candidate is concerned, and rightly so, about shenanigans at the polling place. More to the point, will the democrats steal another election or two tonight as they did in Arizona in 2020? We're already hearing something about felt pens bleeding through the ballots, and, as if that's not enough, the same tabulation machines in place in the 2020 election are still in place for this Primary election. This can't be good.
Fast forward 12 hours, and although we're still waiting for a few races to be called, it seems that MAGA candidates had a good night. Two of the three republican candidates who voted to impeach Trump have now lost their races to MAGA candidates. Both impeachments of Trump were a sham, so good riddance is what I say to these bastards who threw their support behind the Democrats in their effort to thwart the presidency of one Donald J Trump. I think ten republicans voted to impeach. Nine of the bastards have lost their primaries thus far in 2022. There are stories around this morning about certain irregularities in the voting in Arizona last night, which need to be investigated, and people need to go to jail if they are found guilty of tampering with election results. I am surprised that the Kari Lake race to be the republican gubernatorial candidate has yet to be called. I thought she had a lock on the Primary win based on polling seen over the last few days. Tell me something doesn't smell fishy.
I haven't followed the January 6th Committee's televised hearings too closely because I think it's a kangaroo court. That said, this business about missing and deleted texts from any number of people and governmental agencies in and around the January 6th timeframe is interesting. I wonder what difference it makes to the overall investigation and how it may or may not factor into what the Department of Justice does when it comes to indicting or not indicting Trump. There is enough of a hue and cry from the democrats on the Committee such that it makes me think that the missing texts could make or break their case. How do texts even go missing in this day and age when everything you do on your phone ends up on a cloud somewhere? It's all backed up until it isn't, I suppose. Anyway, whoever is responsible for "losing" the texts, you done good. You may have saved the Committee from its failings.
It's hard to remember from one year to the next just how hot it gets during the summer months and precisely how long the heat waves last. We're looking down the barrel of another week here in the Northeast, with temperatures in the upper eighties and occasionally intolerable humidity. I would say that this is unprecedented, but, as I said, I can't remember what last summer or past summers were like. If someone were to tell me today that we're all going to die in twelve years if we don't do something today about global warming, I might well come around to their point of view. There are only so many places to hide once temperatures climb above one hundred plus degrees. You can't run to the local cinema on those sweltering days anymore because they've all gone out of business thanks to the seemingly endless Covid pandemic. You can't crank up the air conditioner anymore because electricity rates have doubled thanks to the energy policies of the Biden Administration. My advice would be to do whatever you're going to do early before things start to heat up.
We're two days removed from the republican gubernatorial primary in Arizona, and we still have no winner. It sure looks like the administrative state in Arizona is slow-walking the count to give themselves the time they need to manufacture votes so that Kari Lake, the overwhelming favorite and the candidate endorsed by Trump, doesn't have enough votes to get over the finish line. Meanwhile, the person responsible for overseeing the vote count in Arizona is on MSNBC mucking it up with her leftist brothers and sisters instead of doing her fucking job back in her state. Is this how they plan to steal the Mid Term election in November? Who doesn't think that this isn't reminiscent of what happened to Trump in 2020? It's deja vu all over again. If I'm not mistaken, Arizona is still working through fraud issues left over from the 2020 election. If you get away with something the first time, why not just get out the same playbook the next time? These leftist bastards have no shame.
I finally got around to making the ratatouille dish I wanted to make. We've got homegrown zucchini coming out of our ears, so why not make one of the dishes we enjoy? The missus said something about freezing some of the ratatouille, but I'm not a fan of throwing things in the freezer where they disappear for months and sometimes years on end before they get thrown away. Even frozen food has a shelf life. Right? Ratatouille is one of those recipes where, in my experience, it doesn't require much precision when working from a recipe. I mean, what do "two medium" zucchinis even look like? Sometimes, the recipe will further define these things by specifying the number of cups that are, at least in theory, equal to two medium zucchinis. I find it easier to eyeball things and hope for the best. If you end up with a little more eggplant than zucchini in your ratatouille, not a big deal. Oh, and by the way, it's a great dish served hot or cold.
I'm thinking of making some zucchini bread, but I don't need to have something that tempting sitting around the house. It's too good, but it's also very carby, and I need fewer carbs in my diet, not more. Sometimes, what you put on it makes it taste good, like butter, but it also adds to your waistline. If I don't make it, I can't eat it. It's that simple. I feel the same way about cookies and potato chips. I never buy them because they're too easy to eat, and not having them around the house calling my name every minute of the day nips that problem in the bud. It's too bad because I have more zucchini than I'll ever use. I should be looking for recipes that will help me use them up. For future reference, the answer to my problem is to plant fewer zucchini plants. As an aside, I can't believe how fast these things grow or how big they get. There's a lesson in there somewhere for my tomato plants. Tomato plants, if you're listening.
I'm not an Alex Jones guy any way you slice it. I've seen snippets here and there of him ranting about this or that outrage, but that's the extent of my knowledge about the guy. I saw some footage on television the other day of Mr. Jones being questioned in a courtroom setting. As I understand it, he's being sued by a group associated with the Sandy Hook massacre, which occurred some ten years ago. I'm guessing it's something he said or maybe something he spouted off about on his InfoWars show, which has the victims' families in a snit. I think he thinks that Sandy Hook was a psyops thing-a-ma-jig orchestrated by the gun grabbers in or out of government. Why does anyone care what he thinks or says, knowing what they know about what he does for a living? I suppose if he's exploiting the event or maybe denigrating the memories of the people whose children were killed in cold blood on that fateful day, then they might have grounds for; I don't know, a slander or libel suit? Or, maybe this is really about the left trying, once again, to silence voices that they don't like or that they don't agree with. Maybe both.
The Ruskies wrapped up the Griner (WNBA player) trial, and Ms. Griner has been sentenced to 9 years in prison. Bumbles Biden released a statement that the trial was a sham, the sentence a miscarriage of justice and that she should be released to her loved ones back in the United States immediately. Biden's message was slightly less effusive than I've portrayed here, but you get the idea. I'm guessing that Vlad will probably have her breaking rocks in a Gulag somewhere until he thinks she can be useful as a pawn for trading purposes. Biden has offered to trade some arms dealer we have sitting in prison for her, but Vlad isn't biting. Vlad knows that the closer we get to the mid-term elections here in the United States, the higher the premium he can extract from the fool sitting in the White House. The Griner constituency, which is to say that she is a proud LGBTQ American-hating member of the marginalized community here in the States, is more likely to go out and vote for democrats in the midterms if Biden can secure her release ahead of Election Day. Timing is everything.
If there is a more despicable piece of shit than Liz Chaney, I'd like to know who that is. If you know more than one Liz Chaney, I'm referring to the congresswoman from Wyoming here. Her vitriol for Donald J Trump and everything he stands for is over-the-top outrageous. She sits on the January 6th Committee as one of two "republicans" and gladly does the bidding of the democrats on the Committee in trying to provide the Justice Department with enough evidence to bring charges against Trump and, if that doesn't work, to sully Trump in the eyes of his supporters such that he will never again have the support he needs to win the presidency for another term. If the latest round of primaries in various states is any indication, and every last one of Trump's endorsed candidates won their respective primaries, it tells you all you need to know about how well the Committee's hearings are going and how much of a joke they've become in the eyes of the public. The MAGA movement is alive and well.
Chaney's primary is coming up in a couple of weeks, and polls show her trailing her Republican opponent, Harriet Hagerman, by some thirty points. Wyoming is Trump country, and turning on Trump as Chaney has is a good way to deep-six your political career. She has made stopping Trump from ever returning to the presidency a personal vendetta, and it's simply not a good look. To make matters worse, she had her father, Dick Chaney, put up a video ad supporting his daughter in her upcoming primary and repeating her talking points about the dangers of Donald Trump should he once again run for president. Yes, this is the same Dick Chaney who, along with George Bush, got our country into a war in Iraq on false pretenses to further his financial and political interests. Bush's and Chaney's republican party has left the barn, and Trump's republican party is now ascendant in the year of the Lord, 2022. Do the right thing, Wyoming. Send this bitch packing.
Governor DeSantis of Florida announced yesterday that he is suspending a specific Florida state prosecutor for failing to enforce the state's laws in cases of abortion and gender therapy. The bigger story here is that DeSantis is thwarting the efforts of George Soros, whose funding put this particular attorney in the office to do his bidding. Soros's goal is now and has always been to do what he can to curtail American sovereignty and make America subservient to the liberal global world order. He has supported uber-liberal district attorneys in major cities across our nation with the express intent of increasing crime and undermining law enforcement in an attempt to create societal discord and chaos. This is what leftists do. DeSantis is the only governor in our country bold enough to stand up for his constituents and do what is necessary to rid his state of these Soros-funded "criminals." Keep doing what you're doing, Governor! We need more leaders like you!
Arizona finally announced that Kari Lake won the republican primary for governor. Better late than never is what I say. Ms. Lake won every county in the state, in case you're wondering about the width and breadth of her win. As resounding as her win was, it still took the state two days to tally up the votes. I think they wanted to deprive the republicans of a headline the morning after that would have likely read, "Trump endorsed candidates sweep the state of Arizona in last night's primary." Most of the republican candidates who won in the state of Arizona this past Tuesday are on record as believing that the election was stolen in 2020 and that Biden is an illegitimate President. The liberal media has asked candidates directly about their belief in the "big lie" that the 2020 election was stolen, thinking that admitting to it would hurt their chances at the polls. As it turns out, it seems that most Americans believe that the election was stolen from Trump. Or, maybe more to the point, no one believes that Biden got eighty-one million votes. I think we'll be hearing less and less about the "big lie" as we approach the mid-term elections. That's a good thing.
What's going on with this Monkeypox thing? We have some 6,000 cases here in the United States and they've declared some kind of health emergency. It's very confusing. They know how it's spread but they've not issued any guidelines to the people most at risk. At a minimum, you might think that telling the men in the gay community to refrain from having multiple sex partners would be good advice. But, no, not a word. They also say that it's not a sexually transmitred disease while knowing full well that it's spread by gay men having intimate contact with infected partners. Who are they afraid of offending this time? The LGBTQ community? Does the government have to wait until the disease is running rampant in the general population before issuing guidelines on how to avoid the disease? Where is Fauci? You couldn't get him off of television during the heyday of Covid. And now, it's fucking crickets. Wasn't Fauci front and center during the AIDS crisis way back when? What the hell is going on here?
The Jobs report came out yesterday for the month of July here in the United States and it reported a net increase in jobs of some 500k new jobs. The number beat expectations by around 200k which seemed pretty good by most accounts. The unemployment rate remained steady at 3.6%. Is it me or do these numbers seem a little fishy to you? We've had two months of back to back negative GDP numbers, back to back increases in interest rates, accelerating layoffs in the private sector, and a softening of the real estate market which comes as no surprise with mortgage rates on the rise. Is it possible that jobs allegedly added in July are a result of people having to work two and three jobs to offset the impact of a near-ten percent inflation rate? Meanwhile, Bumbles Biden takes to the podium at the White House wearing his stupid aviator sunglasses while taking credit for the "amazing" jobs numbers. I think that we all need to take any numbers coming out of the White House between now and Election Day in November with a grain of salt. The ends always justify the means.
Bumbling Joey Biden has had a couple of back-to-back bouts of Covid and he's reportedly been keeping a low profile for the most part. I think the consensus is that he is getting more done while out of the day-to-day spotlight. Any American with half a brain knows that he probably spends his days sitting in a back room somewhere in the bowels of the West Wing slurping down his oatmeal while watching reruns of "The Price is Right" or some such nonsense. Do you really think that the Chinese and the Russians would be running amok as they have been on the world stage if America had a real leader? As I sit here today, the Chinese have the island of Taiwan surrounded and they are fully engaged in live war games. Bumbles, are you listening? It reminds me of the way that the Russians amassed troops and weaponry along the border of Ukraine for months while the rest of the world sat around wondering aloud whether what they were seeing represented a real threat or not. We all know how that turned out.
Trump continues to draw record crowds at his rallies. He was in Wisconsin last night and he was sporting what I thought looked like a new haircut. It made him look a whole ten years younger if not more. It's yet one more indication that the man is running in 2024. I read somewhere where one fella commented to the effect that Trump would begin his term as a lame duck were he to be elected. I think that was Bill Barr, Trump's Attorney General, making that comment. Was the comment intended to give the impression that there wasn't much to worry about with a lame duck president? Or, was he suggesting that Trump had little to nothing to lose by going after the establishment full bore and ripping out the heart of the Deep State root and branch? Put differently, the likihood of Trump finishing the job he started in 2016 is a very real possibility. With DeSantis as Trump's VP and wingman, I can easily envision a good twelve years of Republican (MAGA) leadership in Washington starting with Trump's electoral landslide in 2024. We just need DeSamtis to get on board if he isn't already. Did I mention that Trump won the straw poll at CPAC 69% to DeSantis's 20 something percent? You heard that right. Let's do this!
The Chinese should be calling in their chits after countless years of investing in the Biden family. Anyone who has been paying half a mind to all of the stories over the years about the many trips that Joey and his son, Hunter, have made to China can't be surprised that now that Joey is the President of the United States that they are, as they say in the business, exercising their options. Blowing Pelosi's plane out of the sky seems counter-intuitive when you consider the benefits they've accrued due to their relationship with the Bidens and the risks they now face should they get into a hot war with one of the world's greatest superpowers. Perhaps everything is not as it seems.
Then, you have all of this nonsensical back and forth business between Pelosi and Biden where she allegedly never told the White House that she was planning this trip. Biden is on the record as suggesting that this is not the best time for the Speaker of the House to be traveling to the country of Taiwan, considering China's objections to her visitation. All I can say is, color me skeptical. Someone is lying through their teeth. Someone is angling to gain favor one way or another here. It sure smells like a wag-the-dog situation to me. Is this a ploy engineered by the White House in conjunction with the Chinese to buoy Joey's ratings ahead of the Mid Term elections? Will Pelosi gain favor by her come-hell-or-high-water courageousness and, in turn, raise the prospects of her political party ahead of the very same Mid Terms? Who will get the last laugh?
Did anyone else notice that Tucker Carlson of FOX was in attendance with Trump at Trump's golf event this past weekend in Bedminster, New Jersey? What was that all about? It's difficult for Tucker to be a neutral arbiter of events on his nightly news show if he's publicly associating with political giants like Trump. I'm guessing that none of this was a coincidence. Tucker holds a particular sway inside the republican party, so who he hangs with in public is designed entirely for public consumption. He's done several interviews with some of the world's more conservative leaders somewhat recently, so maybe none of what we saw with he and Trump should surprise anyone. I can assure you of one thing. His spending time with Trump was not lost on the news media.
They will likely speculate on this or that, and someone will eventually get it right. How about a Trump-Carlson ticket in 2024? Interesting, right? I can see Carlson jumping on that bandwagon for the same reasons that Trump has given us over time as a reason for his involvement in running for the presidency; Someone has to save our damn country from these damn liberals. He's probably wealthy enough that he doesn't have to worry about giving up his gig on FOX should he run with Trump. FOX has become so anti-Trump that Carlon's ticket is likely to be punched sooner rather than later, given his preference for strong leaders like Trump. Maybe this is Trump's way of signaling to DeSantis that his bench of potential vice presidential candidates isn't as flimsy as previously reported.
The Ev man was over for dinner last night. He and I sat down to a game of chess after dinner. It was our first game ever. I've only started to play, but I think my game is improving with every game I play. I might be learning more from the games I lose than the games I win. The Ev man, on the other hand, is an old hand at playing chess. We used to take him for lessons as a child, and he did just fine. To quote one of his instructors back in the day, "I don't think Evan knows how good he is." He's been to more tournaments than we can count, and he was always a good sport regardless of whether he was winning or losing. I think he's not played in many years, and it showed in the first game he and I played. He won both games, but he won the second game more decisively. I suggested that he and I keep track of our wins and losses, and he agreed to do that once I win a game. Smaht.
I'm really kicking myself. I finally got one of my Apple TVs to start working again after it seemingly got fried in a recent storm. I don't know how I did it, and the fact that it started working again may have had nothing to do with what I did or did not do. If you've seen the blinking lights that never go solid on the lower right-hand side of your Apple TV, then you know what I'm talking about. I wasn't expecting the TV to start working again, so you can imagine my surprise when the light went solid. "We're in business again," I hollered to the missus. Instead of taking a victory lap, I should have done a couple of refreshes and maybe a new software installation. I did none of it, and within 24 hours, it was back in the blinking mode, which is where it is today. I can be such a damn fool sometimes. Just when I thought there was a God, there wasn't.
I don't understand Apple putting out a product like the Apple TV that is unfixable once it "breaks." Before the 4k models came out, you could do a little something with the USB plugs to get them going again. There is no way to update anything, much less fix anything, since it has no USB port. I mean, who manufactures a unit that sells for somewhere in the $150 range that is more or less disposable once it "breaks." That, my friends, is how you define an expensive doorstop. That is not the Apple I've come to know and love going back to the early days when Steve Jobs was wowing the world with his genius. I think he would not have approved the product I'm referring to here. He was passionate about design and function, and every product that went out the door at Apple carried his signature promise of reliability. I'm guessing that they are more interested in perpetuating the wokeness of their corporate culture these days than they are in seeing to the sustainability of their product line. That does not portend good things for their future (or mine). Sad.
Today's the day Pelosi arrives in Taiwan. I still think it's a ruse of sorts, although where it ends up is anyone's guess. I'm seeing a tweet this morning from Germany where they've promised to support Taiwan in the event of an invasion by the Chinese. This is new. What other countries will be weighing in? Are they aware that John Kirby stood at the podium at the White House yesterday and stated unequivocally that the United States does not support Taiwan's independence? This after Biden told the press recently that we would defend Taiwan against an attack by China. Of course, Bidden is a hot mess these days, cognitively speaking, so be careful when you hear him saying, "read my lips." That's me channeling George Bush, so there's that. Maybe the game being played by the White House is Trumpian in that the Chinese can't believe a word they hear coming from Biden, so that makes matters less predictable and not more predictable. They do not now, nor have they ever feared Joey "feckless" Biden, and that may be the card they play at the end of the day.
Today is Primary Day in a few states in the Mid West like Kansas, Arizona, and Michigan. I'm sitting here tonight in the Eastern Time Zone waiting and wondering how things will turn out for MAGA candidates like Kari Lake, Blake Masters, and that woman named Tudor who is running to replace the current governor of Michigan Gretchen Whitmer. These states are once or twice removed from my time zone, so it looks like it will be a late night. It's MAGA vs. The Establishment in every one of these races. The prevailing thought for the state of Arizona is that as Arizona goes, so goes the nation. If MAGA wins, it means good things for the country going forward. Every republican candidate is concerned, and rightly so, about shenanigans at the polling place. More to the point, will the democrats steal another election or two tonight as they did in Arizona in 2020? We're already hearing something about felt pens bleeding through the ballots, and, as if that's not enough, the same tabulation machines in place in the 2020 election are still in place for this Primary election. This can't be good.
Fast forward 12 hours, and although we're still waiting for a few races to be called, it seems that MAGA candidates had a good night. Two of the three republican candidates who voted to impeach Trump have now lost their races to MAGA candidates. Both impeachments of Trump were a sham, so good riddance is what I say to these bastards who threw their support behind the Democrats in their effort to thwart the presidency of one Donald J Trump. I think ten republicans voted to impeach. Nine of the bastards have lost their primaries thus far in 2022. There are stories around this morning about certain irregularities in the voting in Arizona last night, which need to be investigated, and people need to go to jail if they are found guilty of tampering with election results. I am surprised that the Kari Lake race to be the republican gubernatorial candidate has yet to be called. I thought she had a lock on the Primary win based on polling seen over the last few days. Tell me something doesn't smell fishy.
I haven't followed the January 6th Committee's televised hearings too closely because I think it's a kangaroo court. That said, this business about missing and deleted texts from any number of people and governmental agencies in and around the January 6th timeframe is interesting. I wonder what difference it makes to the overall investigation and how it may or may not factor into what the Department of Justice does when it comes to indicting or not indicting Trump. There is enough of a hue and cry from the democrats on the Committee such that it makes me think that the missing texts could make or break their case. How do texts even go missing in this day and age when everything you do on your phone ends up on a cloud somewhere? It's all backed up until it isn't, I suppose. Anyway, whoever is responsible for "losing" the texts, you done good. You may have saved the Committee from its failings.
It's hard to remember from one year to the next just how hot it gets during the summer months and precisely how long the heat waves last. We're looking down the barrel of another week here in the Northeast, with temperatures in the upper eighties and occasionally intolerable humidity. I would say that this is unprecedented, but, as I said, I can't remember what last summer or past summers were like. If someone were to tell me today that we're all going to die in twelve years if we don't do something today about global warming, I might well come around to their point of view. There are only so many places to hide once temperatures climb above one hundred plus degrees. You can't run to the local cinema on those sweltering days anymore because they've all gone out of business thanks to the seemingly endless Covid pandemic. You can't crank up the air conditioner anymore because electricity rates have doubled thanks to the energy policies of the Biden Administration. My advice would be to do whatever you're going to do early before things start to heat up.
We're two days removed from the republican gubernatorial primary in Arizona, and we still have no winner. It sure looks like the administrative state in Arizona is slow-walking the count to give themselves the time they need to manufacture votes so that Kari Lake, the overwhelming favorite and the candidate endorsed by Trump, doesn't have enough votes to get over the finish line. Meanwhile, the person responsible for overseeing the vote count in Arizona is on MSNBC mucking it up with her leftist brothers and sisters instead of doing her fucking job back in her state. Is this how they plan to steal the Mid Term election in November? Who doesn't think that this isn't reminiscent of what happened to Trump in 2020? It's deja vu all over again. If I'm not mistaken, Arizona is still working through fraud issues left over from the 2020 election. If you get away with something the first time, why not just get out the same playbook the next time? These leftist bastards have no shame.
I finally got around to making the ratatouille dish I wanted to make. We've got homegrown zucchini coming out of our ears, so why not make one of the dishes we enjoy? The missus said something about freezing some of the ratatouille, but I'm not a fan of throwing things in the freezer where they disappear for months and sometimes years on end before they get thrown away. Even frozen food has a shelf life. Right? Ratatouille is one of those recipes where, in my experience, it doesn't require much precision when working from a recipe. I mean, what do "two medium" zucchinis even look like? Sometimes, the recipe will further define these things by specifying the number of cups that are, at least in theory, equal to two medium zucchinis. I find it easier to eyeball things and hope for the best. If you end up with a little more eggplant than zucchini in your ratatouille, not a big deal. Oh, and by the way, it's a great dish served hot or cold.
I'm thinking of making some zucchini bread, but I don't need to have something that tempting sitting around the house. It's too good, but it's also very carby, and I need fewer carbs in my diet, not more. Sometimes, what you put on it makes it taste good, like butter, but it also adds to your waistline. If I don't make it, I can't eat it. It's that simple. I feel the same way about cookies and potato chips. I never buy them because they're too easy to eat, and not having them around the house calling my name every minute of the day nips that problem in the bud. It's too bad because I have more zucchini than I'll ever use. I should be looking for recipes that will help me use them up. For future reference, the answer to my problem is to plant fewer zucchini plants. As an aside, I can't believe how fast these things grow or how big they get. There's a lesson in there somewhere for my tomato plants. Tomato plants, if you're listening.
I'm not an Alex Jones guy any way you slice it. I've seen snippets here and there of him ranting about this or that outrage, but that's the extent of my knowledge about the guy. I saw some footage on television the other day of Mr. Jones being questioned in a courtroom setting. As I understand it, he's being sued by a group associated with the Sandy Hook massacre, which occurred some ten years ago. I'm guessing it's something he said or maybe something he spouted off about on his InfoWars show, which has the victims' families in a snit. I think he thinks that Sandy Hook was a psyops thing-a-ma-jig orchestrated by the gun grabbers in or out of government. Why does anyone care what he thinks or says, knowing what they know about what he does for a living? I suppose if he's exploiting the event or maybe denigrating the memories of the people whose children were killed in cold blood on that fateful day, then they might have grounds for; I don't know, a slander or libel suit? Or, maybe this is really about the left trying, once again, to silence voices that they don't like or that they don't agree with. Maybe both.
The Ruskies wrapped up the Griner (WNBA player) trial, and Ms. Griner has been sentenced to 9 years in prison. Bumbles Biden released a statement that the trial was a sham, the sentence a miscarriage of justice and that she should be released to her loved ones back in the United States immediately. Biden's message was slightly less effusive than I've portrayed here, but you get the idea. I'm guessing that Vlad will probably have her breaking rocks in a Gulag somewhere until he thinks she can be useful as a pawn for trading purposes. Biden has offered to trade some arms dealer we have sitting in prison for her, but Vlad isn't biting. Vlad knows that the closer we get to the mid-term elections here in the United States, the higher the premium he can extract from the fool sitting in the White House. The Griner constituency, which is to say that she is a proud LGBTQ American-hating member of the marginalized community here in the States, is more likely to go out and vote for democrats in the midterms if Biden can secure her release ahead of Election Day. Timing is everything.
If there is a more despicable piece of shit than Liz Chaney, I'd like to know who that is. If you know more than one Liz Chaney, I'm referring to the congresswoman from Wyoming here. Her vitriol for Donald J Trump and everything he stands for is over-the-top outrageous. She sits on the January 6th Committee as one of two "republicans" and gladly does the bidding of the democrats on the Committee in trying to provide the Justice Department with enough evidence to bring charges against Trump and, if that doesn't work, to sully Trump in the eyes of his supporters such that he will never again have the support he needs to win the presidency for another term. If the latest round of primaries in various states is any indication, and every last one of Trump's endorsed candidates won their respective primaries, it tells you all you need to know about how well the Committee's hearings are going and how much of a joke they've become in the eyes of the public. The MAGA movement is alive and well.
Chaney's primary is coming up in a couple of weeks, and polls show her trailing her Republican opponent, Harriet Hagerman, by some thirty points. Wyoming is Trump country, and turning on Trump as Chaney has is a good way to deep-six your political career. She has made stopping Trump from ever returning to the presidency a personal vendetta, and it's simply not a good look. To make matters worse, she had her father, Dick Chaney, put up a video ad supporting his daughter in her upcoming primary and repeating her talking points about the dangers of Donald Trump should he once again run for president. Yes, this is the same Dick Chaney who, along with George Bush, got our country into a war in Iraq on false pretenses to further his financial and political interests. Bush's and Chaney's republican party has left the barn, and Trump's republican party is now ascendant in the year of the Lord, 2022. Do the right thing, Wyoming. Send this bitch packing.
Governor DeSantis of Florida announced yesterday that he is suspending a specific Florida state prosecutor for failing to enforce the state's laws in cases of abortion and gender therapy. The bigger story here is that DeSantis is thwarting the efforts of George Soros, whose funding put this particular attorney in the office to do his bidding. Soros's goal is now and has always been to do what he can to curtail American sovereignty and make America subservient to the liberal global world order. He has supported uber-liberal district attorneys in major cities across our nation with the express intent of increasing crime and undermining law enforcement in an attempt to create societal discord and chaos. This is what leftists do. DeSantis is the only governor in our country bold enough to stand up for his constituents and do what is necessary to rid his state of these Soros-funded "criminals." Keep doing what you're doing, Governor! We need more leaders like you!
Arizona finally announced that Kari Lake won the republican primary for governor. Better late than never is what I say. Ms. Lake won every county in the state, in case you're wondering about the width and breadth of her win. As resounding as her win was, it still took the state two days to tally up the votes. I think they wanted to deprive the republicans of a headline the morning after that would have likely read, "Trump endorsed candidates sweep the state of Arizona in last night's primary." Most of the republican candidates who won in the state of Arizona this past Tuesday are on record as believing that the election was stolen in 2020 and that Biden is an illegitimate President. The liberal media has asked candidates directly about their belief in the "big lie" that the 2020 election was stolen, thinking that admitting to it would hurt their chances at the polls. As it turns out, it seems that most Americans believe that the election was stolen from Trump. Or, maybe more to the point, no one believes that Biden got eighty-one million votes. I think we'll be hearing less and less about the "big lie" as we approach the mid-term elections. That's a good thing.
What's going on with this Monkeypox thing? We have some 6,000 cases here in the United States and they've declared some kind of health emergency. It's very confusing. They know how it's spread but they've not issued any guidelines to the people most at risk. At a minimum, you might think that telling the men in the gay community to refrain from having multiple sex partners would be good advice. But, no, not a word. They also say that it's not a sexually transmitred disease while knowing full well that it's spread by gay men having intimate contact with infected partners. Who are they afraid of offending this time? The LGBTQ community? Does the government have to wait until the disease is running rampant in the general population before issuing guidelines on how to avoid the disease? Where is Fauci? You couldn't get him off of television during the heyday of Covid. And now, it's fucking crickets. Wasn't Fauci front and center during the AIDS crisis way back when? What the hell is going on here?
The Jobs report came out yesterday for the month of July here in the United States and it reported a net increase in jobs of some 500k new jobs. The number beat expectations by around 200k which seemed pretty good by most accounts. The unemployment rate remained steady at 3.6%. Is it me or do these numbers seem a little fishy to you? We've had two months of back to back negative GDP numbers, back to back increases in interest rates, accelerating layoffs in the private sector, and a softening of the real estate market which comes as no surprise with mortgage rates on the rise. Is it possible that jobs allegedly added in July are a result of people having to work two and three jobs to offset the impact of a near-ten percent inflation rate? Meanwhile, Bumbles Biden takes to the podium at the White House wearing his stupid aviator sunglasses while taking credit for the "amazing" jobs numbers. I think that we all need to take any numbers coming out of the White House between now and Election Day in November with a grain of salt. The ends always justify the means.
Bumbling Joey Biden has had a couple of back-to-back bouts of Covid and he's reportedly been keeping a low profile for the most part. I think the consensus is that he is getting more done while out of the day-to-day spotlight. Any American with half a brain knows that he probably spends his days sitting in a back room somewhere in the bowels of the West Wing slurping down his oatmeal while watching reruns of "The Price is Right" or some such nonsense. Do you really think that the Chinese and the Russians would be running amok as they have been on the world stage if America had a real leader? As I sit here today, the Chinese have the island of Taiwan surrounded and they are fully engaged in live war games. Bumbles, are you listening? It reminds me of the way that the Russians amassed troops and weaponry along the border of Ukraine for months while the rest of the world sat around wondering aloud whether what they were seeing represented a real threat or not. We all know how that turned out.
Trump continues to draw record crowds at his rallies. He was in Wisconsin last night and he was sporting what I thought looked like a new haircut. It made him look a whole ten years younger if not more. It's yet one more indication that the man is running in 2024. I read somewhere where one fella commented to the effect that Trump would begin his term as a lame duck were he to be elected. I think that was Bill Barr, Trump's Attorney General, making that comment. Was the comment intended to give the impression that there wasn't much to worry about with a lame duck president? Or, was he suggesting that Trump had little to nothing to lose by going after the establishment full bore and ripping out the heart of the Deep State root and branch? Put differently, the likihood of Trump finishing the job he started in 2016 is a very real possibility. With DeSantis as Trump's VP and wingman, I can easily envision a good twelve years of Republican (MAGA) leadership in Washington starting with Trump's electoral landslide in 2024. We just need DeSamtis to get on board if he isn't already. Did I mention that Trump won the straw poll at CPAC 69% to DeSantis's 20 something percent? You heard that right. Let's do this!
Hold My Beer
31/07/22 06:46
This past week has been a hot one! It was 97 degrees along the coast yesterday afternoon. The entire week has been just nasty. It makes doing everything and anything that much more difficult. Our lights here at home were flickering yesterday afternoon due presumably to the overwhelming demand for energy due to the heat wave. It's made for a challenging week of bike riding as well. It's one thing when you have pleasant onshore breezes that take the temperatures down a notch. It's entirely something else when those breezes turn offshore, and the relief you were looking forward to turns to shit. And then, you have two choices. Stay on track, keep pushing through the discomfort, or call it a day and head back to your air-conditioned home.
Trump attended a massive 5,000-person event in Florida over the weekend. The event, mainly of youth activists in the Republican party, was sponsored by an organization called Turning Point U.S.A. Trump gave a speech, as did Governor DeSantis from Florida. Both men are expected to run for the presidency in 2024. There may have been some lesser-known names in the mix, but Trump and DeSantis dominated the coverage. I listened to a little bit of Trump's speech, but it sounded like one of his stock speeches, so I turned my attention elsewhere after about 15 minutes. The most exciting thing for me coming out of the event was a poll of the attendees about who they would prefer as their candidate for the upcoming 2024 presidential race. Trump beat DeSantis by a margin of 78% to 19%. What else do you need to know?
I'm doing my best to keep our garden watered. Everything looks pretty good except for a few string bean plants that stopped thriving after producing a few beans. What is that all about? Should I have put up a trestle to give them something to climb? Is that where I went wrong? The plants never grew tall enough where I thought a trestle might help, so I'm just throwing that out there. I'm getting a few tomatoes here and there and seemingly ahead of schedule. I must have made some good choices along the way back when I was considering which varieties to plant. I have too many zucchini plants, so I'll need to see what I can do with zucchini once they start coming around in earnest. We like vegetable lasagna, so that's one option. I'm sure there are others.
I woke up this morning thinking about how we should have replaced one of our air conditioners long ago. It's an air conditioner that hasn't worked well from the jump. Why we've tolerated it this long is beyond me. The unit is large enough, so I don't think it's a matter of having too few BTUs. The room in which it's installed is not so large that you might think a larger unit might have been a better choice. It is large enough that I'll need to hire someone when the time comes to install another unit. I can pop one in a window as well as the next guy, but this is a wall unit, so things may need to be reconfigured. It's going to be one of those things that, once done, the missus will ask me, what the bejesus took us so long? And, she would be right to ask that question.
The other day, an electrical storm blew through, and it fried three of the four LAN ports on my router. That's my initial diagnosis anyway. I had something that worked before the storm came around, and that something is no longer working. Is it something that I can reset? Will it help if I unplug it and then plug it back in? How about powering it off and on? I know; that's the same as unplugging it and then plugging it back in. I'm trying to avoid having to replace my router as an unnecessary expense. As I'm reading up on this, one option is to buy a network switch and use the LAN port that is still working to add additional LAN ports to my router. I can buy a nice network switch for about twenty bucks on Amazon.
I'll need to time all of this to avoid interfering with the work that the missus has planned for the next couple of days. The last thing I want to do is to have her sit down at the computer only to find that she has no internet. She would not be pleased. I tend to dig a lot of holes when I troubleshoot things, and I'm not always successful in digging myself out of those very same holes in a timeframe that is convenient for people who need to use the things that I'm trying to fix. The missus is always quick to chime in when these things happen. "What would I do if you weren't around?" she asks. I never know how to answer those questions, and usually, I don't even try. I should have a pat answer the next time she asks because the day may come when she'll need to know what to do, where to go, what to look for, and so on. But not today.
If I'm not mistaken, I have a couple of Apple TVs downloading software updates when the storm blew in. Neither worked after the fact, and both have blinking lights suggesting the need for a reset. These devices are not happy when something interferes with the software update process. Pressing the usual reset buttons on the devices' remotes was an exercise in futility. I hope to hell this electrical thing that blew through didn't fry the circuitry in my two 4k Apple TVs. That's not likely, or is it? I'm also holding my breath a little bit because I don't know what else broke when the storm came through. Our cable shows, like Tucker Carlson on FOX, worked last night, but there were issues with the audio, so I may need to try powering the cable box on and off.
As Trump puts it, the missus and I don't play the lottery unless the jackpot is "yuge." Well, it's been pretty big these past two weeks, so I bought a couple of tickets just in case. I mean, you never know. Right? I think the pot was somewhere north of 500 million. That ain't nothing to sneeze at. I think we got a couple of numbers but won nothing, and this is the good news, no one else won either. I forgot to buy a couple of tickets for last night's drawing, and no one won again. I think the jackpot might be north of a billion by the time Friday's drawing comes around. I feel sorry for the people who buy more tickets than they can afford, but that's the downside of any numbers game, especially when the odds of winning are infinitesimally small. People without a pot to piss in still have no pot to piss in after losing, and people who can afford to throw away their money by buying lottery tickets shrug it off without another thought. God plays no favorites when it comes to the lottery.
I still think winning would be a nice problem to have all in all. I would certainly want to stay anonymous if we did win. We get enough shit calls from people trying to part us from our money as it is. The last thing I'd want is people knocking on our door in the middle of the night with their hard luck stories. The local mobsters would likely offer us protection, but that too would come with a cost. What is the upside of winning that much money? So what, now we'll be able to buy more things? We have enough things. We don't need more things. I suppose a French villa might be lovely, but the thought of flying thousands of miles over open water to get there doesn't thrill me. Could I help a few family members with their debts with my newfound winnings? I could, and I would. Then again, if you win that much money, there will always be those family members who think that you could give more. Anything less, you're a no-good cheap bastard and a waste of spermatozoa.
Bumbling Joey Biden's Attorney General (Garland) talks a big game when he goes off on how he plans to pursue justice for everyone and anyone involved in impeding a political process. Still, I have a hard time believing that he is targeting Trump at the end of the day. We're talking January 6th here, to be precise. Were he to target Trump for his alleged criminal activities related to the January 6th "insurrection," and were he to issue an indictment of Trump, it would be seen for what it is: A political hit job. Biden knows that Trump has his sights on running for the presidency in 2024, and Biden and the Democrats know that Trump would likely return to power were he to run. This is nothing more than an effort by the Democrats to kneecap their political opposition, and that is the stuff you see in banana republics. This is especially rich, were it to come to pass, when you consider the abject corruption of the Democrat party, and more specifically, the Biden Crime family.
My chess game is going pretty well. I can't complain. I get to choose my opponent's rating, which is good because we newbies need all the help we can get. I think I'm starting to get the hang of the game since I'm beating my "computer" opponent more often than not. I'm getting a little instruction here and there on YouTube, but I'm not sure how much of it is sticking. Conceptually, I get it. Remembering the terms and applying what I've learned while playing is another story. I've heard the stories about players who can see several moves ahead, and I suppose that's probably helpful from time to time. That's not where I am, so I'm just putting that out there.
Recently, I've moved up a bit, and I'm now playing higher-rated (computer) opponents. Playing better and more experienced opponents is both more humbling and more instructive. My days of shooting from the hip are over. Getting bitch-slapped time and time again has a way of making you think twice before you make your next move. It's now more about what my opponent is doing and trying to figure that out before I make my move. It's no longer just about winning or losing. It's not about the destination; it's about the journey.
I told Mrs. G that I was playing computer chess when we stopped over to see her last weekend. I know she plays regularly, so I thought she might have something to say about the game, her experiences playing online, anything at all. I half expected her to ask me more about my experiences and what I liked and didn't like about playing chess online, but there was none of that. There was no discussion about ratings, tactics, nothing. I don't know how I feel about playing chess with her, so maybe it was just as well that the discussion, what little there was of it, went nowhere. She has a board in her apartment that sits there collecting dust. Maybe she knows me well enough to know that my fragile ego couldn't tolerate a loss at the hands of a 90-something-year-old, so she didn't bother broaching the subject. She might be correct, but we may never know. That's probably a good thing.
I like to stay up-to-date on the number of cases of Covid here in our community by reading the statistics in our local newspaper. Well, the digital version of that newspaper anyway. It tells me how many active and inactive cases we have, which includes cases going back to the beginning of the pandemic in March of 2020. So, I was a little surprised when I last saw that they are now providing data on how many cases have been reported in the last fourteen days. What the hell is that all about? Why the change in what and how they're reporting what they're reporting? How am I supposed to interpret the data? Why do I even care how many cases we've had in the last fourteen days? It might be meaningful if the number per fourteen days went from ten to one hundred. It would require I look at it daily if I wanted a relative measure of cases. That's not how I roll. Do I now, or have I ever really cared about the number of cases, no matter the measurement? Not really. Fuck it.
Well, goddamn it, are we in a recession or not? We'll know in about 15 minutes as I sit here waiting for the number to be announced at 8:30 am. If the GDP number is negative, that would be two consecutive quarters of negative growth, and that, at least according to some economists, is how they define a "recession." Where we go from here, if it turns out that we see a negative number, is anyone's guess. The financial markets rallied hard yesterday for all the wrong reasons (Fed raised rates 75 basis points), so maybe that continues today. The worst things get, the more likely it is that the Federal Reserve will pivot and reverse course on raising interest rates. Right? Maybe we should take our cues from what the stooges in the White House are trying to sell us. They are trying to redefine what a recession is, so what does that tell you? It tells me that we're going to see a negative number today. BOOM!
Well, wonders never cease. One of the two Apple TVs I thought was dead in the water after a lightning strike this past week seems to be showing signs of life. As far as I know, it wasn't because of anything I did or didn't do. I set the two devices on the arm of our couch the other day and plugged both of them in, and connected the two with an ethernet cord. Not because I thought that that would somehow fix the problem of the flashing indicator lights but rather because I thought that doing something, anything, was better than doing nothing. When I looked at them this morning, I noticed that the flashing light on one of the units had turned into a solid light. Baby steps, babycakes! I'm thinking that the Lord works in mysterious ways. I won't know why the flashing light stopped flashing until I reconnect everything to see what works and what doesn't. Are we talking luck here or maybe a little divine intervention?
Bumbling Joey Biden had a two-hour phone call with XI from China yesterday. Who believes for a minute that Joey Biden is even capable of having a two-hour conversation? It makes you wonder how he pulled it off. Who was behind the scenes filling out the cue cards or typing answers so that Joey could read the responses aloud in real-time? The readout after the session came from the Chinese and not from Joey and his trusty and stealthy staff. His staff didn't want the world to know just how demented and stupid Biden sounded on the world stage. The Chinese said something about fire and fury in response to their "discussion" with Joey about Taiwan and maybe Pelosi's planned visit there in the next month or so. In other words, the Chinese have given their stooge, Joey Biden, his marching orders once again. It's just so embarrassing.
I'm hearing that a few FBI agents have stepped forward and outed others in the FBI who are working overtime to suppress any news and, even worse than that, any investigations into Hunter Biden and the Biden Crime Family. We have a better understanding now of how all the pieces fit together thanks, in large part, to what we learned from the laptop from hell that Hunter Biden left behind at a computer shop. Others have stepped forward to fill in some of the blanks, such as who is the "big guy" in the remuneration agreements, etc. It's quite possibly one of the most nefarious pay-to-play arrangements involving the highest levels of our government in our nation's history. Just how compromised is the Biden family, and more specifically, Joe Biden?
And why on God's green earth, knowing what our Intelligence agencies know about all of these deals between the Bidens and the Chinese Communist Party, are they allowing this man to sit in our beloved Oval Office and at the helm of one of the greatest countries on the face of the planet? They must know that every decision Biden makes relative to China is driven not by our country's best interests but by the interests of the Communist Chinese. That explains why the Chinese bitch slap Bidens people every time they engage with them on the world stage. They have no respect for the man because they know who and what he is. He's a feckless and corrupt government hack with a fifty-year record of doing more harm than good for the country he ostensibly "serves." The Chinese know he's corrupt because they were complicit in his corruption.
I want to be careful not to put our Intelligence agencies on too high a pedestal. They were, after all, complicit with countless others in and out of government in trying to remove Trump from office by perpetrating the Russia hoax during Trump's first term in office. Maybe this is what happens when you give people too much power. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. When Trump returns to office in 2025, he needs to eliminate the toadies and losers in every agency and at every level. My biggest worry is that they will do whatever they need to ensure that Trump can't return to the presidency. That includes putting the man in jail on trumped-up charges or, worse yet, threatening or even harming the man so that he is incapable of returning to the office. What is it about Trump that they find so threatening? Does anyone think for even a moment that the Communist Chinese Party (CCP) had something to do with putting Joey in office? After years of investing in everything Biden, they weren't about to let Trump stand in the way of the Chinese installing their puppet. That explains everything.
We met up with the Ev man yesterday where we had planned to do a little food shopping with him. We arrived late, and he went shopping without us for a change. When we arrived, he was rolling out of the store with his shopping cart and into the parking lot. I half expected that he would pick up a few things and be done. I was surprised to see that he had a good cartload of food. What he buys and doesn't buy is none of my business, but there are healthy choices and there are unhealthy choices. I'm not sure I saw a lot of healthy choices, but that's his business, so I say nothing, and we all move on. The missus was pouring over his purchases as mothers will do, and I don't think he appreciated her second-guessing his decisions. Had we done a better job of showing up when we promised that we would show up, we might have had more input into what he did and didn't, but such was not the case. We were late, and he was done.
I was listening to Mark Levin on the radio last night, and he was talking about how the left was doing everything possible to keep Trump off the ballot in 2024. The 10,000-foot view, and taking Trump out of the equation, says that the democrat party will do whatever it takes to keep any Republican from holding the presidency of our great nation ever again. Just who in the hell do they think they are? I know they have their agenda, and the Republicans have a very different agenda, but I thought that's what elections were for. That boat has sailed. Now, the ends justify the means. I think the Republicans are waking up to this new reality, and maybe not so new reality since we all know that Kennedy stole the presidency back in 63 when they rigged the elections in Chicago, but here we are. Mark mentioned that the legacy of Trump would be that he taught republicans how to fight back. He exposed them for who and what they are, and they hated him for it.
Have you heard about the latest cultural kerfuffle where a Sesame Street character allegedly snubbed two black children in a parade in the city of Philadelphia this past week? The video shows the costumed character walking along the parade's sidelines, giving white children high-fives, then strolling right by a couple of black children without giving them a second look. Within twenty-four hours, the parents of the aggrieved children filed a 25 million dollar lawsuit against the parent company of Sesame Street, and, wait for it, Jesse Jackson, the grifter, came out of his hole and insisted that Sesame Street add more blacks to their boards and provide funds for black businesses as amends for their racist ways. Oh, and he wants the company to submit their employees to racial sensitivity training. Not that anyone is asking, but here's my response: Kiss my ass.
It's nothing more than an Al Sharpton-style shakedown. Grifters like Sharpton and Jackson, once thought to be leaders in the nationwide fight for civil rights before they discovered that there was more money to be made in shaming guilt-ridden corporations out of millions of dollars, pounce like the rabid ambulance chasers that they are at every opportunity that comes along. Woke corporations like Sesame Street will fold like a cheap suit before pushing back against these so-called icons of the left and their Stazi foot soldiers in their pseudo-aggrieved war against discrimination and racism. It's extortion by any other name. They need to be called out for who and what they are. The only way this stops is by someone, anyone, telling these grifters to fuck off. Better yet, I'd like to see a judge throw this case out of court and recommend to the local DA that the accusers be charged with extortion. Even more laughable is the fact that the article I'm reading about this matter refers to Jesse Jackson as a "former presidential candidate." What, fifty years ago? He's a clown show and always has been.
I was explaining to the missus the other day that the stock market is in a bear market and, even though she sees the financial markets doing well this past week, the overall trajectory is downward. Both bull and bear markets are processes and these markets we're seeing are no exception. Patience is required unless you want to end up buying high and selling low time and time again until you run out of money with which to trade. There is nothing wrong with being 100% in cash until we see some kind of capitulation when and where the financial markets become a wasteland and nobody wants in. That is, of course, the best time to get in. Theoretically speaking, of course. There is still far too much speculation in this market for my tastes and, quite honestly, we're not that far off the highs of late 2021 so we still need a bit more air to come out of the tires. All in good time, is what Jack Bogle would say. Wait a minute! Wasn't he a buy-and-hold guy?
Who knew? The Ev man loves peaches. We bought three big ones and we left them on the kitchen table to ripen. He apologized this morning for eating all of our peaches before we even knew they were gone. Don't get me wrong. We love to see the Ev man eating his fruits and his veggies but he eats them so rarely that we're surprised when we see him eating one or the other with any regularity. Maybe it's peaches today and broccoli next week. Hope springs eternal. Right? Anyway, we sent him packing this morning with a lot of things to eat and drink so that should should hold him for a bit. Well, I sent him packing anyway. The missus is still sleeping. She won't be surprised to learn that he's gone when she gets up. That's how that boy rolls. That's how his momma rolls.
It looks like another stellar day here on the seacoast. I'll want to get out on my bike early to beat the crowds and get my exercise in for the day. I do think that the crowds have been less if that's an acceptable way of putting it. Gas is still in the $4-$6 dollar range and that has to be keeping people driving less, driving fewer miles, going to fewer far-away places, and maybe travelling in groups when appropriate. Going to the beach wasn't always a luxury but it seems that it is just that these days when it costs an arm and a leg to get there and back. It wouldn't stop me and the missus if we wanted to lay out our blankets on the edge of a dune somehwere but that's just us. Maybe people just put their gas purchases on a credit card like everything else and the party continues unabated. All I'm saying is that it seems that I'm not fighting the crowds like I have in past years when I go for my bike rides. Riding earlier in the day helps.
Did I mention that we took Mrs G out for a ride yesterday? We hadn't planned to go for a ride and, as a matter of fact, we had planned to play it by ear once we arrived at her residence. If Mrs G wanted to go for a ride then we would happily oblige. She never asks, of course, so we're always looking and listening for the right cues once we're on site. It was such a nice day yesterday and her apartment seemed so, well, stifling, that I asked her directly if she might like to get out of the house for a while. She was smartly dressed when we arrived so that seeemed to suggest that she might be open to getting out and about. We drove to the little farm stand out on route 88 which we've visited previously and it's nice little shop where Mrs G seems to enjoy shopping. They have lots of fruits and vegetables and homemade goods that practically jump in your basket as you walk down the aisle. It's a bit pricey but isn't everything a bit pricey these days?
When we arrived back at her place, she asked if we wouldn't mind circling around to an adjoining property owned by her facility where she hoped to get a better look at where they were planning to build a central health center of sorts. Mrs G has a keen interest in all things real estate so none of that was a surprise to us. I've always wondered if she didn't miss her calling in life knowing what we know about her interest in real estate. We rarely have a conversation these days when she's not bringing up the sale of this or that piece of real estate in the community. Having interests in the twilight of your life is not a bad thing. If it helps you to keep putting one foot in front of the other when you get out of bed every morning then you should thank the Baby Jesus for bestowing you with said gifts.
Trump attended a massive 5,000-person event in Florida over the weekend. The event, mainly of youth activists in the Republican party, was sponsored by an organization called Turning Point U.S.A. Trump gave a speech, as did Governor DeSantis from Florida. Both men are expected to run for the presidency in 2024. There may have been some lesser-known names in the mix, but Trump and DeSantis dominated the coverage. I listened to a little bit of Trump's speech, but it sounded like one of his stock speeches, so I turned my attention elsewhere after about 15 minutes. The most exciting thing for me coming out of the event was a poll of the attendees about who they would prefer as their candidate for the upcoming 2024 presidential race. Trump beat DeSantis by a margin of 78% to 19%. What else do you need to know?
I'm doing my best to keep our garden watered. Everything looks pretty good except for a few string bean plants that stopped thriving after producing a few beans. What is that all about? Should I have put up a trestle to give them something to climb? Is that where I went wrong? The plants never grew tall enough where I thought a trestle might help, so I'm just throwing that out there. I'm getting a few tomatoes here and there and seemingly ahead of schedule. I must have made some good choices along the way back when I was considering which varieties to plant. I have too many zucchini plants, so I'll need to see what I can do with zucchini once they start coming around in earnest. We like vegetable lasagna, so that's one option. I'm sure there are others.
I woke up this morning thinking about how we should have replaced one of our air conditioners long ago. It's an air conditioner that hasn't worked well from the jump. Why we've tolerated it this long is beyond me. The unit is large enough, so I don't think it's a matter of having too few BTUs. The room in which it's installed is not so large that you might think a larger unit might have been a better choice. It is large enough that I'll need to hire someone when the time comes to install another unit. I can pop one in a window as well as the next guy, but this is a wall unit, so things may need to be reconfigured. It's going to be one of those things that, once done, the missus will ask me, what the bejesus took us so long? And, she would be right to ask that question.
The other day, an electrical storm blew through, and it fried three of the four LAN ports on my router. That's my initial diagnosis anyway. I had something that worked before the storm came around, and that something is no longer working. Is it something that I can reset? Will it help if I unplug it and then plug it back in? How about powering it off and on? I know; that's the same as unplugging it and then plugging it back in. I'm trying to avoid having to replace my router as an unnecessary expense. As I'm reading up on this, one option is to buy a network switch and use the LAN port that is still working to add additional LAN ports to my router. I can buy a nice network switch for about twenty bucks on Amazon.
I'll need to time all of this to avoid interfering with the work that the missus has planned for the next couple of days. The last thing I want to do is to have her sit down at the computer only to find that she has no internet. She would not be pleased. I tend to dig a lot of holes when I troubleshoot things, and I'm not always successful in digging myself out of those very same holes in a timeframe that is convenient for people who need to use the things that I'm trying to fix. The missus is always quick to chime in when these things happen. "What would I do if you weren't around?" she asks. I never know how to answer those questions, and usually, I don't even try. I should have a pat answer the next time she asks because the day may come when she'll need to know what to do, where to go, what to look for, and so on. But not today.
If I'm not mistaken, I have a couple of Apple TVs downloading software updates when the storm blew in. Neither worked after the fact, and both have blinking lights suggesting the need for a reset. These devices are not happy when something interferes with the software update process. Pressing the usual reset buttons on the devices' remotes was an exercise in futility. I hope to hell this electrical thing that blew through didn't fry the circuitry in my two 4k Apple TVs. That's not likely, or is it? I'm also holding my breath a little bit because I don't know what else broke when the storm came through. Our cable shows, like Tucker Carlson on FOX, worked last night, but there were issues with the audio, so I may need to try powering the cable box on and off.
As Trump puts it, the missus and I don't play the lottery unless the jackpot is "yuge." Well, it's been pretty big these past two weeks, so I bought a couple of tickets just in case. I mean, you never know. Right? I think the pot was somewhere north of 500 million. That ain't nothing to sneeze at. I think we got a couple of numbers but won nothing, and this is the good news, no one else won either. I forgot to buy a couple of tickets for last night's drawing, and no one won again. I think the jackpot might be north of a billion by the time Friday's drawing comes around. I feel sorry for the people who buy more tickets than they can afford, but that's the downside of any numbers game, especially when the odds of winning are infinitesimally small. People without a pot to piss in still have no pot to piss in after losing, and people who can afford to throw away their money by buying lottery tickets shrug it off without another thought. God plays no favorites when it comes to the lottery.
I still think winning would be a nice problem to have all in all. I would certainly want to stay anonymous if we did win. We get enough shit calls from people trying to part us from our money as it is. The last thing I'd want is people knocking on our door in the middle of the night with their hard luck stories. The local mobsters would likely offer us protection, but that too would come with a cost. What is the upside of winning that much money? So what, now we'll be able to buy more things? We have enough things. We don't need more things. I suppose a French villa might be lovely, but the thought of flying thousands of miles over open water to get there doesn't thrill me. Could I help a few family members with their debts with my newfound winnings? I could, and I would. Then again, if you win that much money, there will always be those family members who think that you could give more. Anything less, you're a no-good cheap bastard and a waste of spermatozoa.
Bumbling Joey Biden's Attorney General (Garland) talks a big game when he goes off on how he plans to pursue justice for everyone and anyone involved in impeding a political process. Still, I have a hard time believing that he is targeting Trump at the end of the day. We're talking January 6th here, to be precise. Were he to target Trump for his alleged criminal activities related to the January 6th "insurrection," and were he to issue an indictment of Trump, it would be seen for what it is: A political hit job. Biden knows that Trump has his sights on running for the presidency in 2024, and Biden and the Democrats know that Trump would likely return to power were he to run. This is nothing more than an effort by the Democrats to kneecap their political opposition, and that is the stuff you see in banana republics. This is especially rich, were it to come to pass, when you consider the abject corruption of the Democrat party, and more specifically, the Biden Crime family.
My chess game is going pretty well. I can't complain. I get to choose my opponent's rating, which is good because we newbies need all the help we can get. I think I'm starting to get the hang of the game since I'm beating my "computer" opponent more often than not. I'm getting a little instruction here and there on YouTube, but I'm not sure how much of it is sticking. Conceptually, I get it. Remembering the terms and applying what I've learned while playing is another story. I've heard the stories about players who can see several moves ahead, and I suppose that's probably helpful from time to time. That's not where I am, so I'm just putting that out there.
Recently, I've moved up a bit, and I'm now playing higher-rated (computer) opponents. Playing better and more experienced opponents is both more humbling and more instructive. My days of shooting from the hip are over. Getting bitch-slapped time and time again has a way of making you think twice before you make your next move. It's now more about what my opponent is doing and trying to figure that out before I make my move. It's no longer just about winning or losing. It's not about the destination; it's about the journey.
I told Mrs. G that I was playing computer chess when we stopped over to see her last weekend. I know she plays regularly, so I thought she might have something to say about the game, her experiences playing online, anything at all. I half expected her to ask me more about my experiences and what I liked and didn't like about playing chess online, but there was none of that. There was no discussion about ratings, tactics, nothing. I don't know how I feel about playing chess with her, so maybe it was just as well that the discussion, what little there was of it, went nowhere. She has a board in her apartment that sits there collecting dust. Maybe she knows me well enough to know that my fragile ego couldn't tolerate a loss at the hands of a 90-something-year-old, so she didn't bother broaching the subject. She might be correct, but we may never know. That's probably a good thing.
I like to stay up-to-date on the number of cases of Covid here in our community by reading the statistics in our local newspaper. Well, the digital version of that newspaper anyway. It tells me how many active and inactive cases we have, which includes cases going back to the beginning of the pandemic in March of 2020. So, I was a little surprised when I last saw that they are now providing data on how many cases have been reported in the last fourteen days. What the hell is that all about? Why the change in what and how they're reporting what they're reporting? How am I supposed to interpret the data? Why do I even care how many cases we've had in the last fourteen days? It might be meaningful if the number per fourteen days went from ten to one hundred. It would require I look at it daily if I wanted a relative measure of cases. That's not how I roll. Do I now, or have I ever really cared about the number of cases, no matter the measurement? Not really. Fuck it.
Well, goddamn it, are we in a recession or not? We'll know in about 15 minutes as I sit here waiting for the number to be announced at 8:30 am. If the GDP number is negative, that would be two consecutive quarters of negative growth, and that, at least according to some economists, is how they define a "recession." Where we go from here, if it turns out that we see a negative number, is anyone's guess. The financial markets rallied hard yesterday for all the wrong reasons (Fed raised rates 75 basis points), so maybe that continues today. The worst things get, the more likely it is that the Federal Reserve will pivot and reverse course on raising interest rates. Right? Maybe we should take our cues from what the stooges in the White House are trying to sell us. They are trying to redefine what a recession is, so what does that tell you? It tells me that we're going to see a negative number today. BOOM!
Well, wonders never cease. One of the two Apple TVs I thought was dead in the water after a lightning strike this past week seems to be showing signs of life. As far as I know, it wasn't because of anything I did or didn't do. I set the two devices on the arm of our couch the other day and plugged both of them in, and connected the two with an ethernet cord. Not because I thought that that would somehow fix the problem of the flashing indicator lights but rather because I thought that doing something, anything, was better than doing nothing. When I looked at them this morning, I noticed that the flashing light on one of the units had turned into a solid light. Baby steps, babycakes! I'm thinking that the Lord works in mysterious ways. I won't know why the flashing light stopped flashing until I reconnect everything to see what works and what doesn't. Are we talking luck here or maybe a little divine intervention?
Bumbling Joey Biden had a two-hour phone call with XI from China yesterday. Who believes for a minute that Joey Biden is even capable of having a two-hour conversation? It makes you wonder how he pulled it off. Who was behind the scenes filling out the cue cards or typing answers so that Joey could read the responses aloud in real-time? The readout after the session came from the Chinese and not from Joey and his trusty and stealthy staff. His staff didn't want the world to know just how demented and stupid Biden sounded on the world stage. The Chinese said something about fire and fury in response to their "discussion" with Joey about Taiwan and maybe Pelosi's planned visit there in the next month or so. In other words, the Chinese have given their stooge, Joey Biden, his marching orders once again. It's just so embarrassing.
I'm hearing that a few FBI agents have stepped forward and outed others in the FBI who are working overtime to suppress any news and, even worse than that, any investigations into Hunter Biden and the Biden Crime Family. We have a better understanding now of how all the pieces fit together thanks, in large part, to what we learned from the laptop from hell that Hunter Biden left behind at a computer shop. Others have stepped forward to fill in some of the blanks, such as who is the "big guy" in the remuneration agreements, etc. It's quite possibly one of the most nefarious pay-to-play arrangements involving the highest levels of our government in our nation's history. Just how compromised is the Biden family, and more specifically, Joe Biden?
And why on God's green earth, knowing what our Intelligence agencies know about all of these deals between the Bidens and the Chinese Communist Party, are they allowing this man to sit in our beloved Oval Office and at the helm of one of the greatest countries on the face of the planet? They must know that every decision Biden makes relative to China is driven not by our country's best interests but by the interests of the Communist Chinese. That explains why the Chinese bitch slap Bidens people every time they engage with them on the world stage. They have no respect for the man because they know who and what he is. He's a feckless and corrupt government hack with a fifty-year record of doing more harm than good for the country he ostensibly "serves." The Chinese know he's corrupt because they were complicit in his corruption.
I want to be careful not to put our Intelligence agencies on too high a pedestal. They were, after all, complicit with countless others in and out of government in trying to remove Trump from office by perpetrating the Russia hoax during Trump's first term in office. Maybe this is what happens when you give people too much power. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. When Trump returns to office in 2025, he needs to eliminate the toadies and losers in every agency and at every level. My biggest worry is that they will do whatever they need to ensure that Trump can't return to the presidency. That includes putting the man in jail on trumped-up charges or, worse yet, threatening or even harming the man so that he is incapable of returning to the office. What is it about Trump that they find so threatening? Does anyone think for even a moment that the Communist Chinese Party (CCP) had something to do with putting Joey in office? After years of investing in everything Biden, they weren't about to let Trump stand in the way of the Chinese installing their puppet. That explains everything.
We met up with the Ev man yesterday where we had planned to do a little food shopping with him. We arrived late, and he went shopping without us for a change. When we arrived, he was rolling out of the store with his shopping cart and into the parking lot. I half expected that he would pick up a few things and be done. I was surprised to see that he had a good cartload of food. What he buys and doesn't buy is none of my business, but there are healthy choices and there are unhealthy choices. I'm not sure I saw a lot of healthy choices, but that's his business, so I say nothing, and we all move on. The missus was pouring over his purchases as mothers will do, and I don't think he appreciated her second-guessing his decisions. Had we done a better job of showing up when we promised that we would show up, we might have had more input into what he did and didn't, but such was not the case. We were late, and he was done.
I was listening to Mark Levin on the radio last night, and he was talking about how the left was doing everything possible to keep Trump off the ballot in 2024. The 10,000-foot view, and taking Trump out of the equation, says that the democrat party will do whatever it takes to keep any Republican from holding the presidency of our great nation ever again. Just who in the hell do they think they are? I know they have their agenda, and the Republicans have a very different agenda, but I thought that's what elections were for. That boat has sailed. Now, the ends justify the means. I think the Republicans are waking up to this new reality, and maybe not so new reality since we all know that Kennedy stole the presidency back in 63 when they rigged the elections in Chicago, but here we are. Mark mentioned that the legacy of Trump would be that he taught republicans how to fight back. He exposed them for who and what they are, and they hated him for it.
Have you heard about the latest cultural kerfuffle where a Sesame Street character allegedly snubbed two black children in a parade in the city of Philadelphia this past week? The video shows the costumed character walking along the parade's sidelines, giving white children high-fives, then strolling right by a couple of black children without giving them a second look. Within twenty-four hours, the parents of the aggrieved children filed a 25 million dollar lawsuit against the parent company of Sesame Street, and, wait for it, Jesse Jackson, the grifter, came out of his hole and insisted that Sesame Street add more blacks to their boards and provide funds for black businesses as amends for their racist ways. Oh, and he wants the company to submit their employees to racial sensitivity training. Not that anyone is asking, but here's my response: Kiss my ass.
It's nothing more than an Al Sharpton-style shakedown. Grifters like Sharpton and Jackson, once thought to be leaders in the nationwide fight for civil rights before they discovered that there was more money to be made in shaming guilt-ridden corporations out of millions of dollars, pounce like the rabid ambulance chasers that they are at every opportunity that comes along. Woke corporations like Sesame Street will fold like a cheap suit before pushing back against these so-called icons of the left and their Stazi foot soldiers in their pseudo-aggrieved war against discrimination and racism. It's extortion by any other name. They need to be called out for who and what they are. The only way this stops is by someone, anyone, telling these grifters to fuck off. Better yet, I'd like to see a judge throw this case out of court and recommend to the local DA that the accusers be charged with extortion. Even more laughable is the fact that the article I'm reading about this matter refers to Jesse Jackson as a "former presidential candidate." What, fifty years ago? He's a clown show and always has been.
I was explaining to the missus the other day that the stock market is in a bear market and, even though she sees the financial markets doing well this past week, the overall trajectory is downward. Both bull and bear markets are processes and these markets we're seeing are no exception. Patience is required unless you want to end up buying high and selling low time and time again until you run out of money with which to trade. There is nothing wrong with being 100% in cash until we see some kind of capitulation when and where the financial markets become a wasteland and nobody wants in. That is, of course, the best time to get in. Theoretically speaking, of course. There is still far too much speculation in this market for my tastes and, quite honestly, we're not that far off the highs of late 2021 so we still need a bit more air to come out of the tires. All in good time, is what Jack Bogle would say. Wait a minute! Wasn't he a buy-and-hold guy?
Who knew? The Ev man loves peaches. We bought three big ones and we left them on the kitchen table to ripen. He apologized this morning for eating all of our peaches before we even knew they were gone. Don't get me wrong. We love to see the Ev man eating his fruits and his veggies but he eats them so rarely that we're surprised when we see him eating one or the other with any regularity. Maybe it's peaches today and broccoli next week. Hope springs eternal. Right? Anyway, we sent him packing this morning with a lot of things to eat and drink so that should should hold him for a bit. Well, I sent him packing anyway. The missus is still sleeping. She won't be surprised to learn that he's gone when she gets up. That's how that boy rolls. That's how his momma rolls.
It looks like another stellar day here on the seacoast. I'll want to get out on my bike early to beat the crowds and get my exercise in for the day. I do think that the crowds have been less if that's an acceptable way of putting it. Gas is still in the $4-$6 dollar range and that has to be keeping people driving less, driving fewer miles, going to fewer far-away places, and maybe travelling in groups when appropriate. Going to the beach wasn't always a luxury but it seems that it is just that these days when it costs an arm and a leg to get there and back. It wouldn't stop me and the missus if we wanted to lay out our blankets on the edge of a dune somehwere but that's just us. Maybe people just put their gas purchases on a credit card like everything else and the party continues unabated. All I'm saying is that it seems that I'm not fighting the crowds like I have in past years when I go for my bike rides. Riding earlier in the day helps.
Did I mention that we took Mrs G out for a ride yesterday? We hadn't planned to go for a ride and, as a matter of fact, we had planned to play it by ear once we arrived at her residence. If Mrs G wanted to go for a ride then we would happily oblige. She never asks, of course, so we're always looking and listening for the right cues once we're on site. It was such a nice day yesterday and her apartment seemed so, well, stifling, that I asked her directly if she might like to get out of the house for a while. She was smartly dressed when we arrived so that seeemed to suggest that she might be open to getting out and about. We drove to the little farm stand out on route 88 which we've visited previously and it's nice little shop where Mrs G seems to enjoy shopping. They have lots of fruits and vegetables and homemade goods that practically jump in your basket as you walk down the aisle. It's a bit pricey but isn't everything a bit pricey these days?
When we arrived back at her place, she asked if we wouldn't mind circling around to an adjoining property owned by her facility where she hoped to get a better look at where they were planning to build a central health center of sorts. Mrs G has a keen interest in all things real estate so none of that was a surprise to us. I've always wondered if she didn't miss her calling in life knowing what we know about her interest in real estate. We rarely have a conversation these days when she's not bringing up the sale of this or that piece of real estate in the community. Having interests in the twilight of your life is not a bad thing. If it helps you to keep putting one foot in front of the other when you get out of bed every morning then you should thank the Baby Jesus for bestowing you with said gifts.
This and That
24/07/22 07:00
I got an e-mail from Mrs. G yesterday. She thanked me for the Moe's sub we dropped off the other day when we visited. Moe's makes a mean Italian sub on a nice fresh roll with a dressing that's hard not to like. It's not for the health-conscious folks who want to avoid sandwich meats and white bread that spikes your blood sugars but, hey; you only live once. I had a hankering that Mrs. G might like one of their subs, and I love to surprise her, so we picked up a half sub while stopping for gas. If I'm not mistaken, she and Mr. G used to stop by Moe's with some regularity back in the day. Who doesn't like going down memory lane from time to time?
We received our property reassessments the other day from our town. Valuations have gone up, and that comes as no surprise. My initial reaction was that there would be a tax increase commensurate with the increase in our property value. As I'm reading a bit more about this process, I understand that there is usually a proportionate decrease in the tax rate. Everything else being equal, the reassessment shouldn't result in a tax increase. I think these reassessments are done every ten years, but I'll be damned if I can remember what happened ten years ago with the last assessment. I'll have to look that up.
I compared our assessment to other property reassessments hereabouts and found that some seem out of whack compared to ours. In other words, their property valuations didn't even come close to market value, according to what I could determine using the Zillow.com site. That means the tax burden is being allocated disproportionately amongst properties in town, and that's what I mean by "out of whack." Do people drop a dime on their neighbors when this happens? Does it make for a less pleasant gathering on the usual neighborhood get-togethers? Do we have assessors doing the bidding of property owners rather than looking out for the welfare of the town they serve? Is it safe to say that I smell a rat?
I'm full of ideas this morning. I suggested to my neighbor that, should she have to sell her property due to her reassessment, she marry her friend and double her deduction in order to reduce her capital gain for tax purposes. I'm not even sure how that would work, but why not. Is there something in the tax code that says you must be married for a specific time before filing as a married couple (joint return)? Desperate times call for desperate measures. Right? I'm no CPA, but I did sleep at a Holiday Inn last night, so there's that. Besides, what are friends for if you can't give them a little tax advice here and there? I need an extra cup of coffee.
The missus gave me a haircut the other day, and I'm not sure it was one of her better cuts. I'm to the point with haircuts where I couldn't care less about what it looks like as long as it's shorter. I can always throw a cap on if worse comes to worst. If I could figure out how to cut the hair on the back of my head, I'd be cutting my hair, and that would be that. Maybe I should do everything I can, and then, for the parts I can't get to, I can have the missus weigh in with her clippers. I don't think she cares what my hair looks like, but she probably agrees with me when I say that shorter is better. The good news is, at least when it comes to haircuts, that the darn stuff grows back, so it doesn't make any sense to be losing sleep, much less a marriage, over a bad haircut.
Now that it looks like Elon won't be buying Twitter, I'll need to keep my snarky tweets to myself if I want to keep Twitter as my newsfeed. That's easier said than done. You know how I like to call a spade a spade. I'm guessing that Twitter monitors will look for people like me as we get closer to the November election. They'll be looking to suppress or shut down opposing views of their leftist candidates when posted, which might put me in their crosshairs. I can always sign up again as someone else, and it won't be the first time I've had to do that to stay on the platform. Call me the king of workarounds.
I was listening to a few political shows this past weekend, and I heard a caller or two, presumably all republicans, calling in to complain about specific republican senatorial candidates not fighting back against ads placed by their opponents in states like Ohio, Georgia, and other places. Knowing the Republican candidates as I do, and we're talking about Herschel Walker, JD Vance, and maybe Dr. Oz here, it struck me as a little weird that they wouldn't be fighting back. I mean, these guys are fighters.
They are all Trump-endorsed and well positioned after winning their primaries to go full bore into the races in their respective states. Do you suppose these callers were callers from the other side of the aisle looking to create mischief? Maybe they are looking to create the misperception that these candidates are unwilling to fight for themselves. If they aren't willing to fight for themselves, why should I bother going to the polls for them? I suppose anything is possible.
I was telling the missus last night that I've noticed that it's almost dark outside when I get out of bed in the morning these days. We're just a month out from the longest day of the year, and here we are. I used to think that I woke up at the crack of dawn every day based on the amount of daylight in the bedroom, but now that I think of it, it probably has more to do with the time than it does with the amount of sunlight available. If I'm not out of bed by a specific time, then I won't have the time to do everything I have planned to do on any given morning. If I don't do what I like to do, what I enjoy doing, then that makes for a miserable Johnny. The longer I stay in bed, the greater the chance I'll be distracted by this, that, or the other thing when I get up. I'm getting better at working through the distractions, so I feel good about that.
The missus and I stopped into a local supermarket (Not Whole Foods) last night to pick up a few things. It's one of the better supermarkets in the area, so just putting that out there. The store's produce section was about as depleted as I've seen. Both the fruit and vegetable sections looked as though they had either not been restocked recently or, maybe less likely had been bought up somehow. It can't have anything to do with this so-called global famine we've heard about. Right? It was shocking. We didn't see any similar shortages in other store sections, so it didn't warrant much more conversation. It might have been something as simple as the night shift not showing up. You know how hard it is to find good help these days.
I keep hearing and seeing stories about Trump and questions about when he might announce his candidacy for the 2024 Presidential campaign. I think the stories are designed to ramp up speculation to the point that even though Trump is not on the ballot in November, the democrat party will want you to believe that he is. If they can put Trump on the ballot in November, they think it might incentivize their voters to get out there and vote blue (Democrat) until it hurts. Nothing triggers a liberal more than Trump, and that's just a fact. I can't tease out all the variables when it comes to Trump deciding to announce before or after the midterms, but the libs are convinced that if they can put him on the ballot, then that's a good thing. I think that they are even pushing out fake polls showing Trump losing to DeSantis just to get Trump to jump in before the midterms. They are a despicable bunch. Will fake polls get the job done?
Speaking of elections, the State of Maryland held its primary yesterday. One of the republican candidates won with the help of an endorsement from Trump. I'm also reading reports that any number of Democrats voted for Trump's pick as well since they considered Trump's pick to be least likely to win in the general election. In other words, Democrats flocked to the polls to vote, not for their candidate but for the person from the opposing party they thought would be the least likely to beat their candidate in the general election. What the hell kind of Tomfoolery is that? Is that not the classic definition of a rigged election? Here's hoping that this strategy of theirs delivers Trump's pick for the win in November. Fuck them and the trojan horse that they rode in on.
The Republican voters in Wyoming may see a similar strategy employed by the Democrats when they hold their primary a month or two from now. The problem for the Wyoming Democrats is that they aren't enough to make a difference. You can put the lot of them on the head of a pin in the state of Wyoming, and you'd still have a hard time finding anyone to admit to being a democrat. Sorry, I'm running short on metaphors this morning. That's good news for Liz Cheney's Republican opponent in Wyoming's upcoming primary. It also ensures that Wyoming will send another Republican to the House of Representatives in January 2023. Anyone but the never-Trumper, Liz Cheney.
I have to laugh. Every time I read this or that story in the news about Covid, the story seems to take on a different twist. The latest is that this newest variant makes it more likely than not that the more injections you've had, the more likely it is that you'll come down with the virus. What kind of twisted logic is that? Show me the data. Please show me the study that supports that theory. The truth is, the more shots you've had, the less protection you have against the virus. It has nothing to do with the latest "variant."
To put it another way, they developed these vaccines not to protect you from the virus and not to stop you from transmitting the virus, but rather to weaken your immune system to the point where you'll need annual, if not bi-annual, injections from the same company's that developed the vaccine in the first place. And in perpetuity, I would hasten to add. Does anyone want to talk about all the footballers who have keeled over on the field of play?
I read this morning that just 16 percent of the people hospitalized with Covid in my state were unvaccinated. Twenty-nine percent were "unknown." What does that tell you? It means that the virus is not much of a threat to people who have not been vaccinated. It tells me that someone is lying about the twenty-nine percent. You know they know their vaccination status. They don't want to tell you because it would prove my point that most people who end up in the hospital are vaccinated and, more likely than not, have received every booster offered ad infinitum. That's a lot of bullshit serum running roughshod through your veins. The missus and I got the first round, which was one and done for us. Why would we want more shots if it increases the likelihood of getting sick or, worse yet, dying? Fuck Fauci and fuck Big Pharma.
I bought a new air pump yesterday. I've had this old mini-compressor kind of thing that I purchased at a local tire store ages ago, which takes forever to inflate my bike tires. It's one of those frogs in the boiling water kind of things. It probably worked well once upon a time, but over time, it has worked less well. I finally got to the point in the last week or so where I said to myself, Johnny Boy, it's time to find another something to inflate your tires. I saw a nice little air compressor for $39 in Home Depot, which I figured had to be the bee's knees after using what I've been using for the past ten years. I may have had this old thing for the past twenty years. Anyway, what took me twenty minutes to do previously, and that's no word of a lie, I now do in ten seconds or less. I was so impressed that I dragged the missus out to the garage for a demonstration. I told her not to blink, or she might miss the magic. Well, in so many words anyway.
I finally got around to setting up our new microwave. I used it for the first time and discovered that it's a little challenging to see the inside of the microwave through the tinted glass door when it's running. What is that all about? I'm so accustomed to watching things go round and round when they cook in the microwave that I'm a little lost when I can't see what's happening behind the glass. Is it boiling over? Is it doing what it's supposed to be doing? Making matters worse is that I can see through the tinted glass but not without a supreme effort on my part. Who in their right mind thought that this design was a good one? Maybe I left a filament on the device that I should have taken off when I removed it from the box. It's quieter than our last microwave, so that's good. The missus doesn't like the digital clock. She says, "it's too bright." I agree with her. I like Samsung products, but the design team fucked this one up good.
These are design flaws that you would never know about until after you purchased the item. I suppose I could have read something about it in a write-up or some consumer magazine that covers these things, but who has the time to do all of that before deciding to purchase the appliance? The less you pay for something, the more likely it is that you'll never bother doing any research. That's just a fact. These appliances are so cheap that they are essentially disposable if you think about it. These are also the kinds of things that a typical homeowner rarely replaces. When was the last time that your microwave broke down? It just never happens. Time will tell whether or not I decide I can live with this appliance that doesn't do everything I want it to do, so stay tuned. Life is too short, or so they say.
I don't know what to make of this story about the Secret Service losing texts from the period in and around the so-called "insurrection" on January 6th. I don't know if that's a good thing for Trump. I do know that the January 6th committee is not happy about not having access to the texts. I should probably conclude from the committee's unhappiness that this might be good for Trump. Does anyone believe they couldn't produce the texts if push came to shove? If what they're saying about the missing texts is true, it appears that Trump may well benefit from the Secret Service's so-called incompetence. It's also possible that the Secret Service is covering up their involvement since having a hand in the creation of or furthering of said insurrection would make them complicit. They've denied any involvement thus far, so any evidence to the contrary cannot possibly see the light of day if they are to remain unindicted co-conspirators or, worse yet, the one party solely responsible for orchestrating the entire affair. Is any of this plausible?
I told the missus to get cracking and do today's Wordle. I did it this morning, and I got it in three words. I got three out of five letters in my first two words, none of which were in their proper location. The missus asked me to tell her how many tries it took me before I guessed correctly, but I refused to answer her question. I think it puts an excessive amount of pressure on the missus to get the answer in the same number of tries it took me to get the answer, and it increases the likelihood that she'll give up if she fails to get it in the same number of tries. Does any of this make any sense? Is there a better way to explain it? I have to tell you, though, that the word I ended up getting (APHID) is one of those words you'd likely not expect to see with this game. It's one of those words that one might well ask themselves, is APHID a word?
Newsflash: Biden has Covid! Wait one fucking minute. Isn't this the same ass hat who told us not that long ago that if you were vaccinated, you wouldn't get the virus? Isn't this the same ass hat who sat down in the West Room of the White House and televised his getting one or more boosters as an example of what good Americans are supposed to do in the middle of a pandemic? I thought they said that keeping up to date on your boosters would protect you from the virus? Now that we see it never helped demented Joe, I think the message is clear: The vaccine doesn't work. It doesn't stop you from getting the virus, and it sure as shit doesn't prevent you from transmitting it. But we all knew that, didn't we? But, make no mistake about it. The Harris toadies in the White House are circling the wagons and measuring the drapes in the Oval Office. Word has it she is even interviewing prospective Vice Presidents. All in plain sight, I might add. Meanwhile, Joey enjoys his daily serving of oatmeal, Melba Toast, and pulp-free orange juice in his private quarters.
The January 6th Committee held another televised hearing last night, which I did not watch. The Committee focused on the 187 minutes during which the "insurrection" was underway and what was known about Trump's activities during those fateful hours. Here's my take: What Trump was doing or not doing is none of their fucking business. Who the fuck do they think they are asking what our Commander-in-Chief was doing in the privacy of his quarters at the White House? We already know that Trump had approved any number of whatever to be available that day to provide protection should there be any threats against the institutions in and around the Capitol. We also know that Trump's offer to protect personnel and property was either ignored or simply not put into place as it should have been. In other words, if he were planning a coup, he wouldn't have approved the placement of troops in and around the Capitol. Case closed mother fuckers.
There's this whole other thing going on with this Committee where they seem more interested in having people get on the stand to rant about their first, second, and third-hand stories about the character flaws of one Donald J. Trump. I think the Committee knows that even if they send a criminal referral to the Justice Department, nothing will come of it because they've not made their case. That being the case, their goal now is to reach out to every last person who may be open to either turning against the man they once supported for President or, conversely, get those individuals who already hate Trump out to the polls in 2024 to make sure that he never wins another term as president. CNN and other leftist media outlets were quite successful during Trump's time in office in spinning similar falsehoods and slanderous exaggerations about the man they and their liberal lackeys once revered back in the day before he came down the escalator with Melania in 2015 when he contributed generously to Democrat candidates and causes.
Maybe it will work for the Committee, and perhaps it won't. How insidious is that? It is a travesty of justice that this "Committee" is allowed to do what they're doing. Most people see this kangaroo court for what it is; A sham of a "court." And then there are the talking heads on radio and television which provides an echo chamber for the Committee's dastardly deeds to ensure that it all gets amplified and spilled out into the ether for the public's consumption. To a talking head, they are incredulous that our country's Attorney General hasn't issued an indictment, and they are putting him on notice that, until he issues that indictment, the cacophony of criticism will not stop. They will bring the appropriate pressure to bear. That's how it works. Please pay attention to the words they are starting to use to denigrate Trump further. One turd-in-the-fishbowl I was listening to the other day referred to Trump as "unfit" to be president. What the hell does that even mean?
I think I ate one too many chocolate chip cookies. Why do I do that to myself? I should know better than to buy the damn things. If I don't have them in the house, I won't be tempted to eat them. In theory, that's the way it's supposed to work. In other news today, Steve Bannon, Trump's campaign manager in 2016, was found guilty in a courtroom in Washington DC of two counts of ignoring a subpoena from the January 6th Committee. Not sure what it means or where it goes, but it's a damn tragedy if he had some sort of presidential privilege and the judge on the case did not allow him to use it as a defense. Bannon is the original honey badger for protecting our country and Constitution from the leftists who would sell us down the river to China or others before allowing Trump to get back into the White House. His daily "War Room" show is a must-see for every red-blooded God-fearing American. He brings the "receipts" five days a week.
Bannon's attorneys are expected to file an appeal that may take the proceedings into the next Congress when the conservatives will likely return to power. Once in power, they will likely deem the January 6th Committee an invalid exercise in political mischief. As such, no criminal statutes apply to people who choose not to appear before said committee. My concern is that he will be jailed in the interim, although there may not be a legal precedent for doing so. I know the leftists are soiling their trousers thinking about Steve being in jail and all that entails, but their wet dreams may be put on hold if the Trump-appointed judge decides in Bannon's favor. I don't know that Steve is a flight risk, so there's that. As far as I'm concerned, the sooner he returns to his rightful place in the War Room for his usual show, which plays six days a week, the better.
I couldn't stay awake for Trump's rally last night in the great state of Arizona. I'm sorry I missed it. Arizona looks like one of those states where we can pick up a MAGA (Make America Great Again) gubernatorial candidate in November (Kari Lake) along with a senatorial seat if the feisty and brilliant 35-year-old Blake Masters wins both his primary and the general election in November. Ms. Lake is promising a lot, so I hope she comes through for her constituents if elected. Arizona has a republican governor already, but he's a RINO (Republican in name only.) She has promised to blow up the drug tunnels linking Mexico and Arizona, and she says that she doesn't care if she takes out a couple of narco-terrorists in the process. Oh, and she's going to finish building the wall. Yeah, that wall. The one Trump tried to build when he was president. The wall the democrats wanted to stop him from building every step of the way. Now we know why. Flooding the Americas with illegal and criminal immigrants is job number one. So that you know, they're not sending their best.
I called Mrs. G out of the blue from aisle number five yesterday while shopping in our local supermarket with the missus. "Do you have anything on your list for me, Mrs. G?" I asked. I think she was tickled that I was checking in, and she collected her thoughts for a minute or two before giving me a few things to purchase for her. She loves scala bread, so I wasn't surprised to hear she wanted a couple loaves of scala bread. I had already put a quart of orange juice for her in my basket. I reminded her that I would buy the kind of orange juice that her doctor suggested she drink. You know, the stuff with the extra calcium. I still don't have a good sense of her tolerance for pulp, so I usually try to get a middle-of-the-road variety just to be safe. We've gone back and forth on the potato chips she prefers in the not-too-distant past, so, despite not hearing a request for the same, I threw a big bag of Lays potato chips in the cart. She doesn't care much for the kettle chips, and she doesn't like the chips with ridges—still, no sight of the missus.
Lee Zeldin, the Republican gubernatorial candidate for the state of New York, was holding a rally the other day somewhere in the state when he was attacked by a man wielding a knife. That was the headline in so many words. Mr. Zeldin wasn't hurt, and his assailant was quickly wrestled to the ground and held until the police arrived. It turns out that the current governor of the state (Governor Hochul), Zeldin's opponent, had published a list of public events where her followers could find Mr. Zeldin should they be so disposed. Some of the wording in the publication was reportedly incendiary. I think Zeldin was referred to as an "enemy," and some language may have suggested that Zeldin was "dangerous." Is this the state of our politics these days in our country? Hochul publicly condemned the actions of the assailant but, make no mistake about it, from her perspective, this guy had one job, and he failed miserably.
I finally caught up with some video taken of the attack, and, as attacks go, it was about as lame as I've seen. It appeared as though the assailant, the alleged assailant, I should say, walked up to the candidate on the stage and, if I didn't know better, it looked like he was there to shake hands or maybe even hug candidate Zeldin. I mentioned that the assailant had a knife, but it looked more like one of those palm-held letter openers one uses when processing bulk mail. I've never actually seen anything like it, but it didn't look like much of anything, much less something you would use to harm someone. What he planned to do with the "knife" is still unclear. There wasn't a visible blade the likes of which you might use to penetrate an object, so "stabbing" someone with it would be a stretch. I'm not sure where I'm going with all of this other than to say it was just weird—contrived, most certainly, but by whom?
The Ev man is doing well. He drops me a message now and then, usually in the early morning, asking me to send him a few clams so he can pick up breakfast at the local Shell station. The missus and I dropped off a nice meatball sub for him yesterday afternoon on our way to visit Mrs. G. He's partial to sub sandwiches from Moe's, so that's where we go. I find their meatballs to be smaller than the average meatball, and I prefer a larger meatball. That's just me. He stops by the house at least once a week to chat with the missus and me. He has been texting us quite a bit, or at least more than usual, I would say, and I'm beginning to wonder if he doesn't have too much free time on his hands. Too much of anything can be irritating. Know what I mean? I'm talking about his texts here. The good news with texts is that you can ignore them if they are seemingly insignificant. Sometimes, you're just not in the mood to shoot the shit. That doesn't make you a bad dad. Does it?
We received our property reassessments the other day from our town. Valuations have gone up, and that comes as no surprise. My initial reaction was that there would be a tax increase commensurate with the increase in our property value. As I'm reading a bit more about this process, I understand that there is usually a proportionate decrease in the tax rate. Everything else being equal, the reassessment shouldn't result in a tax increase. I think these reassessments are done every ten years, but I'll be damned if I can remember what happened ten years ago with the last assessment. I'll have to look that up.
I compared our assessment to other property reassessments hereabouts and found that some seem out of whack compared to ours. In other words, their property valuations didn't even come close to market value, according to what I could determine using the Zillow.com site. That means the tax burden is being allocated disproportionately amongst properties in town, and that's what I mean by "out of whack." Do people drop a dime on their neighbors when this happens? Does it make for a less pleasant gathering on the usual neighborhood get-togethers? Do we have assessors doing the bidding of property owners rather than looking out for the welfare of the town they serve? Is it safe to say that I smell a rat?
I'm full of ideas this morning. I suggested to my neighbor that, should she have to sell her property due to her reassessment, she marry her friend and double her deduction in order to reduce her capital gain for tax purposes. I'm not even sure how that would work, but why not. Is there something in the tax code that says you must be married for a specific time before filing as a married couple (joint return)? Desperate times call for desperate measures. Right? I'm no CPA, but I did sleep at a Holiday Inn last night, so there's that. Besides, what are friends for if you can't give them a little tax advice here and there? I need an extra cup of coffee.
The missus gave me a haircut the other day, and I'm not sure it was one of her better cuts. I'm to the point with haircuts where I couldn't care less about what it looks like as long as it's shorter. I can always throw a cap on if worse comes to worst. If I could figure out how to cut the hair on the back of my head, I'd be cutting my hair, and that would be that. Maybe I should do everything I can, and then, for the parts I can't get to, I can have the missus weigh in with her clippers. I don't think she cares what my hair looks like, but she probably agrees with me when I say that shorter is better. The good news is, at least when it comes to haircuts, that the darn stuff grows back, so it doesn't make any sense to be losing sleep, much less a marriage, over a bad haircut.
Now that it looks like Elon won't be buying Twitter, I'll need to keep my snarky tweets to myself if I want to keep Twitter as my newsfeed. That's easier said than done. You know how I like to call a spade a spade. I'm guessing that Twitter monitors will look for people like me as we get closer to the November election. They'll be looking to suppress or shut down opposing views of their leftist candidates when posted, which might put me in their crosshairs. I can always sign up again as someone else, and it won't be the first time I've had to do that to stay on the platform. Call me the king of workarounds.
I was listening to a few political shows this past weekend, and I heard a caller or two, presumably all republicans, calling in to complain about specific republican senatorial candidates not fighting back against ads placed by their opponents in states like Ohio, Georgia, and other places. Knowing the Republican candidates as I do, and we're talking about Herschel Walker, JD Vance, and maybe Dr. Oz here, it struck me as a little weird that they wouldn't be fighting back. I mean, these guys are fighters.
They are all Trump-endorsed and well positioned after winning their primaries to go full bore into the races in their respective states. Do you suppose these callers were callers from the other side of the aisle looking to create mischief? Maybe they are looking to create the misperception that these candidates are unwilling to fight for themselves. If they aren't willing to fight for themselves, why should I bother going to the polls for them? I suppose anything is possible.
I was telling the missus last night that I've noticed that it's almost dark outside when I get out of bed in the morning these days. We're just a month out from the longest day of the year, and here we are. I used to think that I woke up at the crack of dawn every day based on the amount of daylight in the bedroom, but now that I think of it, it probably has more to do with the time than it does with the amount of sunlight available. If I'm not out of bed by a specific time, then I won't have the time to do everything I have planned to do on any given morning. If I don't do what I like to do, what I enjoy doing, then that makes for a miserable Johnny. The longer I stay in bed, the greater the chance I'll be distracted by this, that, or the other thing when I get up. I'm getting better at working through the distractions, so I feel good about that.
The missus and I stopped into a local supermarket (Not Whole Foods) last night to pick up a few things. It's one of the better supermarkets in the area, so just putting that out there. The store's produce section was about as depleted as I've seen. Both the fruit and vegetable sections looked as though they had either not been restocked recently or, maybe less likely had been bought up somehow. It can't have anything to do with this so-called global famine we've heard about. Right? It was shocking. We didn't see any similar shortages in other store sections, so it didn't warrant much more conversation. It might have been something as simple as the night shift not showing up. You know how hard it is to find good help these days.
I keep hearing and seeing stories about Trump and questions about when he might announce his candidacy for the 2024 Presidential campaign. I think the stories are designed to ramp up speculation to the point that even though Trump is not on the ballot in November, the democrat party will want you to believe that he is. If they can put Trump on the ballot in November, they think it might incentivize their voters to get out there and vote blue (Democrat) until it hurts. Nothing triggers a liberal more than Trump, and that's just a fact. I can't tease out all the variables when it comes to Trump deciding to announce before or after the midterms, but the libs are convinced that if they can put him on the ballot, then that's a good thing. I think that they are even pushing out fake polls showing Trump losing to DeSantis just to get Trump to jump in before the midterms. They are a despicable bunch. Will fake polls get the job done?
Speaking of elections, the State of Maryland held its primary yesterday. One of the republican candidates won with the help of an endorsement from Trump. I'm also reading reports that any number of Democrats voted for Trump's pick as well since they considered Trump's pick to be least likely to win in the general election. In other words, Democrats flocked to the polls to vote, not for their candidate but for the person from the opposing party they thought would be the least likely to beat their candidate in the general election. What the hell kind of Tomfoolery is that? Is that not the classic definition of a rigged election? Here's hoping that this strategy of theirs delivers Trump's pick for the win in November. Fuck them and the trojan horse that they rode in on.
The Republican voters in Wyoming may see a similar strategy employed by the Democrats when they hold their primary a month or two from now. The problem for the Wyoming Democrats is that they aren't enough to make a difference. You can put the lot of them on the head of a pin in the state of Wyoming, and you'd still have a hard time finding anyone to admit to being a democrat. Sorry, I'm running short on metaphors this morning. That's good news for Liz Cheney's Republican opponent in Wyoming's upcoming primary. It also ensures that Wyoming will send another Republican to the House of Representatives in January 2023. Anyone but the never-Trumper, Liz Cheney.
I have to laugh. Every time I read this or that story in the news about Covid, the story seems to take on a different twist. The latest is that this newest variant makes it more likely than not that the more injections you've had, the more likely it is that you'll come down with the virus. What kind of twisted logic is that? Show me the data. Please show me the study that supports that theory. The truth is, the more shots you've had, the less protection you have against the virus. It has nothing to do with the latest "variant."
To put it another way, they developed these vaccines not to protect you from the virus and not to stop you from transmitting the virus, but rather to weaken your immune system to the point where you'll need annual, if not bi-annual, injections from the same company's that developed the vaccine in the first place. And in perpetuity, I would hasten to add. Does anyone want to talk about all the footballers who have keeled over on the field of play?
I read this morning that just 16 percent of the people hospitalized with Covid in my state were unvaccinated. Twenty-nine percent were "unknown." What does that tell you? It means that the virus is not much of a threat to people who have not been vaccinated. It tells me that someone is lying about the twenty-nine percent. You know they know their vaccination status. They don't want to tell you because it would prove my point that most people who end up in the hospital are vaccinated and, more likely than not, have received every booster offered ad infinitum. That's a lot of bullshit serum running roughshod through your veins. The missus and I got the first round, which was one and done for us. Why would we want more shots if it increases the likelihood of getting sick or, worse yet, dying? Fuck Fauci and fuck Big Pharma.
I bought a new air pump yesterday. I've had this old mini-compressor kind of thing that I purchased at a local tire store ages ago, which takes forever to inflate my bike tires. It's one of those frogs in the boiling water kind of things. It probably worked well once upon a time, but over time, it has worked less well. I finally got to the point in the last week or so where I said to myself, Johnny Boy, it's time to find another something to inflate your tires. I saw a nice little air compressor for $39 in Home Depot, which I figured had to be the bee's knees after using what I've been using for the past ten years. I may have had this old thing for the past twenty years. Anyway, what took me twenty minutes to do previously, and that's no word of a lie, I now do in ten seconds or less. I was so impressed that I dragged the missus out to the garage for a demonstration. I told her not to blink, or she might miss the magic. Well, in so many words anyway.
I finally got around to setting up our new microwave. I used it for the first time and discovered that it's a little challenging to see the inside of the microwave through the tinted glass door when it's running. What is that all about? I'm so accustomed to watching things go round and round when they cook in the microwave that I'm a little lost when I can't see what's happening behind the glass. Is it boiling over? Is it doing what it's supposed to be doing? Making matters worse is that I can see through the tinted glass but not without a supreme effort on my part. Who in their right mind thought that this design was a good one? Maybe I left a filament on the device that I should have taken off when I removed it from the box. It's quieter than our last microwave, so that's good. The missus doesn't like the digital clock. She says, "it's too bright." I agree with her. I like Samsung products, but the design team fucked this one up good.
These are design flaws that you would never know about until after you purchased the item. I suppose I could have read something about it in a write-up or some consumer magazine that covers these things, but who has the time to do all of that before deciding to purchase the appliance? The less you pay for something, the more likely it is that you'll never bother doing any research. That's just a fact. These appliances are so cheap that they are essentially disposable if you think about it. These are also the kinds of things that a typical homeowner rarely replaces. When was the last time that your microwave broke down? It just never happens. Time will tell whether or not I decide I can live with this appliance that doesn't do everything I want it to do, so stay tuned. Life is too short, or so they say.
I don't know what to make of this story about the Secret Service losing texts from the period in and around the so-called "insurrection" on January 6th. I don't know if that's a good thing for Trump. I do know that the January 6th committee is not happy about not having access to the texts. I should probably conclude from the committee's unhappiness that this might be good for Trump. Does anyone believe they couldn't produce the texts if push came to shove? If what they're saying about the missing texts is true, it appears that Trump may well benefit from the Secret Service's so-called incompetence. It's also possible that the Secret Service is covering up their involvement since having a hand in the creation of or furthering of said insurrection would make them complicit. They've denied any involvement thus far, so any evidence to the contrary cannot possibly see the light of day if they are to remain unindicted co-conspirators or, worse yet, the one party solely responsible for orchestrating the entire affair. Is any of this plausible?
I told the missus to get cracking and do today's Wordle. I did it this morning, and I got it in three words. I got three out of five letters in my first two words, none of which were in their proper location. The missus asked me to tell her how many tries it took me before I guessed correctly, but I refused to answer her question. I think it puts an excessive amount of pressure on the missus to get the answer in the same number of tries it took me to get the answer, and it increases the likelihood that she'll give up if she fails to get it in the same number of tries. Does any of this make any sense? Is there a better way to explain it? I have to tell you, though, that the word I ended up getting (APHID) is one of those words you'd likely not expect to see with this game. It's one of those words that one might well ask themselves, is APHID a word?
Newsflash: Biden has Covid! Wait one fucking minute. Isn't this the same ass hat who told us not that long ago that if you were vaccinated, you wouldn't get the virus? Isn't this the same ass hat who sat down in the West Room of the White House and televised his getting one or more boosters as an example of what good Americans are supposed to do in the middle of a pandemic? I thought they said that keeping up to date on your boosters would protect you from the virus? Now that we see it never helped demented Joe, I think the message is clear: The vaccine doesn't work. It doesn't stop you from getting the virus, and it sure as shit doesn't prevent you from transmitting it. But we all knew that, didn't we? But, make no mistake about it. The Harris toadies in the White House are circling the wagons and measuring the drapes in the Oval Office. Word has it she is even interviewing prospective Vice Presidents. All in plain sight, I might add. Meanwhile, Joey enjoys his daily serving of oatmeal, Melba Toast, and pulp-free orange juice in his private quarters.
The January 6th Committee held another televised hearing last night, which I did not watch. The Committee focused on the 187 minutes during which the "insurrection" was underway and what was known about Trump's activities during those fateful hours. Here's my take: What Trump was doing or not doing is none of their fucking business. Who the fuck do they think they are asking what our Commander-in-Chief was doing in the privacy of his quarters at the White House? We already know that Trump had approved any number of whatever to be available that day to provide protection should there be any threats against the institutions in and around the Capitol. We also know that Trump's offer to protect personnel and property was either ignored or simply not put into place as it should have been. In other words, if he were planning a coup, he wouldn't have approved the placement of troops in and around the Capitol. Case closed mother fuckers.
There's this whole other thing going on with this Committee where they seem more interested in having people get on the stand to rant about their first, second, and third-hand stories about the character flaws of one Donald J. Trump. I think the Committee knows that even if they send a criminal referral to the Justice Department, nothing will come of it because they've not made their case. That being the case, their goal now is to reach out to every last person who may be open to either turning against the man they once supported for President or, conversely, get those individuals who already hate Trump out to the polls in 2024 to make sure that he never wins another term as president. CNN and other leftist media outlets were quite successful during Trump's time in office in spinning similar falsehoods and slanderous exaggerations about the man they and their liberal lackeys once revered back in the day before he came down the escalator with Melania in 2015 when he contributed generously to Democrat candidates and causes.
Maybe it will work for the Committee, and perhaps it won't. How insidious is that? It is a travesty of justice that this "Committee" is allowed to do what they're doing. Most people see this kangaroo court for what it is; A sham of a "court." And then there are the talking heads on radio and television which provides an echo chamber for the Committee's dastardly deeds to ensure that it all gets amplified and spilled out into the ether for the public's consumption. To a talking head, they are incredulous that our country's Attorney General hasn't issued an indictment, and they are putting him on notice that, until he issues that indictment, the cacophony of criticism will not stop. They will bring the appropriate pressure to bear. That's how it works. Please pay attention to the words they are starting to use to denigrate Trump further. One turd-in-the-fishbowl I was listening to the other day referred to Trump as "unfit" to be president. What the hell does that even mean?
I think I ate one too many chocolate chip cookies. Why do I do that to myself? I should know better than to buy the damn things. If I don't have them in the house, I won't be tempted to eat them. In theory, that's the way it's supposed to work. In other news today, Steve Bannon, Trump's campaign manager in 2016, was found guilty in a courtroom in Washington DC of two counts of ignoring a subpoena from the January 6th Committee. Not sure what it means or where it goes, but it's a damn tragedy if he had some sort of presidential privilege and the judge on the case did not allow him to use it as a defense. Bannon is the original honey badger for protecting our country and Constitution from the leftists who would sell us down the river to China or others before allowing Trump to get back into the White House. His daily "War Room" show is a must-see for every red-blooded God-fearing American. He brings the "receipts" five days a week.
Bannon's attorneys are expected to file an appeal that may take the proceedings into the next Congress when the conservatives will likely return to power. Once in power, they will likely deem the January 6th Committee an invalid exercise in political mischief. As such, no criminal statutes apply to people who choose not to appear before said committee. My concern is that he will be jailed in the interim, although there may not be a legal precedent for doing so. I know the leftists are soiling their trousers thinking about Steve being in jail and all that entails, but their wet dreams may be put on hold if the Trump-appointed judge decides in Bannon's favor. I don't know that Steve is a flight risk, so there's that. As far as I'm concerned, the sooner he returns to his rightful place in the War Room for his usual show, which plays six days a week, the better.
I couldn't stay awake for Trump's rally last night in the great state of Arizona. I'm sorry I missed it. Arizona looks like one of those states where we can pick up a MAGA (Make America Great Again) gubernatorial candidate in November (Kari Lake) along with a senatorial seat if the feisty and brilliant 35-year-old Blake Masters wins both his primary and the general election in November. Ms. Lake is promising a lot, so I hope she comes through for her constituents if elected. Arizona has a republican governor already, but he's a RINO (Republican in name only.) She has promised to blow up the drug tunnels linking Mexico and Arizona, and she says that she doesn't care if she takes out a couple of narco-terrorists in the process. Oh, and she's going to finish building the wall. Yeah, that wall. The one Trump tried to build when he was president. The wall the democrats wanted to stop him from building every step of the way. Now we know why. Flooding the Americas with illegal and criminal immigrants is job number one. So that you know, they're not sending their best.
I called Mrs. G out of the blue from aisle number five yesterday while shopping in our local supermarket with the missus. "Do you have anything on your list for me, Mrs. G?" I asked. I think she was tickled that I was checking in, and she collected her thoughts for a minute or two before giving me a few things to purchase for her. She loves scala bread, so I wasn't surprised to hear she wanted a couple loaves of scala bread. I had already put a quart of orange juice for her in my basket. I reminded her that I would buy the kind of orange juice that her doctor suggested she drink. You know, the stuff with the extra calcium. I still don't have a good sense of her tolerance for pulp, so I usually try to get a middle-of-the-road variety just to be safe. We've gone back and forth on the potato chips she prefers in the not-too-distant past, so, despite not hearing a request for the same, I threw a big bag of Lays potato chips in the cart. She doesn't care much for the kettle chips, and she doesn't like the chips with ridges—still, no sight of the missus.
Lee Zeldin, the Republican gubernatorial candidate for the state of New York, was holding a rally the other day somewhere in the state when he was attacked by a man wielding a knife. That was the headline in so many words. Mr. Zeldin wasn't hurt, and his assailant was quickly wrestled to the ground and held until the police arrived. It turns out that the current governor of the state (Governor Hochul), Zeldin's opponent, had published a list of public events where her followers could find Mr. Zeldin should they be so disposed. Some of the wording in the publication was reportedly incendiary. I think Zeldin was referred to as an "enemy," and some language may have suggested that Zeldin was "dangerous." Is this the state of our politics these days in our country? Hochul publicly condemned the actions of the assailant but, make no mistake about it, from her perspective, this guy had one job, and he failed miserably.
I finally caught up with some video taken of the attack, and, as attacks go, it was about as lame as I've seen. It appeared as though the assailant, the alleged assailant, I should say, walked up to the candidate on the stage and, if I didn't know better, it looked like he was there to shake hands or maybe even hug candidate Zeldin. I mentioned that the assailant had a knife, but it looked more like one of those palm-held letter openers one uses when processing bulk mail. I've never actually seen anything like it, but it didn't look like much of anything, much less something you would use to harm someone. What he planned to do with the "knife" is still unclear. There wasn't a visible blade the likes of which you might use to penetrate an object, so "stabbing" someone with it would be a stretch. I'm not sure where I'm going with all of this other than to say it was just weird—contrived, most certainly, but by whom?
The Ev man is doing well. He drops me a message now and then, usually in the early morning, asking me to send him a few clams so he can pick up breakfast at the local Shell station. The missus and I dropped off a nice meatball sub for him yesterday afternoon on our way to visit Mrs. G. He's partial to sub sandwiches from Moe's, so that's where we go. I find their meatballs to be smaller than the average meatball, and I prefer a larger meatball. That's just me. He stops by the house at least once a week to chat with the missus and me. He has been texting us quite a bit, or at least more than usual, I would say, and I'm beginning to wonder if he doesn't have too much free time on his hands. Too much of anything can be irritating. Know what I mean? I'm talking about his texts here. The good news with texts is that you can ignore them if they are seemingly insignificant. Sometimes, you're just not in the mood to shoot the shit. That doesn't make you a bad dad. Does it?
Blind Spots
17/07/22 06:57
The media is talking about their fearless leader, one Bumbling Joe Biden, who they say is too old to run for re-election in 2024. They are conveniently not mentioning that he is too demented, likely senile, and probably not physically or mentally capable of mounting a campaign for the presidency in 2024. I don't care how many pictures or videos they put out of this nitwit riding his bicycle for the general public to see because it's nothing but smoke and mirrors. It's pure unadulterated hokum.
It's also true that this clown living in our White House also ran his 2020 campaign from his basement in Delaware, so we shouldn't put anything past the democrats regarding running and stealing elections. Yes, that's right, I said stealing elections. It's also very likely that the democrats are scheming and putting the mechanisms in place as I sit here this morning to make sure that they don't lose key Senate seats this Fall when the so-called red wave sweeps every last one of these leftist democrats out of office for the damage that they've inflicted on our country and our culture since Biden came into office.
Oh, and before I forget, they're raising the "too old" straw man argument against Biden because they want to use the same fight against Trump when their attempts to indict or convict him fall flat. The comparison is ridiculous, of course, but par for the period regarding Democrats and their burn-the-house-down tactics they employ to steal elections. The challenge for Republicans is that they have yet to hold the democrats responsible in any meaningful way for the shenanigans they pull off every election cycle. When will anyone, and I'm referring to democrats here, go to jail for their complicity in stealing elections?
This whole Elon Musk buying Twitter thing seems to be falling apart at the seams. He's backing out of the deal now because of some alleged sleight of hand on the part of Twitter management having to do with the number of bots or some such nonsense. I was hoping that Elon would go in and rid the joint of the libs running the place so that we God-loving Americans would have a home to call our own in the days and months leading up to the midterm elections here in the United States. We conservatives would be there with bells on fighting back against the leftists spewing their garbage without any fear of reprisals or repudiation. It's all very disappointing.
The Ev man was over for a visit yesterday. I chatted with him about my recent interest in online chess and how I was kicking ass and taking names. He was not impressed in the least. I could see the words "noob" forming on his lips, but he never quite uttered the word, and I was thankful. The Ev man was quite the player back in the day, but he's not played in many years. I handed him my iPad and had him play a game or two, and I was surprised to see that he was as interested as he was. He quickly and expertly dispatched his two opponents. I thought for a moment that this was the beginning of something more enduring, but if it was, he wasn't letting on. Isn't that just like the Ev man?
Did you see that Tucker Carlson piece on FOX last night about the Bidens and their incestuous relationship with the Communist Chinese Party? Holy cow! And all this time, I thought it was nothing but a boring story about a washed-up crackhead and his underage whores. I'd also heard all the stories about Hunter Biden and his business deals with his "partners" in China and elsewhere. Still, those stories never seemed to get any traction in the primary street media, so they were quickly dismissed. Besides, Joey Biden said he never discussed his son's business deals with him, so the message was simple: Move along, folks. There's nothing to see here.
Of course, if Joey did know, then that would make him complicit in his son's crimes. And how else do you explain the documents taken from Hunter's laptop that detail who got what when these so-called deals were consummated? You know, the ones that say something about the Big Guy getting his ten percent? Tucker also laid out any actions taken by the Biden Administration that have benefited Communist China and to the detriment of the United States, including the removal of tariffs that the Chinese have been complaining about since Trump imposed them during his time in the White House. It is a clear-cut case of influence peddling by the Biden family to enrich themselves at the expense of our country. How is that not impeachable or, for that matter, treasonous? And yet, the primary street media and our Intelligence agencies look the other way.
It's so funny. Now that I have this interest in all things chess, I'm playing more and enjoying it more with each passing day. That's not the funny part. The funny part is that I'm finding that the chess game has me looking differently at other things I do in my everyday life. For example, I was in a tangle of traffic on my bike the other day, and I had several options available that would physically remove me from the web. I found myself quickly and efficiently evaluating my chances on the fly, not unlike something that I might well do while playing a game of chess with a worthy opponent. What was once second nature has become more of a calculation where options are considered and either accepted or dismissed based on likely outcomes. It gets even more interesting when you start seeing the same diagonal and linear patterns emerging in the real world that you know so well from playing chess. Maybe "funny" is the wrong word.
Something else I've discovered about myself while playing chess is that I have certain blind spots I didn't know I had. I don't know how much of that is visual and how much of that is due to simple miscalculation. I know that it rarely or never happens when I move more deliberately and less impulsively. I also think I give a little too much consideration to my opponent's pieces when they're advancing toward my side of the board and less care than is necessary to my opponent's details when they are in a position to attack my pieces from the rear. That's probably a more concise summary, or theory, of my so-called blind spot. As usual, there's a cautionary tale in there somewhere.
We're expecting June's inflation number to come out this morning at 8:30. The White House has already told everyone that the number will be "elevated." Well, what if the number is not "elevated"? I'm guessing that they said something about it being elevated because they had advance notice of what the number was going to be. What if they've decided to play a different game. A game where they win because they've decided that it's better to ramp up expectations and then take a victory lap when the number comes in lower than expected. Financial markets rally, investors coast to coast go from risk-off to risk-on, owners of 401k's get an unexpected bump in their monthly statements, and all is well again with the world because the Biden Administration has solved the inflation problem.
Would you put any of this past this Administration? The Biden Administration has the lowest approval rating of any presidency in the history of our country. The last time I looked, Biden's approval number was somewhere in the twenties. I think I saw something the other day about what presidents do when they have low ratings. They start wars, for one thing. I can't recall what the other thing is. Neither option is pretty, of course. Going to fight as a nation might well be what this Administration needs to regain its mojo. There's only one problem. Joe Biden is barely a daytime president, much less a wartime president. You don't want him anywhere near the nuclear codes. That would make us more fearful as a nation and not less. Oh, and then there's the Covid card.
We're now starting to see any number of the Biden people coming out with dire warnings about the resurgence of Covid this Fall. Suppose for a minute that they can't win elections fair and square. In that case, they can always roll out absentee balloting for the forever fearful in our country who assiduously follow the guidance of the CDC regarding protecting themselves and their loved ones. They'll stay home and mail in their ballots for their candidates in the upcoming midterm elections. Remember, it's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes. Does any of this sound familiar? It should because that is precisely what the democrats did in 2020. I'm guessing it is more difficult to do for House races in the midterms, but I wouldn't put it past them to rig a couple of crucial senate races in purple states.
I don't know what happened yesterday. Part of the problem was that the temperatures ramped up early on to the point where I decided it would be counterproductive to ride my bike in the 90-degree temperatures. I typically get on the road by ten or so, but when the ten o'clock hour rolled around, I decided it was not in my best interest to ride in the heat. It was all downhill from there. I did little to no exercise and stayed inside to beat the heat. Any momentum I might have gotten from my bike ride was nowhere to be found, leaving me feeling flat and sluggish. Eight or more hours of dull and slow makes for a bad day. Here I sit just twelve hours later, and I do not want to repeat the previous day's mistakes. I'm going to get on the road early before things heat up.
I was a little off base on my abovementioned comments regarding the White House and their attempts to try and play the expectations game with the inflation number. They weren't kidding about the number coming in "elevated." The year-over-year number came in at 9.1%, compared to market expectations of an 8.8% figure. Meanwhile, some polls had Biden's approval rating up three points. The inflation number came out while Bumbling Joe was getting off the plane in Israel on his first visit to that country since his inauguration in 2020. That has not gone unnoticed by the Israelis. As usual, he made any number of gaffs as he usually does, and he was a complete embarrassment on the world stage. At one point, he was singing happy birthday to a female reporter. Who does that?
It's hard to say where this inflation thing is going. Prices are up for just about everything, so it's hard to piss and moan about any one particular area. You need an economics background to get a good handle on what it means in the long run, but we do have some examples in the not-to-distant past about the potential pain it can inflict on the American consumer. Think Jimmy Carter and sitting in long lines to purchase gas for your car. What's weird is that the prices of commodities are falling like a rock which you would think would be a good thing. Everything should be more affordable. Right? That would be true if interest rates stayed static, but interest rates are getting ratcheted up by the Federal Reserve to fight inflation, so growth gets hammered. Without growth, all you're left with is contraction. That's not good for our country overall.
The Ev man said something yesterday about wanting to go out to a local restaurant with the missus and me to have a bite to eat. I think that he knows that that's something that we'd like to do with him, but we know all too well, everything else being equal, that going out to dinner would not be his first choice. I told him we would check in with him in a couple of days to see if he's still game to go. There is a restaurant right up the street from his place, which he's been to once or twice, and it sounds like he's willing and wanting to go there with us again for whatever reason. Maybe it's just a reason to get out of the house and do something he doesn't usually do. Perhaps it makes him feel good to talk about doing things that he'd like to do, even though he knows in his heart that he'll probably bow out at the last minute. We've seen this movie before, and we know how it ends.
I've been thinking lately that having the missus get up earlier than usual and being out and about while I'm writing in this journal is not distracting enough to take me off my writing game. I'm not so sure of that anymore. I've been struggling a bit to get things down in writing this past week or so, and I think it might have something to do with who is and who isn't around while I'm doing what I do. I can't even type a sentence without making mistakes that I need to correct before moving on. I'm no typist, but I know things are not working as they should. It's one of those things that you don't want to see worsen over time because you don't know where it will end up. Maybe it has nothing to do with the missus. That's even more concerning.
I'm debating buying a chess board. Is this one of those things I'll buy, use for a day or two, and then never use again? I think it's one thing to play the game online where the chess board is one-dimensional, and it's something completely different to play a game on an actual board. I've been looking at instructional videos on YouTube lately, and recreating scenarios in the online game room that I go to after the fact is next to impossible. It would be much easier to game it all out on an actual board instead of hoping my opponent moves the way I want him to when I'm playing my online opponent. Maybe I could pick up one of those cheesy sets where you play checkers on one side of the board and chess on the other. Remember those? Or am I just dating myself?
I'm feeling the need for something to bring me back around. Not sure what's going on here. Maybe my bike ride will get me out of the doldrums this morning. Perhaps if I keep busy doing things, it will take my mind off of whatever has me feeling less focused than usual. I have a list of things I need to do somewhere around the house, so I probably should find that and see if there's anything that requires my immediate attention. Did I mention that the missus and I looked around a few stores yesterday for a microwave? In the back of my mind, I think our microwave is getting a little long in the tooth, and I worry about worn seals and escaping microwave thing-a-ma-jigs that go bump in the night. I'm not sure if that's a thing, but you can never be too careful.
I have to tell you. There wasn't much in the way of variety or supply in the stores we went into. We went into a few big box stores where you would think the supplies would be good. Microwaves are a dime a dozen. No? Does this have anything to do with the shortages of semiconductors? I don't think so, but I can't say for sure. Semiconductors are in everything, so that might be one reason why we can't find a decent microwave if there are shortages. And, to be clear, we're not looking for some combo microwave-air fryer-vacuum cleaner unit because we aren't. Maybe the world has changed, and single-use appliances are no longer all the rage. Our last stop before we turn to Amazon.com will be to stop into Lowes. Maybe we should have gone there first thing.
I'm sitting here on a Friday afternoon waiting to hear Bumbling Joe Biden's remarks from Saudi Arabia at 3:30. Who doesn't love a good blooper or gaffe to round out their week? I don't know whether the network carrying his remarks has enough control over the feed to suppress any idiocy that comes out of his mouth. He's already been criticized by the Main Street Media for fist bumping the guy he has been criticizing since day one of his Administration for his role in killing the Washington Post reporter maybe three years ago. It's also true, at least as of late, that he seems incapable of reading his cue cards or the remarks written for him on his teleprompter with any degree of accuracy. As I said, you never know what will come tumbling out of Bumbling Joe's mouth.
It sounds like the Democrats were putting together legislation dealing with the Administration's goals on energy and climate. The legislation was touted to be what the progressives considered the crown jewel in Biden's first term. The Democrats are, of course, desperate to give something to their voters that will bring them out in sufficient numbers in the mid-terms to keep the tsunami of Republican voters from taking back the House and the Senate. Senator Joe Manchin is one fly-in-the-ointment for the democrats who could kill this legislation in the crib. That's how tight the margin is in the 50-50 Senate. I want to give Manchin a hat tip because he's gone on the record as a no-vote regarding the legislation's energy and climate goals.
This week's blogging has been a real battle, so I'll be happy when it's over. I've just had to dig really deeply for the inspiration or whatever to come up with things to put down on paper. If I had had Covid, I might blame it on what they call "long Covid." I hope to hell it doesn't portend some kind of dry spell in the days and weeks ahead. That's the kind of getting off track that I want no part of. It's who I am, and it's what I do. What would I do if I didn't do my blogging? Would I read more? Would I do more of something that I like to do instead? You can see how circular this gets. Where it goes and when it stops is above my pay grade. Maybe there's something to that age-old adage that says you keep putting one foot in front of the other, and you'll be fine. The corollary in the blogging world is to keep writing. I'm trying. God knows I'm trying.
Mrs. G never returned our call yesterday. I hope she's okay. We'll stop by to visit her later today. I'll want to give her a call ahead of time to see if she needs anything. Maybe she's running short on this or that. Perhaps she'd like to have a backup bottle of rose for special occasions. We also know she likes a nice ham sandwich from Jersey Mike's from time to time, so maybe we'll swing by there on the way over to her place. She likes it Mike's way, just so you know. We're still working on buying her a replacement nightstand of sorts, so if we have an update to share with her on that front, all the better. She'll likely share all the latest goings-on at her facility, emphasizing changes in the weekly menus, updates on emergency hospitalizations of her less-than-fortunate fellow residents, and who knows what else. It's all grist for the mill, as they say.
One of these days, we'll get the Ev man to stop by and say hello to Mrs. G. It's not exactly in his wheelhouse these days to do that, so he'll need a bit of prodding. The two of them can talk about old times, and they have a bit of history, so Katy bar the door. Am I putting too many commas in my sentences here? I have this spell check thing running, and either I don't know when I should use commas, or this spell check thing and grammar thing is overly partial to the use of commas. Mrs. G and the Ev man used to skip the light fantastic back when Mr. and Mrs. G lived on Park Ridge Lane. He was just a little guy back then but, memories being what they are, he's likely not forgotten their many kindnesses.
My neighbor was whining a bit the other day about having to pay a tree service some $1,400 to remove a tree from her property. It occured to me after the fact that she ought to just find somone with chain saw and pay them $100 or so to fell the tree. She could sell the wood for firewood and maybe even make a few sheckles on the deal. I've not seen the tree so I'm not sure how big the tree is nor have I assessed what damage the tree might inflict on persons or property were it to fall in an unintended fashion. I've also seen some real yahoos on some of the Alaskan shows I watch from time to time wielding chain saws like old time lumber Jacks so it looks easy enough to do. She just needs to find the right yahoo. Git er done!
I can't get this interview that I watched the other night on televison out of my head. The host was interviewing some self-confessed lesbian leftist activist who was facing three years in jail in Norway for making what most people would consider commonsense comments. You know, like "men can't bear children" and "men can't be lesbians." That's really radical, right? I don't know the first thing about Norway or how stupid or insane their culture is, not to mention their political system, but if what this woman is testifying to is actually happening, someone needs to call the stupid-police. I think she said that she was about to be charged with a hate crime for saying what she said. Have they lost their fucking minds?
I shouldn't sound so surprised. The leftist here in the United States would love dearly to have the power to decide what is and what isn't a crime when it comes to marginalized communities of every color, gender, and you name the flavor of the month. Whatever it takes, really, to tear down or circumvent our first amendment rights or, for that matter, any other rights enumerated in our Constitution. Hell, they would throw out our beloved Constitution given half a chance. That doesn't stop them from chipping away at our culture and our society with their endless nonsense about men (who think their women) competing in women's sports, trans sexuals showering with the oppposite sex in our armed forces, and the list goes on and on.
I'll tune into the Sunday morning talk shows this morning just to see what's on. More often than not I end up not watching any of it and just going out for a bike ride or whatever. There will no doubt be glowing coverage of Biden's visit to Saudi Arabia by the majority of the left wing media. We know differently, don't we. We know Biden lied about his having confronted the Saudi's about their alleged killing of the Washington Post reporter. What else did he lie about? Maybe the Saudi's will release the tape. Biden doesn't remember what he had for breakfast so don't expect much in the way of push-back from him. It's sad to say but I'll believe the Saudi's before I'll believe a word coming out of Biden's mouth. There, I said it.
The missus tells me that she's seeing more and more articles in rags like the New York Times that are critical of Biden in one way or another. Is this the beginning of the end? All of them, and I mean all of them, at least according to the missus, reference his advanced age and what it means to have an octogenarian at the helm of our Republic. Not a one of them suggests that Biden is cognitively robust enough to stay on as President for remainder of his first term. We're even hearing stories about how he shuffles here and there in the White House at all hours of the day and night and how he has bursts of anger that are sadly reminiscent of people suffering from late stage dementia. You know that when your long time allies in the media turn their backs on you, and worse yet, go after you in ways they never would have previously, it might be time to start planning your exit. Is the world ready for President Kamala Harris? Perish the fucking thought.
It's also true that this clown living in our White House also ran his 2020 campaign from his basement in Delaware, so we shouldn't put anything past the democrats regarding running and stealing elections. Yes, that's right, I said stealing elections. It's also very likely that the democrats are scheming and putting the mechanisms in place as I sit here this morning to make sure that they don't lose key Senate seats this Fall when the so-called red wave sweeps every last one of these leftist democrats out of office for the damage that they've inflicted on our country and our culture since Biden came into office.
Oh, and before I forget, they're raising the "too old" straw man argument against Biden because they want to use the same fight against Trump when their attempts to indict or convict him fall flat. The comparison is ridiculous, of course, but par for the period regarding Democrats and their burn-the-house-down tactics they employ to steal elections. The challenge for Republicans is that they have yet to hold the democrats responsible in any meaningful way for the shenanigans they pull off every election cycle. When will anyone, and I'm referring to democrats here, go to jail for their complicity in stealing elections?
This whole Elon Musk buying Twitter thing seems to be falling apart at the seams. He's backing out of the deal now because of some alleged sleight of hand on the part of Twitter management having to do with the number of bots or some such nonsense. I was hoping that Elon would go in and rid the joint of the libs running the place so that we God-loving Americans would have a home to call our own in the days and months leading up to the midterm elections here in the United States. We conservatives would be there with bells on fighting back against the leftists spewing their garbage without any fear of reprisals or repudiation. It's all very disappointing.
The Ev man was over for a visit yesterday. I chatted with him about my recent interest in online chess and how I was kicking ass and taking names. He was not impressed in the least. I could see the words "noob" forming on his lips, but he never quite uttered the word, and I was thankful. The Ev man was quite the player back in the day, but he's not played in many years. I handed him my iPad and had him play a game or two, and I was surprised to see that he was as interested as he was. He quickly and expertly dispatched his two opponents. I thought for a moment that this was the beginning of something more enduring, but if it was, he wasn't letting on. Isn't that just like the Ev man?
Did you see that Tucker Carlson piece on FOX last night about the Bidens and their incestuous relationship with the Communist Chinese Party? Holy cow! And all this time, I thought it was nothing but a boring story about a washed-up crackhead and his underage whores. I'd also heard all the stories about Hunter Biden and his business deals with his "partners" in China and elsewhere. Still, those stories never seemed to get any traction in the primary street media, so they were quickly dismissed. Besides, Joey Biden said he never discussed his son's business deals with him, so the message was simple: Move along, folks. There's nothing to see here.
Of course, if Joey did know, then that would make him complicit in his son's crimes. And how else do you explain the documents taken from Hunter's laptop that detail who got what when these so-called deals were consummated? You know, the ones that say something about the Big Guy getting his ten percent? Tucker also laid out any actions taken by the Biden Administration that have benefited Communist China and to the detriment of the United States, including the removal of tariffs that the Chinese have been complaining about since Trump imposed them during his time in the White House. It is a clear-cut case of influence peddling by the Biden family to enrich themselves at the expense of our country. How is that not impeachable or, for that matter, treasonous? And yet, the primary street media and our Intelligence agencies look the other way.
It's so funny. Now that I have this interest in all things chess, I'm playing more and enjoying it more with each passing day. That's not the funny part. The funny part is that I'm finding that the chess game has me looking differently at other things I do in my everyday life. For example, I was in a tangle of traffic on my bike the other day, and I had several options available that would physically remove me from the web. I found myself quickly and efficiently evaluating my chances on the fly, not unlike something that I might well do while playing a game of chess with a worthy opponent. What was once second nature has become more of a calculation where options are considered and either accepted or dismissed based on likely outcomes. It gets even more interesting when you start seeing the same diagonal and linear patterns emerging in the real world that you know so well from playing chess. Maybe "funny" is the wrong word.
Something else I've discovered about myself while playing chess is that I have certain blind spots I didn't know I had. I don't know how much of that is visual and how much of that is due to simple miscalculation. I know that it rarely or never happens when I move more deliberately and less impulsively. I also think I give a little too much consideration to my opponent's pieces when they're advancing toward my side of the board and less care than is necessary to my opponent's details when they are in a position to attack my pieces from the rear. That's probably a more concise summary, or theory, of my so-called blind spot. As usual, there's a cautionary tale in there somewhere.
We're expecting June's inflation number to come out this morning at 8:30. The White House has already told everyone that the number will be "elevated." Well, what if the number is not "elevated"? I'm guessing that they said something about it being elevated because they had advance notice of what the number was going to be. What if they've decided to play a different game. A game where they win because they've decided that it's better to ramp up expectations and then take a victory lap when the number comes in lower than expected. Financial markets rally, investors coast to coast go from risk-off to risk-on, owners of 401k's get an unexpected bump in their monthly statements, and all is well again with the world because the Biden Administration has solved the inflation problem.
Would you put any of this past this Administration? The Biden Administration has the lowest approval rating of any presidency in the history of our country. The last time I looked, Biden's approval number was somewhere in the twenties. I think I saw something the other day about what presidents do when they have low ratings. They start wars, for one thing. I can't recall what the other thing is. Neither option is pretty, of course. Going to fight as a nation might well be what this Administration needs to regain its mojo. There's only one problem. Joe Biden is barely a daytime president, much less a wartime president. You don't want him anywhere near the nuclear codes. That would make us more fearful as a nation and not less. Oh, and then there's the Covid card.
We're now starting to see any number of the Biden people coming out with dire warnings about the resurgence of Covid this Fall. Suppose for a minute that they can't win elections fair and square. In that case, they can always roll out absentee balloting for the forever fearful in our country who assiduously follow the guidance of the CDC regarding protecting themselves and their loved ones. They'll stay home and mail in their ballots for their candidates in the upcoming midterm elections. Remember, it's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes. Does any of this sound familiar? It should because that is precisely what the democrats did in 2020. I'm guessing it is more difficult to do for House races in the midterms, but I wouldn't put it past them to rig a couple of crucial senate races in purple states.
I don't know what happened yesterday. Part of the problem was that the temperatures ramped up early on to the point where I decided it would be counterproductive to ride my bike in the 90-degree temperatures. I typically get on the road by ten or so, but when the ten o'clock hour rolled around, I decided it was not in my best interest to ride in the heat. It was all downhill from there. I did little to no exercise and stayed inside to beat the heat. Any momentum I might have gotten from my bike ride was nowhere to be found, leaving me feeling flat and sluggish. Eight or more hours of dull and slow makes for a bad day. Here I sit just twelve hours later, and I do not want to repeat the previous day's mistakes. I'm going to get on the road early before things heat up.
I was a little off base on my abovementioned comments regarding the White House and their attempts to try and play the expectations game with the inflation number. They weren't kidding about the number coming in "elevated." The year-over-year number came in at 9.1%, compared to market expectations of an 8.8% figure. Meanwhile, some polls had Biden's approval rating up three points. The inflation number came out while Bumbling Joe was getting off the plane in Israel on his first visit to that country since his inauguration in 2020. That has not gone unnoticed by the Israelis. As usual, he made any number of gaffs as he usually does, and he was a complete embarrassment on the world stage. At one point, he was singing happy birthday to a female reporter. Who does that?
It's hard to say where this inflation thing is going. Prices are up for just about everything, so it's hard to piss and moan about any one particular area. You need an economics background to get a good handle on what it means in the long run, but we do have some examples in the not-to-distant past about the potential pain it can inflict on the American consumer. Think Jimmy Carter and sitting in long lines to purchase gas for your car. What's weird is that the prices of commodities are falling like a rock which you would think would be a good thing. Everything should be more affordable. Right? That would be true if interest rates stayed static, but interest rates are getting ratcheted up by the Federal Reserve to fight inflation, so growth gets hammered. Without growth, all you're left with is contraction. That's not good for our country overall.
The Ev man said something yesterday about wanting to go out to a local restaurant with the missus and me to have a bite to eat. I think that he knows that that's something that we'd like to do with him, but we know all too well, everything else being equal, that going out to dinner would not be his first choice. I told him we would check in with him in a couple of days to see if he's still game to go. There is a restaurant right up the street from his place, which he's been to once or twice, and it sounds like he's willing and wanting to go there with us again for whatever reason. Maybe it's just a reason to get out of the house and do something he doesn't usually do. Perhaps it makes him feel good to talk about doing things that he'd like to do, even though he knows in his heart that he'll probably bow out at the last minute. We've seen this movie before, and we know how it ends.
I've been thinking lately that having the missus get up earlier than usual and being out and about while I'm writing in this journal is not distracting enough to take me off my writing game. I'm not so sure of that anymore. I've been struggling a bit to get things down in writing this past week or so, and I think it might have something to do with who is and who isn't around while I'm doing what I do. I can't even type a sentence without making mistakes that I need to correct before moving on. I'm no typist, but I know things are not working as they should. It's one of those things that you don't want to see worsen over time because you don't know where it will end up. Maybe it has nothing to do with the missus. That's even more concerning.
I'm debating buying a chess board. Is this one of those things I'll buy, use for a day or two, and then never use again? I think it's one thing to play the game online where the chess board is one-dimensional, and it's something completely different to play a game on an actual board. I've been looking at instructional videos on YouTube lately, and recreating scenarios in the online game room that I go to after the fact is next to impossible. It would be much easier to game it all out on an actual board instead of hoping my opponent moves the way I want him to when I'm playing my online opponent. Maybe I could pick up one of those cheesy sets where you play checkers on one side of the board and chess on the other. Remember those? Or am I just dating myself?
I'm feeling the need for something to bring me back around. Not sure what's going on here. Maybe my bike ride will get me out of the doldrums this morning. Perhaps if I keep busy doing things, it will take my mind off of whatever has me feeling less focused than usual. I have a list of things I need to do somewhere around the house, so I probably should find that and see if there's anything that requires my immediate attention. Did I mention that the missus and I looked around a few stores yesterday for a microwave? In the back of my mind, I think our microwave is getting a little long in the tooth, and I worry about worn seals and escaping microwave thing-a-ma-jigs that go bump in the night. I'm not sure if that's a thing, but you can never be too careful.
I have to tell you. There wasn't much in the way of variety or supply in the stores we went into. We went into a few big box stores where you would think the supplies would be good. Microwaves are a dime a dozen. No? Does this have anything to do with the shortages of semiconductors? I don't think so, but I can't say for sure. Semiconductors are in everything, so that might be one reason why we can't find a decent microwave if there are shortages. And, to be clear, we're not looking for some combo microwave-air fryer-vacuum cleaner unit because we aren't. Maybe the world has changed, and single-use appliances are no longer all the rage. Our last stop before we turn to Amazon.com will be to stop into Lowes. Maybe we should have gone there first thing.
I'm sitting here on a Friday afternoon waiting to hear Bumbling Joe Biden's remarks from Saudi Arabia at 3:30. Who doesn't love a good blooper or gaffe to round out their week? I don't know whether the network carrying his remarks has enough control over the feed to suppress any idiocy that comes out of his mouth. He's already been criticized by the Main Street Media for fist bumping the guy he has been criticizing since day one of his Administration for his role in killing the Washington Post reporter maybe three years ago. It's also true, at least as of late, that he seems incapable of reading his cue cards or the remarks written for him on his teleprompter with any degree of accuracy. As I said, you never know what will come tumbling out of Bumbling Joe's mouth.
It sounds like the Democrats were putting together legislation dealing with the Administration's goals on energy and climate. The legislation was touted to be what the progressives considered the crown jewel in Biden's first term. The Democrats are, of course, desperate to give something to their voters that will bring them out in sufficient numbers in the mid-terms to keep the tsunami of Republican voters from taking back the House and the Senate. Senator Joe Manchin is one fly-in-the-ointment for the democrats who could kill this legislation in the crib. That's how tight the margin is in the 50-50 Senate. I want to give Manchin a hat tip because he's gone on the record as a no-vote regarding the legislation's energy and climate goals.
This week's blogging has been a real battle, so I'll be happy when it's over. I've just had to dig really deeply for the inspiration or whatever to come up with things to put down on paper. If I had had Covid, I might blame it on what they call "long Covid." I hope to hell it doesn't portend some kind of dry spell in the days and weeks ahead. That's the kind of getting off track that I want no part of. It's who I am, and it's what I do. What would I do if I didn't do my blogging? Would I read more? Would I do more of something that I like to do instead? You can see how circular this gets. Where it goes and when it stops is above my pay grade. Maybe there's something to that age-old adage that says you keep putting one foot in front of the other, and you'll be fine. The corollary in the blogging world is to keep writing. I'm trying. God knows I'm trying.
Mrs. G never returned our call yesterday. I hope she's okay. We'll stop by to visit her later today. I'll want to give her a call ahead of time to see if she needs anything. Maybe she's running short on this or that. Perhaps she'd like to have a backup bottle of rose for special occasions. We also know she likes a nice ham sandwich from Jersey Mike's from time to time, so maybe we'll swing by there on the way over to her place. She likes it Mike's way, just so you know. We're still working on buying her a replacement nightstand of sorts, so if we have an update to share with her on that front, all the better. She'll likely share all the latest goings-on at her facility, emphasizing changes in the weekly menus, updates on emergency hospitalizations of her less-than-fortunate fellow residents, and who knows what else. It's all grist for the mill, as they say.
One of these days, we'll get the Ev man to stop by and say hello to Mrs. G. It's not exactly in his wheelhouse these days to do that, so he'll need a bit of prodding. The two of them can talk about old times, and they have a bit of history, so Katy bar the door. Am I putting too many commas in my sentences here? I have this spell check thing running, and either I don't know when I should use commas, or this spell check thing and grammar thing is overly partial to the use of commas. Mrs. G and the Ev man used to skip the light fantastic back when Mr. and Mrs. G lived on Park Ridge Lane. He was just a little guy back then but, memories being what they are, he's likely not forgotten their many kindnesses.
My neighbor was whining a bit the other day about having to pay a tree service some $1,400 to remove a tree from her property. It occured to me after the fact that she ought to just find somone with chain saw and pay them $100 or so to fell the tree. She could sell the wood for firewood and maybe even make a few sheckles on the deal. I've not seen the tree so I'm not sure how big the tree is nor have I assessed what damage the tree might inflict on persons or property were it to fall in an unintended fashion. I've also seen some real yahoos on some of the Alaskan shows I watch from time to time wielding chain saws like old time lumber Jacks so it looks easy enough to do. She just needs to find the right yahoo. Git er done!
I can't get this interview that I watched the other night on televison out of my head. The host was interviewing some self-confessed lesbian leftist activist who was facing three years in jail in Norway for making what most people would consider commonsense comments. You know, like "men can't bear children" and "men can't be lesbians." That's really radical, right? I don't know the first thing about Norway or how stupid or insane their culture is, not to mention their political system, but if what this woman is testifying to is actually happening, someone needs to call the stupid-police. I think she said that she was about to be charged with a hate crime for saying what she said. Have they lost their fucking minds?
I shouldn't sound so surprised. The leftist here in the United States would love dearly to have the power to decide what is and what isn't a crime when it comes to marginalized communities of every color, gender, and you name the flavor of the month. Whatever it takes, really, to tear down or circumvent our first amendment rights or, for that matter, any other rights enumerated in our Constitution. Hell, they would throw out our beloved Constitution given half a chance. That doesn't stop them from chipping away at our culture and our society with their endless nonsense about men (who think their women) competing in women's sports, trans sexuals showering with the oppposite sex in our armed forces, and the list goes on and on.
I'll tune into the Sunday morning talk shows this morning just to see what's on. More often than not I end up not watching any of it and just going out for a bike ride or whatever. There will no doubt be glowing coverage of Biden's visit to Saudi Arabia by the majority of the left wing media. We know differently, don't we. We know Biden lied about his having confronted the Saudi's about their alleged killing of the Washington Post reporter. What else did he lie about? Maybe the Saudi's will release the tape. Biden doesn't remember what he had for breakfast so don't expect much in the way of push-back from him. It's sad to say but I'll believe the Saudi's before I'll believe a word coming out of Biden's mouth. There, I said it.
The missus tells me that she's seeing more and more articles in rags like the New York Times that are critical of Biden in one way or another. Is this the beginning of the end? All of them, and I mean all of them, at least according to the missus, reference his advanced age and what it means to have an octogenarian at the helm of our Republic. Not a one of them suggests that Biden is cognitively robust enough to stay on as President for remainder of his first term. We're even hearing stories about how he shuffles here and there in the White House at all hours of the day and night and how he has bursts of anger that are sadly reminiscent of people suffering from late stage dementia. You know that when your long time allies in the media turn their backs on you, and worse yet, go after you in ways they never would have previously, it might be time to start planning your exit. Is the world ready for President Kamala Harris? Perish the fucking thought.
Day of Reckoning
10/07/22 07:07
Let's get this party started, fellow grundoons! We've got another week ahead so let's see if we can't keep our feet on the ground and our heads up high. Today is the Fourth of July and a holiday hereabouts. We have no shrimp to throw on the barbie and no short ribs to put in the smoker. I've got some leftover potato salad in the fridge if that floats your boat. If that doesn't work then I'm afraid there's not much more I have to offer. If I had an American flag I'd be hanging it outside the house to show my allegiance to this great nation of ours on today, our nation's birthday. Happy Birthday, babycakes!
I'm feeling the need to get an even earlier start to the day on my bike today now that summer is officially underway here on the coast. The cars on Ocean Boulevard start to pile up early this time of year and before you can say "Jack Spratt" my bike path is gone. Poof! That means that I'm watching my flank not only for children jutting out from in between cars but for cars and their drivers that could care less about my welfare. I have a couple of alternate routes that I can take but I'll be damned if I'll have to take another route just because some out-of-towners show up with their surfboards, children, and beach paraphernalia in tow. This is my damn town!
The missus is still counting sheep but she'll be up and about soon throwing on water for her tea and making her way onto our back deck while she waits for the water to come to a boil. That in itself is not enough to take me off track here but the less she engages me the better. I don't have the heart to tell her not to talk to me while I'm doing this here journal thing but I think she does her best to occupy herself knowing as she does that I'm still busy doing what I do at this hour of the morning. She said something to me once about staying in bed when she wakes up so as not to disturb me in the morning. I told her in no uncertain terms that that was not necessary. I think I'm pretty much impervious to distractions at this point when it comes to getting in my journal time.
I started reading a book yesterday and after maybe 20 pages or so I decided that the story itself was so far-fetched that I couldn't in good conscience continue reading the book. The writing itself was quite good so I was surprised that the storyline went the way that it did. I'll have to find a review or two of this book to see if others don't agree with me. Maybe it's me. With so many books at my disposal, I can afford to pick them up and put them down at my leisure. If I never pick them up again, so be it. I've now moved on to a recently released book about the life and times of Clarence Thomas. The format is a little weird in that Clarence is being interviewed and he's responding to questions asked. So far, so good. As I said, there's no shortage of good books out there.
I asked the missus recently if she wouldn't mind joining me for a game of chess. Sadly, she declined. I think it irks her when I beat her at the games we play so, needless to say, we don't play many games. I don't always beat her, mind you, but I must win more often than not otherwise she wouldn't get this pissy when all I'm looking to do is have a little fun with my better half. I'm not even a chess player truth be told. I know how the pieces move on the board and that's about it. I'm not even sure where this hankering to play a game of chess comes from. Maybe the thought of getting better at something I'm not particularly good at has a certain amount of appeal to me. Who doesn't like getting better at things?
Where there's a will, there's a way. I signed on to a chess game online at Chess.com and I was off to the races. Call me a bully but I signed up to play a beginner so I could get a few wins under my belt before playing a real opponent. I think the computer that I'm playing makes intentional mistakes so as not to whip my ass too badly. The missus sees me playing now and I'm quite sure that she thinks I'm playing with some honey sitting in a smoke-filled gaming parlor somewhere in Lithuania. "I'm playing a computer, little darlings," I assure her. "There is nothing to worry about." I am getting better so that feels good. I think this is one of those games where you can read all the books on the planet but there's just no substitute for actually playing the game.
If the good Lord is willin' and the creek don't rise, we'll throw together a cold tortellini salad today. The number of things that you can add to a salad like that is, well, in a phrase, without bounds. I do think it's possible to fuck it up so there's that. Too much of the wrong something would do it. I'm thinking that broccoli is one of those somethings. We'll add some oil but we can't allow the salad to coagulate after sitting in the fridge for a bit so it will have to be a blend of olive oil and vegetable oil. This is a five-cheese tortellini so it will provide just the right balance of proteins and carbohydrates. I'm also going to take another run at that cold Swiss Chard salad I had a good mind to make the other day before I had to throw it all out because of the red ants that came from God only knows where. Who said that there are no such things as second chances?
It's almost Pavlovian. The minute that we see some kind of mass shooting here in the United States, the Democrats are out in force demanding more gun control. Take the shooting in Highland Park over this past holiday weekend for example. The bodies weren't even cold yet and the left and their propaganda arm, the media, were hitting the airwaves whipping up a frenzied and fearful public into believing that if every last gun were confiscated that there would be fewer to no murders on the streets in our towns and cities. What they're not telling you is that the deranged shooter was an Antifa acolyte who, had he not had access to a gun, would have used a motor vehicle or some other weapon of mass destruction to kill Americans on our nation's birthday, the Fourth of July.
That was the whole point. If you're convinced that our nation's founding was conceived out of racism or some other ridiculous corollary, then you want nothing more than to attack and tear down every last institution associated with said corollary. A random shooting isn't going to get the job done. You need to make a statement and what better way to make a statement than to bring a gun to a crowded theater or event and prove to your compatriots that you are in it to win it. This Highland Park shooting wasn't a hate crime if you're thinking in terms of skin color or sexual preference but it was a hate crime nonetheless. It was hatred for America and everything that America stands for.
I don't know what you can do to prevent these kinds of things from happening. Clearly, the usual deterrents aren't getting the job done. The threat of spending the rest of your days behind bars isn't enough anymore. These nutty adherents are willing to lose their lives if that's what it takes. If they survive, they will most likely find a constituency of like-minded fallen angels with whom to hobnob once they are behind bars. Incidentally, where were all the good guys with guns when this loon started shooting from the rooftop in Highland Park yesterday? Oh, that's right, this happened in Illinois where they have the strictest gun laws in the nation. Maybe we need more good guys with guns and fewer laws that nobody enforces.
We're still on track for the delivery of Mrs G's couch on Friday of this week. I don't know why but I've been a little preoccupied with the notion that the deliverymen are going to show up at the appointed hour and Mrs G's old couch will still be there in the space reserved for the new couch. We discussed removal of the old couch several times with Mrs G and she had a couple of ideas in mind that might, at a minimum, get the couch moved to the other side of her living room if not out the door. We got an email from her yesterday informing us that she had made arrangements with the management of her facility to take care of the couch. I don't know if that means they are coming to take it away or maybe, and this would be fine too, just move it out of the way.
Either way, that takes care of the potential problem with the delivery of her new couch. It's one less thing to worry about. Mrs G wanted to replace an old bedside table so we've been working on that as well. She said something to the missus about not wanting a table too large as it might have to fit into a smaller space should she move to a smaller unit. I don't even know what that means. Maybe the sudden passing of a good friend at her facility has her rethinking all of her plans as it relates to her most recent furniture purchases. Maybe this is no different than the urge that one gets when they get on in years to see to it that they don't burden their children or anyone else with having to remove or arrange for the disposal of excess personal belongings after their passing.
Is anyone else following this Brittany Griner story? She's the nappy-haired and heavily tattooed semi-professional basketball player who is being detained in Russia after officials found some marijuana-related paraphernalia in her suitcase at the airport. It's hard to say what's to become of Ms Griner exactly but it's clear thus far that the only thing she's getting from the Biden administration is lip service. Apparently, her phone calls to Joey and Jill are going unanswered at the White House. Her wife, yes, I said her wife, has pleaded with whoever will listen time and time again to assist with the efforts to have her wife released from custody and returned to her rightful place in the United States. She's even gone so far as to suggest that were it Michael Jordan who was being detained that the Biden Administration would be doing more than they are currently doing to negotiate her release.
I just don't know that there is a sufficient hue and cry from any particular political constituency that would otherwise benefit Biden so I'm guessing that is why he's letting her rot in her cell without making so much as an overture for her release. She is both a member of a marginalized community and the gay community so there's that. That has to count for something. No? Maybe Biden's standard fee of 10% for the Big Guy is something that maybe the Griner family or fan club at large is either unable or unwilling to pay. I certainly don't see her teammates, or for that matter, her team, stepping up to the plate with an offer of any kind. Getting busted for carrying spliffs in a foreign country is hardly the kind of headline that any sports club welcomes so Brittany, as dear as she may be to her club, is probably now persona non grata. Brittany who?
Trump has a rally coming up this weekend in Alaska to benefit the Primary opponent of Senator Lisa Murkowski. When is the last time that a president campaigned in Alaska? I'm guessing not in my lifetime. It should be one hell of a rally since I'm guessing that Trump is a rock star in good standing in the eyes of many an Alaskan resident. It wouldn't surprise me to hear that people traveled far and wide to see Trump and some maybe even by dogsled. I'm not sure where the rally is but I'll be tuned in here in the States to watch the rally. With bells on, as they say in the business. Nobody does a rally like Trump and it will be a once-in-a-lifetime event for many Alaskans so it is definitely not to be missed. How much it helps Murkowski's opponent, I'm not sure. I guess I would say that it can't hurt. With any luck, Murkowski will defeat Murkowski. She's that bad.
We had such high hopes for dinner last night. The missus bought a nice piece of swordfish and a handful of fresh green beans which she planned to steam. I thought the piece of fish was a little small for the two of us but that's neither here nor there. I turned the oven /broiler on around 5:30 and no sooner had I turned the oven on than our electricity went off. Well, so much for that. I threw the fish back in the fridge as quickly as possible and the missus and I went to work trying to figure out why we had lost our electricity and when we might be getting it back. It turned out that there was an accident in town and we wouldn't be getting our electricity back for the better part of an hour and a half.
We have a generator but I had recently drained the oil out of the generator and I was expecting delivery of the replacement oil so the unit was sitting in our garage with no oil in it. That wasn't the biggest of deals since I had other oil I could use so I threw it all together and got the generator up and running in about 10 minutes. The generator is nice but it doesn't power everything in the house and it definitely doesn't power up the oven so fish was back off the menu for at least one more night. So much for buying a nice piece of fresh fish to have for dinner. Oh, and this generator is one of those generators that you have to wheel in and out of the garage every time you want to use it. One of these days, we'll arrange for a fixed unit. Not sure why we didn't do that the first time around.
One thing that I discovered when the power went out was that the missus didn't have a clue as to how to turn the computer back on. Say what? We never turn our computer off so I suppose she'd likely never have to know how to turn it on if it's never off. That said, we've had computers for decades so you'd think that she might have occasion here and there to turn it on or maybe off here and there. I was actually stunned when she told me that she didn't know how to turn it on. I suppose that she could have figured it out if I for some reason wasn't around to offer her instruction, but that isn't the point. This is one of those teach the person to fish type deals so he or she can feed themselves instead of being spoon-fed each and every day of their life. I suppose that's on me.
The latest lunacy coming out of the Biden Administration is that they have been selling oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR) to other countries in Europe and China. So, we Americans have been paying nearly $6 a gallon for gas, and rather than use that oil from the SPR to reduce prices at the pump here in America, Biden is selling it to our allies and our enemies. You can't make this shit up. Where are the articles of impeachment from our congressman? Biden is aiding and abetting the Communist Chinese and not a fucking word out of anyone in our Senate or House. How much is Joey is making off of these deals? Or, are these sales a payback for the billions that the Chinese have invested over the years in failed ventures of Joey and Hunter Biden? Where are the fucking special prosecutors? Is everyone asleep at the wheel?
I even got a text last night from my brother from another mother on this subject. I dare say that he's even more critical and intolerant of Biden than I am if that's possible. I think his vitriol stems from the fact that Biden and his minions have brought him to near ruin at a time when he was looking to retire sooner rather than later. I could be wrong about that and we've not discussed it at length so it's mere speculation on my part. I'm also guessing that he sees what every other God-fearing American sees when they see Joey on the stump reading from his prepared cue cards while drooling and looking, more often than not, bewildered and dazed. I mean, this is what passes for an American president these days? How far have we fallen as a nation? I guess what they say about elections having consequences and stolen elections having catastrophic consequences is right as rain.
I think we need to be very clear-eyed about this green energy bullshit that the liberals are trying to force down our throats. In a way, it ties into Biden's selling our petroleum reserve to our enemies. He's blocked or stopped every effort to kickstart our domestic oil production in order to further his dystopian green energy nightmare. As a nation, we have neither the infrastructure nor the technology to support these so-called green energy solutions. Our enemies know this all too well and they have been very successful in selling this so-called green revolution to the Marxists in our midst who are now in control of our government. It has made us weaker as a nation. One of these days the people who have lined their pockets with monies from our enemies in order to bring down our country will pay a price for their treasonous behavior. Let's hope we still have a country to call our own when the time comes.
One of the things that has become abundantly clear since Biden took office is that the so-called liberals and democrats have shown us who they really are. They are not the blue dog democrats from days of old. They are leftists at best and Marxists at worst. Not one of them wants what's best for our country. They condone each and everything Biden does no matter how foolish or wrong-headed. The ends always justify the means. Biden, as sad and demented as he is, is the torch bearer of the Marxist movement in our country and his minions sing his praises at every turn. His Justice Department thinks nothing of labeling parents as domestic terrorists while looking the other way while real terrorist groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter burn down our cities and trash our Constitution. Biden has his Brown Shirts and he has his Propoganda arm in the national media. Here is what we know to be true. Power corrupts; Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The revolution is at our doorstep.
I tweeted something out the other day about the fact that I was willing to concede that Biden probably got at least some 40 million votes in the 2020 election when he ran against Trump. His final vote totals were somewhere in the 80 million vote range so where the fuck did the extra 40 million votes come from? As bad as Biden's approval numbers are now, it makes me wonder if they are not planning to steal yet another election in the upcoming mid-terms. I mean, if they can create 40 million ballots for Biden out of whole cloth then what will stop them from doing what they need to do come November? I don't want to be sitting here the day after the November election only to find out that the democrats did not lose the House and that they actually picked up seats in the Senate. I'll be calling foul from the rooftops. Then again, all of this talk about how far underwater Biden is may just be a ruse to fool Republicans into thinking that they don't have to go to the polls because they think they have it in the bag.
Just a quick update on this lesbian basketball player being held in Russia on drug charges. I may have been wrong about the White House not picking up the phone. Did I mention that she pleaded guilty to the charges? Anyway, the gay lobby is putting some serious pressure on Joey and Jill to do something to secure her release. What about all the other Americans being held in Russia, Mr President? Are they not queer enough? Do their cases not justify the intervention of you and your minions? Certainly, they have been held much longer than this basketball player and you've done nothing to help secure their release. And, more than likely, they've been held on charges less serious than this Rastafarian who likes to pack her own spliffs when she goes abroad. I say that she needs to do every day of her ten-year sentence if that is what she gets.
I'm trying to put this whole food security thing in perspective. Think globally here. There is apparently some famine-type thing going on in Africa that we're not hearing a whole lot about. You've got farmers in the Netherlands, the second-largest exporter of agricultural products behind the United States, taking to the streets in their tractors after an apparent land grab by their government, and then you have both the Chinese and Bill Gates from Microsoft buying up thousands of acres of farmland in the heartland of our country. Add to the mix the fact that the largest exporter of fertilizer, Ukraine, is currently under siege by the Russians who are blocking exports of wheat and fertilizer, and you can see how nations and other key players now presumably in control of the world's food supply, have maybe learned how to weaponize food supplies to gain political advantage. If you can control the food supply, you can control the people.
Maybe this is one of those George Soros deals. You know, the Hungarian billionaire who was, and probably still is, operating under the premise that the best way to conquer nations like the United States and other countries like the UK, is to flood the borders of these countries with millions of migrants who will, by their sheer number, overwhelm governments and support systems. When starting wars in these migrant-rich backwaters, or hellholes as Trump liked to call them, didn't force enough relocations to destabilize and destroy the abovementioned governments, Soros needed to employ yet more tactics from his quiver of Marxist arrows. He continues to fund the political campaigns of leftist district attorneys here in our country who, once elected, are changing our laws coast to coast to the detriment of the citizens in those communities. What hand, if any, is Soros playing in this latest volley of assaults on the planet's food supply? Is this just more Soros or is this something different? Food for thought.
If we didn't have some senile old fuck of a "president" like Joe Biden sitting in our White House and making decisions day after day that only make matters worse here in our country on any number of fronts, I might not give much thought to any of this. I don't think I'll be building a bunker or fallout shelter anytime soon but don't think for a moment that I'm not giving some serious thought to buying some backup foodstuffs. I think it's important to think longer-term here since, at least in the case of the fertilizer, we're several crop cycles away from seeing shortages on the shelves at our local stores. We all saw how, during the Covid crisis, people were in the stores buying up everything in sight and not giving a good godamn about the needs of the next guy and how he may or may not now be able to provide for his family because you bought more than you needed. Experience can be a cruel but necessary master. Oh, and if you think that I'm not still regretting having bent over for that Pfizer injection, you would be wrong. They put the fear of God in us and it worked.
I swear to God. Every time Bumbling Joe steps up to the microphone and the teleprompter you just never know what is going to come tumbling out of his mouth. He was making comments this morning about abortion or some such nonsense and he starts to read the actual words on the teleprompter which were never meant to be read aloud. He did it twice. Once he said, "End of quote." When he did it again, he read the words, "Repeat the line." I mean, who does this? How ungodly discomforting is this to we Americans who care about who has their fingers on the nuclear codes? Were he less senile, you could make the case that he just sucks at reading a teleprompter. At one point, his press secretary chimed in on Social Media to say that he said something that he didn't say. We've got the tape, you dumb shits. It's all over Twitter. Just stop.
I was sorry to hear about the assassination of Abe in Japan this morning. He and Trump were the best of buds and both were Nationalists to the bone. You rarely saw Abe without his red "Make America Great Again" when he was in the company of Trump here on American soil. Abe was not currently in power but his voice still resonates within the party he represented when he was in power. In fact, he was campaigning in support of his party on a street corner in Japan when he was killed with a homemade shotgun of sorts. This, of course, comes on the heels of Boris Johnson stepping down as leader of the Conservative party in the UK in the last few days and Macron losing his absolute majority in the parliament in France. Meanwhile, Biden becomes more bewildered by the day, Xi and Putin more powerful by the day, and Zelensky continues to fight a losing battle against a Russian bear who has still not declared what it is that he hopes to accomplish in Ukraine. Just a complete shit show.
Speaking about abortion, what is this crazy obession that the democrats have killing babies in the womb? This is the hill that they want to die on? This is their key to success in driving their voters to the polls in November? Right. I want to make sure that I can comtinue to be able to kill my child in utero if that is what I want to do. How narcissistic is that? You will carry that little mother fucker to term and you'll be happy about it, bitch! There are plenty of moms and dads who would be tickled to be able to adopt your child so that has to count for something. No? These bastards would rather disaptch their Antifa thugs to the healthcare centers where they can unleash their vitriol and violence on people wanting nothing more than to do the Lord's work saving unborn children and the desperate mothers who are in dire need of their services.
I'll end this week's screed with just a little more on what I've learned playing chess. I mentioned that I've been playing the "computer" and not a real person for a week or two now. It doesn't matter to me who I play but, truth be told, I'm not a very good loser so knowing that there isn't a "real" person out there in the ether gloating every time I lose a game online is somewhat comforting. The lengths I go to not to lose, even though I know that my opponent is a computer, are quite exraordinary. Reading between the lines, that means playing beginners for an extended period of time when playing beginners offers what I can only describe as diminishing returns when it comes to upping my game and geting myself ready for the next level of play.
I've played a couple of games with intermediate level "computer" opponents and, despite losing my arse and losing my arse badly, I now know what playing a better opponent looks like. I'd like to think of my style of play as aggresive but aggressive only gets you so far in the game of chess. It seems to me, at least in terms of my limited expereince playing the game, that defense is the name of the game. I liken it to the tale about the tortoise and the hare. I need to be less like the hare and more like the tortoise. To the extent that your opponent's moves tell you a lot about what it takes to win or lose, I'm beginning to think that my time is better spent playing the intermediate players even if I do lose a lot of those games. If nothing else, maybe I'll learn to be a better loser.
I'm feeling the need to get an even earlier start to the day on my bike today now that summer is officially underway here on the coast. The cars on Ocean Boulevard start to pile up early this time of year and before you can say "Jack Spratt" my bike path is gone. Poof! That means that I'm watching my flank not only for children jutting out from in between cars but for cars and their drivers that could care less about my welfare. I have a couple of alternate routes that I can take but I'll be damned if I'll have to take another route just because some out-of-towners show up with their surfboards, children, and beach paraphernalia in tow. This is my damn town!
The missus is still counting sheep but she'll be up and about soon throwing on water for her tea and making her way onto our back deck while she waits for the water to come to a boil. That in itself is not enough to take me off track here but the less she engages me the better. I don't have the heart to tell her not to talk to me while I'm doing this here journal thing but I think she does her best to occupy herself knowing as she does that I'm still busy doing what I do at this hour of the morning. She said something to me once about staying in bed when she wakes up so as not to disturb me in the morning. I told her in no uncertain terms that that was not necessary. I think I'm pretty much impervious to distractions at this point when it comes to getting in my journal time.
I started reading a book yesterday and after maybe 20 pages or so I decided that the story itself was so far-fetched that I couldn't in good conscience continue reading the book. The writing itself was quite good so I was surprised that the storyline went the way that it did. I'll have to find a review or two of this book to see if others don't agree with me. Maybe it's me. With so many books at my disposal, I can afford to pick them up and put them down at my leisure. If I never pick them up again, so be it. I've now moved on to a recently released book about the life and times of Clarence Thomas. The format is a little weird in that Clarence is being interviewed and he's responding to questions asked. So far, so good. As I said, there's no shortage of good books out there.
I asked the missus recently if she wouldn't mind joining me for a game of chess. Sadly, she declined. I think it irks her when I beat her at the games we play so, needless to say, we don't play many games. I don't always beat her, mind you, but I must win more often than not otherwise she wouldn't get this pissy when all I'm looking to do is have a little fun with my better half. I'm not even a chess player truth be told. I know how the pieces move on the board and that's about it. I'm not even sure where this hankering to play a game of chess comes from. Maybe the thought of getting better at something I'm not particularly good at has a certain amount of appeal to me. Who doesn't like getting better at things?
Where there's a will, there's a way. I signed on to a chess game online at Chess.com and I was off to the races. Call me a bully but I signed up to play a beginner so I could get a few wins under my belt before playing a real opponent. I think the computer that I'm playing makes intentional mistakes so as not to whip my ass too badly. The missus sees me playing now and I'm quite sure that she thinks I'm playing with some honey sitting in a smoke-filled gaming parlor somewhere in Lithuania. "I'm playing a computer, little darlings," I assure her. "There is nothing to worry about." I am getting better so that feels good. I think this is one of those games where you can read all the books on the planet but there's just no substitute for actually playing the game.
If the good Lord is willin' and the creek don't rise, we'll throw together a cold tortellini salad today. The number of things that you can add to a salad like that is, well, in a phrase, without bounds. I do think it's possible to fuck it up so there's that. Too much of the wrong something would do it. I'm thinking that broccoli is one of those somethings. We'll add some oil but we can't allow the salad to coagulate after sitting in the fridge for a bit so it will have to be a blend of olive oil and vegetable oil. This is a five-cheese tortellini so it will provide just the right balance of proteins and carbohydrates. I'm also going to take another run at that cold Swiss Chard salad I had a good mind to make the other day before I had to throw it all out because of the red ants that came from God only knows where. Who said that there are no such things as second chances?
It's almost Pavlovian. The minute that we see some kind of mass shooting here in the United States, the Democrats are out in force demanding more gun control. Take the shooting in Highland Park over this past holiday weekend for example. The bodies weren't even cold yet and the left and their propaganda arm, the media, were hitting the airwaves whipping up a frenzied and fearful public into believing that if every last gun were confiscated that there would be fewer to no murders on the streets in our towns and cities. What they're not telling you is that the deranged shooter was an Antifa acolyte who, had he not had access to a gun, would have used a motor vehicle or some other weapon of mass destruction to kill Americans on our nation's birthday, the Fourth of July.
That was the whole point. If you're convinced that our nation's founding was conceived out of racism or some other ridiculous corollary, then you want nothing more than to attack and tear down every last institution associated with said corollary. A random shooting isn't going to get the job done. You need to make a statement and what better way to make a statement than to bring a gun to a crowded theater or event and prove to your compatriots that you are in it to win it. This Highland Park shooting wasn't a hate crime if you're thinking in terms of skin color or sexual preference but it was a hate crime nonetheless. It was hatred for America and everything that America stands for.
I don't know what you can do to prevent these kinds of things from happening. Clearly, the usual deterrents aren't getting the job done. The threat of spending the rest of your days behind bars isn't enough anymore. These nutty adherents are willing to lose their lives if that's what it takes. If they survive, they will most likely find a constituency of like-minded fallen angels with whom to hobnob once they are behind bars. Incidentally, where were all the good guys with guns when this loon started shooting from the rooftop in Highland Park yesterday? Oh, that's right, this happened in Illinois where they have the strictest gun laws in the nation. Maybe we need more good guys with guns and fewer laws that nobody enforces.
We're still on track for the delivery of Mrs G's couch on Friday of this week. I don't know why but I've been a little preoccupied with the notion that the deliverymen are going to show up at the appointed hour and Mrs G's old couch will still be there in the space reserved for the new couch. We discussed removal of the old couch several times with Mrs G and she had a couple of ideas in mind that might, at a minimum, get the couch moved to the other side of her living room if not out the door. We got an email from her yesterday informing us that she had made arrangements with the management of her facility to take care of the couch. I don't know if that means they are coming to take it away or maybe, and this would be fine too, just move it out of the way.
Either way, that takes care of the potential problem with the delivery of her new couch. It's one less thing to worry about. Mrs G wanted to replace an old bedside table so we've been working on that as well. She said something to the missus about not wanting a table too large as it might have to fit into a smaller space should she move to a smaller unit. I don't even know what that means. Maybe the sudden passing of a good friend at her facility has her rethinking all of her plans as it relates to her most recent furniture purchases. Maybe this is no different than the urge that one gets when they get on in years to see to it that they don't burden their children or anyone else with having to remove or arrange for the disposal of excess personal belongings after their passing.
Is anyone else following this Brittany Griner story? She's the nappy-haired and heavily tattooed semi-professional basketball player who is being detained in Russia after officials found some marijuana-related paraphernalia in her suitcase at the airport. It's hard to say what's to become of Ms Griner exactly but it's clear thus far that the only thing she's getting from the Biden administration is lip service. Apparently, her phone calls to Joey and Jill are going unanswered at the White House. Her wife, yes, I said her wife, has pleaded with whoever will listen time and time again to assist with the efforts to have her wife released from custody and returned to her rightful place in the United States. She's even gone so far as to suggest that were it Michael Jordan who was being detained that the Biden Administration would be doing more than they are currently doing to negotiate her release.
I just don't know that there is a sufficient hue and cry from any particular political constituency that would otherwise benefit Biden so I'm guessing that is why he's letting her rot in her cell without making so much as an overture for her release. She is both a member of a marginalized community and the gay community so there's that. That has to count for something. No? Maybe Biden's standard fee of 10% for the Big Guy is something that maybe the Griner family or fan club at large is either unable or unwilling to pay. I certainly don't see her teammates, or for that matter, her team, stepping up to the plate with an offer of any kind. Getting busted for carrying spliffs in a foreign country is hardly the kind of headline that any sports club welcomes so Brittany, as dear as she may be to her club, is probably now persona non grata. Brittany who?
Trump has a rally coming up this weekend in Alaska to benefit the Primary opponent of Senator Lisa Murkowski. When is the last time that a president campaigned in Alaska? I'm guessing not in my lifetime. It should be one hell of a rally since I'm guessing that Trump is a rock star in good standing in the eyes of many an Alaskan resident. It wouldn't surprise me to hear that people traveled far and wide to see Trump and some maybe even by dogsled. I'm not sure where the rally is but I'll be tuned in here in the States to watch the rally. With bells on, as they say in the business. Nobody does a rally like Trump and it will be a once-in-a-lifetime event for many Alaskans so it is definitely not to be missed. How much it helps Murkowski's opponent, I'm not sure. I guess I would say that it can't hurt. With any luck, Murkowski will defeat Murkowski. She's that bad.
We had such high hopes for dinner last night. The missus bought a nice piece of swordfish and a handful of fresh green beans which she planned to steam. I thought the piece of fish was a little small for the two of us but that's neither here nor there. I turned the oven /broiler on around 5:30 and no sooner had I turned the oven on than our electricity went off. Well, so much for that. I threw the fish back in the fridge as quickly as possible and the missus and I went to work trying to figure out why we had lost our electricity and when we might be getting it back. It turned out that there was an accident in town and we wouldn't be getting our electricity back for the better part of an hour and a half.
We have a generator but I had recently drained the oil out of the generator and I was expecting delivery of the replacement oil so the unit was sitting in our garage with no oil in it. That wasn't the biggest of deals since I had other oil I could use so I threw it all together and got the generator up and running in about 10 minutes. The generator is nice but it doesn't power everything in the house and it definitely doesn't power up the oven so fish was back off the menu for at least one more night. So much for buying a nice piece of fresh fish to have for dinner. Oh, and this generator is one of those generators that you have to wheel in and out of the garage every time you want to use it. One of these days, we'll arrange for a fixed unit. Not sure why we didn't do that the first time around.
One thing that I discovered when the power went out was that the missus didn't have a clue as to how to turn the computer back on. Say what? We never turn our computer off so I suppose she'd likely never have to know how to turn it on if it's never off. That said, we've had computers for decades so you'd think that she might have occasion here and there to turn it on or maybe off here and there. I was actually stunned when she told me that she didn't know how to turn it on. I suppose that she could have figured it out if I for some reason wasn't around to offer her instruction, but that isn't the point. This is one of those teach the person to fish type deals so he or she can feed themselves instead of being spoon-fed each and every day of their life. I suppose that's on me.
The latest lunacy coming out of the Biden Administration is that they have been selling oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR) to other countries in Europe and China. So, we Americans have been paying nearly $6 a gallon for gas, and rather than use that oil from the SPR to reduce prices at the pump here in America, Biden is selling it to our allies and our enemies. You can't make this shit up. Where are the articles of impeachment from our congressman? Biden is aiding and abetting the Communist Chinese and not a fucking word out of anyone in our Senate or House. How much is Joey is making off of these deals? Or, are these sales a payback for the billions that the Chinese have invested over the years in failed ventures of Joey and Hunter Biden? Where are the fucking special prosecutors? Is everyone asleep at the wheel?
I even got a text last night from my brother from another mother on this subject. I dare say that he's even more critical and intolerant of Biden than I am if that's possible. I think his vitriol stems from the fact that Biden and his minions have brought him to near ruin at a time when he was looking to retire sooner rather than later. I could be wrong about that and we've not discussed it at length so it's mere speculation on my part. I'm also guessing that he sees what every other God-fearing American sees when they see Joey on the stump reading from his prepared cue cards while drooling and looking, more often than not, bewildered and dazed. I mean, this is what passes for an American president these days? How far have we fallen as a nation? I guess what they say about elections having consequences and stolen elections having catastrophic consequences is right as rain.
I think we need to be very clear-eyed about this green energy bullshit that the liberals are trying to force down our throats. In a way, it ties into Biden's selling our petroleum reserve to our enemies. He's blocked or stopped every effort to kickstart our domestic oil production in order to further his dystopian green energy nightmare. As a nation, we have neither the infrastructure nor the technology to support these so-called green energy solutions. Our enemies know this all too well and they have been very successful in selling this so-called green revolution to the Marxists in our midst who are now in control of our government. It has made us weaker as a nation. One of these days the people who have lined their pockets with monies from our enemies in order to bring down our country will pay a price for their treasonous behavior. Let's hope we still have a country to call our own when the time comes.
One of the things that has become abundantly clear since Biden took office is that the so-called liberals and democrats have shown us who they really are. They are not the blue dog democrats from days of old. They are leftists at best and Marxists at worst. Not one of them wants what's best for our country. They condone each and everything Biden does no matter how foolish or wrong-headed. The ends always justify the means. Biden, as sad and demented as he is, is the torch bearer of the Marxist movement in our country and his minions sing his praises at every turn. His Justice Department thinks nothing of labeling parents as domestic terrorists while looking the other way while real terrorist groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter burn down our cities and trash our Constitution. Biden has his Brown Shirts and he has his Propoganda arm in the national media. Here is what we know to be true. Power corrupts; Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The revolution is at our doorstep.
I tweeted something out the other day about the fact that I was willing to concede that Biden probably got at least some 40 million votes in the 2020 election when he ran against Trump. His final vote totals were somewhere in the 80 million vote range so where the fuck did the extra 40 million votes come from? As bad as Biden's approval numbers are now, it makes me wonder if they are not planning to steal yet another election in the upcoming mid-terms. I mean, if they can create 40 million ballots for Biden out of whole cloth then what will stop them from doing what they need to do come November? I don't want to be sitting here the day after the November election only to find out that the democrats did not lose the House and that they actually picked up seats in the Senate. I'll be calling foul from the rooftops. Then again, all of this talk about how far underwater Biden is may just be a ruse to fool Republicans into thinking that they don't have to go to the polls because they think they have it in the bag.
Just a quick update on this lesbian basketball player being held in Russia on drug charges. I may have been wrong about the White House not picking up the phone. Did I mention that she pleaded guilty to the charges? Anyway, the gay lobby is putting some serious pressure on Joey and Jill to do something to secure her release. What about all the other Americans being held in Russia, Mr President? Are they not queer enough? Do their cases not justify the intervention of you and your minions? Certainly, they have been held much longer than this basketball player and you've done nothing to help secure their release. And, more than likely, they've been held on charges less serious than this Rastafarian who likes to pack her own spliffs when she goes abroad. I say that she needs to do every day of her ten-year sentence if that is what she gets.
I'm trying to put this whole food security thing in perspective. Think globally here. There is apparently some famine-type thing going on in Africa that we're not hearing a whole lot about. You've got farmers in the Netherlands, the second-largest exporter of agricultural products behind the United States, taking to the streets in their tractors after an apparent land grab by their government, and then you have both the Chinese and Bill Gates from Microsoft buying up thousands of acres of farmland in the heartland of our country. Add to the mix the fact that the largest exporter of fertilizer, Ukraine, is currently under siege by the Russians who are blocking exports of wheat and fertilizer, and you can see how nations and other key players now presumably in control of the world's food supply, have maybe learned how to weaponize food supplies to gain political advantage. If you can control the food supply, you can control the people.
Maybe this is one of those George Soros deals. You know, the Hungarian billionaire who was, and probably still is, operating under the premise that the best way to conquer nations like the United States and other countries like the UK, is to flood the borders of these countries with millions of migrants who will, by their sheer number, overwhelm governments and support systems. When starting wars in these migrant-rich backwaters, or hellholes as Trump liked to call them, didn't force enough relocations to destabilize and destroy the abovementioned governments, Soros needed to employ yet more tactics from his quiver of Marxist arrows. He continues to fund the political campaigns of leftist district attorneys here in our country who, once elected, are changing our laws coast to coast to the detriment of the citizens in those communities. What hand, if any, is Soros playing in this latest volley of assaults on the planet's food supply? Is this just more Soros or is this something different? Food for thought.
If we didn't have some senile old fuck of a "president" like Joe Biden sitting in our White House and making decisions day after day that only make matters worse here in our country on any number of fronts, I might not give much thought to any of this. I don't think I'll be building a bunker or fallout shelter anytime soon but don't think for a moment that I'm not giving some serious thought to buying some backup foodstuffs. I think it's important to think longer-term here since, at least in the case of the fertilizer, we're several crop cycles away from seeing shortages on the shelves at our local stores. We all saw how, during the Covid crisis, people were in the stores buying up everything in sight and not giving a good godamn about the needs of the next guy and how he may or may not now be able to provide for his family because you bought more than you needed. Experience can be a cruel but necessary master. Oh, and if you think that I'm not still regretting having bent over for that Pfizer injection, you would be wrong. They put the fear of God in us and it worked.
I swear to God. Every time Bumbling Joe steps up to the microphone and the teleprompter you just never know what is going to come tumbling out of his mouth. He was making comments this morning about abortion or some such nonsense and he starts to read the actual words on the teleprompter which were never meant to be read aloud. He did it twice. Once he said, "End of quote." When he did it again, he read the words, "Repeat the line." I mean, who does this? How ungodly discomforting is this to we Americans who care about who has their fingers on the nuclear codes? Were he less senile, you could make the case that he just sucks at reading a teleprompter. At one point, his press secretary chimed in on Social Media to say that he said something that he didn't say. We've got the tape, you dumb shits. It's all over Twitter. Just stop.
I was sorry to hear about the assassination of Abe in Japan this morning. He and Trump were the best of buds and both were Nationalists to the bone. You rarely saw Abe without his red "Make America Great Again" when he was in the company of Trump here on American soil. Abe was not currently in power but his voice still resonates within the party he represented when he was in power. In fact, he was campaigning in support of his party on a street corner in Japan when he was killed with a homemade shotgun of sorts. This, of course, comes on the heels of Boris Johnson stepping down as leader of the Conservative party in the UK in the last few days and Macron losing his absolute majority in the parliament in France. Meanwhile, Biden becomes more bewildered by the day, Xi and Putin more powerful by the day, and Zelensky continues to fight a losing battle against a Russian bear who has still not declared what it is that he hopes to accomplish in Ukraine. Just a complete shit show.
Speaking about abortion, what is this crazy obession that the democrats have killing babies in the womb? This is the hill that they want to die on? This is their key to success in driving their voters to the polls in November? Right. I want to make sure that I can comtinue to be able to kill my child in utero if that is what I want to do. How narcissistic is that? You will carry that little mother fucker to term and you'll be happy about it, bitch! There are plenty of moms and dads who would be tickled to be able to adopt your child so that has to count for something. No? These bastards would rather disaptch their Antifa thugs to the healthcare centers where they can unleash their vitriol and violence on people wanting nothing more than to do the Lord's work saving unborn children and the desperate mothers who are in dire need of their services.
I'll end this week's screed with just a little more on what I've learned playing chess. I mentioned that I've been playing the "computer" and not a real person for a week or two now. It doesn't matter to me who I play but, truth be told, I'm not a very good loser so knowing that there isn't a "real" person out there in the ether gloating every time I lose a game online is somewhat comforting. The lengths I go to not to lose, even though I know that my opponent is a computer, are quite exraordinary. Reading between the lines, that means playing beginners for an extended period of time when playing beginners offers what I can only describe as diminishing returns when it comes to upping my game and geting myself ready for the next level of play.
I've played a couple of games with intermediate level "computer" opponents and, despite losing my arse and losing my arse badly, I now know what playing a better opponent looks like. I'd like to think of my style of play as aggresive but aggressive only gets you so far in the game of chess. It seems to me, at least in terms of my limited expereince playing the game, that defense is the name of the game. I liken it to the tale about the tortoise and the hare. I need to be less like the hare and more like the tortoise. To the extent that your opponent's moves tell you a lot about what it takes to win or lose, I'm beginning to think that my time is better spent playing the intermediate players even if I do lose a lot of those games. If nothing else, maybe I'll learn to be a better loser.
POS
03/07/22 13:29
What are the chances that we see a Trump-DeSantis ticket in 2024? Wouldn't that be something? They say that DeSantis is Trump without all the baggage. It would be an unbelievable ticket to be sure. And, who do the democrats have? Demented Joe? Cackling Kamala? Mr "I'm on maternity leave" Butt-Edge-Edge? It's a clown show from the left and our country has had enough of them after a little more than a year. We want our low gas prices back and we want our laws respected regardless of the political party you belong to. Is that too fucking much to ask? And how about putting a few turrets along our southern borders to protect our citizenry from the marauding and militant illegals carrying drugs and disease into our country day after day and night after night?
It was so funny. Jake Tapper (CNN) is overseas covering the G7 and he sat down for an interview with Boris Johnson. You know, the Prime Minister of Britain. That Boris. I'm still not sure how a child born in New York City grows up to be the Prime Minister of Britain but that's a story for another day. Anyway, Toadie Jake asks Boris a number of pointed questions about the January 6th hearings and all the hullabaloo around Trump and everything that happened on that fateful day. You could tell that Jake wanted very badly to have Boris rake Trump over the coals. That would make for some terrific headlines going into the Mid Terms. Boris was having none of it. Just an epic fail! What else have you got?
I saw a couple of photos coming out of the G7 which were interesting. One photo had the lot of them sitting around a roundtable looking mildly amused. Upon closer inspection, I couldn't help but notice that Joey Biden had his cue cards propped up on his lap and out of view of the other participants. You know he can't speak in complete sentences without his cue cards. Right? When is one or more of these "leaders' going to drop a dime on this fool and call him out for the demented fool that he is? What are they afraid of? Are they afraid that they'll pay a price somehow? Maybe they won't be invited to the White House? You know that to a person they know dementia when they see it. Right?
I don't know how I feel about the Republican gubernatorial primary in New York coming up the day after tomorrow. Zeldin seems like a likable enough chap but I have to wonder if likable gets you across the finish line? Giuliani, on the other hand, is about as tough as they come and maybe that's what New York needs after years of democratic "leadership." We're talking Andrew here and not Rudy just so you know. He's Rudy's boy, setting aside the four years that he worked in the Trump Administration, so he has the genes. I haven't watched all the debates so I'm not sure who is professing to be more MAGA but if I had to guess I'd say Andrew takes the lead there. One of the two will win. The real question is, who can win in the general? I just don't see people getting behind Hochul.
The caterwauling on the left continues after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade. If I hear one more loon cry out, "My body, my choice," I think I'm going to lose it. This was another topic that Jake Tapper of CNN tried to get Boris Johnson to weigh in on. Boris was just not willing to go so far as to say that he disagreed with the ruling coming out of our highest court in the land. He was about as diplomatic as one might expect from a sitting Prime Minister of a great country like Great Britain.
You couldn't listen to that interview without thinking to yourself that this is what a normal functioning leader sounds like. Compare that to the clown Biden who hasn't had a press conference in months and even when he does show up he's not without his cue cards. Just to be clear, the cue cards give him talking points but they are otherwise useless when it comes to commenting or responding to questions extemporaneously. More to the point, why wasn't Jake interviewing Biden? I think we know the answer to that question. The world knows the answer to that question. As an American through and through, I'm embarrassed for our country with this clown sitting in the White House.
I think we need to gird ourselves for the months ahead. If you think that the caterwauling is over the top now, it's likely to get a lot worse as we close in on the Mid Term elections in November. The media will be doing story after story about people of color and people in marginalized communities who are beset with this or that woe because of the decisions made by our Supreme Court as it relates to the abortion issue. We'll hear our share of stories about women who have lost their lives due to abortions done in back alleys, women who couldn't afford to travel to other states where abortions are legal and now have to bear the burden of having unwanted children, and children who will go unnourished because their mother couldn't afford to abort her latest in a burgeoning brood.
What I think we need, but it's something that we'll likely not see anytime soon, is a video of an actual abortion. The left doesn't want you to see just how hideous this practice is and they will go to extremes to make sure that you don't see it. None of it, of course, would pass muster on prime-time television and that probably is just as true when you consider cable television. I don't know how we get that story out in all of its hideousness but, were we to inject it into the mainstream of the American consciousness however that happens, you'd see a lot of suburban moms coast to coast changing their party affiliation from democrat to republican. We need to take the wind out of this "My body, my choice, movement at all costs. The Supreme Court decision is just the beginning. It's now all hands on deck.
I don't know how much more wining I can take. We had the Roe vs Wade decision and that was literally life-affirming. We had the gun ruling out of the Supreme Court and that put guns back in the hands, waistbands, and holsters of law-abiding citizens in the state of New York. That strengthens, not weakens, our collective second amendment rights. Then, just yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 for a coach who was fired from his position for kneeling in prayer on the field before his team's game. If that doesn't have you standing up and giving the baby Jesus a hallelujah, I don't know what does. Free speech is alive and well in our great republic but don't take my word for it. The Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, says so. And, how about that ruling from the NY Supreme Court yesterday saying, in so many words, that illegal aliens aren't eligible to vote in local elections? We're on a roll!
The missus and I drove into Boston yesterday for a follow-up visitation for the missus. We decided that we wouldn't spend the night before in a hotel so that had us up at the crack of dawn looking to beat the traffic into the city. I wouldn't say that it was a painless drive once we hit the road at 5:30 am but it was pretty close. Weather conditions were good, traffic was maybe a little lighter than expected, and all told, we probably caught a couple of breaks here and there which put us in the city somewhere around 7 am. With time to waste before the 8:30 appointment, the missus and I walked across town and down to Faneuil Hall and back. So many familiar sights and sounds. We walked through a city just waking up and there wasn't but a hint of the hustle and bustle that was to follow.
I'd be lying if I didn't tell you that the so-called walk across town was a bit of a trudge-fest. I was carrying a backpack and, at some point along the way, I noticed that the missus was struggling so I put her handbag inside my backpack. She may not have said it but I could tell that she was feeling relieved not to have to carry that bag even one more block. We were a little disappointed to find that so many of the shops and stores that we used to frequent down in the Faneuil Hall area had yet to open their doors. What we wouldn't have given to have maybe a little muffin and maybe a little liquid refreshment of some kind. We were also quite amazed to see some of the stores and restaurants that we used to frequent back in the day were still standing and still in business.
By the time the missus and I got back home in the late afternoon, we were reminded of the fact that there is a certain resiliency of mind that comes with doing that which is routine. You get on that treadmill of life and familiarity becomes the path of least resistance. Intentionally or not, you construct guardrails along the way which make for a more predictable and maybe less perilous path day in and day out. The minute you get off that treadmill and start doing things and going places the likes of which we did yesterday, you start to appreciate just how exhausting getting off the beaten path can prove to be. By the time we got home, our collective equilibrium was turned inside out and upside down. I wanted nothing more than to get back on that treadmill of mine and return to the fantasy land that is my life. I wasn't alone.
What is this I'm hearing about NATO increasing troop strength in Europe from 30k to 100k? And then you have Biden giving some speech in Europe about tossing another few billion to do this or that to assist Ukraine. Add to the mix comments from Russia about hitting London with a nuclear device if things were to go down a certain path and we've got ourselves a shit show on steroids. So, after all of this nonsense about letting Ukraine fight its own battles on its territory, it's now time to up the ante and do what? Is NATO planning to declare war on Russia? Are we looking at World War three here? What is this bewildering old fool, Biden, getting us into? Does he think that his chances of political survival, and those of his party, are more likely or even enhanced if he stands tall in the breach as a wartime president? I hate to tell him but that is the last thing we Americans want or need. Nothing could be scarier than a demented old fool like Biden with his shaky hands on the nuclear briefcase.
I wonder sometimes if I don't sound like a broken record week in and week out in this here blog. Not that I should care about such things but no one wants to come across as humdrum when all is said and done. I guess I just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other and maybe care a little less about where it takes me or where I end up. Continuity is the key. Any good blogger will tell you that writing every day is a discipline in itself. It's taken me a good while to get to the point where I have the discipline to sit down and do what I do here every morning, well almost every morning, of every week. And, truth be told, there is no shortage of grist for the mill as it were so thank the baby Jesus for that.
I think the January 6th committee in our nation's Capitol really stepped in it yesterday. You know, that "bipartisan" group of congressmen looking into what transpired on January 6th, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. I don't know that the committee's goal is to send a criminal referral to the Department of Justice so much as it is to dirty up Trump and render him ineligible to run for president in 2024. The committee called an emergency meeting yesterday to hear the testimony of a surprise witness. It was all hands on deck for the Main Street media. This was the moment when they would tighten the proverbial noose around Trump's neck and having a surprise witness would only heighten the drama and, with any luck, exponentially increase the number of eyeballs on the event. By the end of the day, all one could reasonably conclude was that the hearing was more akin than not to that offered up by the serial liar, Christine Blasey Ford, during the Senate hearings for Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court, Justice Kavanaugh.
Some of the stories told by the surprise witness were ludicrous on their face. Many of her stories were second and third hand which, under any reasonable cross-examination, would never pass muster in a court of law. In fact, her accounts were immediately disputed by any number of people who spoke up and offered to come in and give their own testimony under oath to the contrary. It was so bad that every media outlet, seeing that things were going south in a hurry as they too watched the testimony of this witness, took members of the committee who were willing to be interviewed after the fact to task about the credibility of their witness. If the committee thought for even a minute that this witness was going to be the John Dean (Watergate fame) of the hearings, they were sadly mistaken. If anything, this sham of a hearing put the credibility of the entire committee on display and it exposed them for the kangaroo court that they are. Good luck finding another job in Washington, DC, missy.
Of course, you're going to have your clapping seals on the left talking about how devastating the testimony was for Trump and his minions who allegedly ran a failed coup on that fateful day. If I had to guess, I'd say that this particular witness made it less likely that the Department of Justice will indict Trump anytime soon. We all know the DOJ is watching the hearings very closely and, given half a chance, would do Biden's bidding and indict Trump at the drop of a hat if they had even a scintilla of evidence that Trump was behind any of it. It's one thing to indict some of Trump's people for their involvement in whatever schemes they can dream up and it's quite another to indict an ex-president of our country. That's banana republic-level stuff and not something that we ever want to see in our country. Then again, there's a lot about the Biden presidency that says "banana republic" so you know what they say about people who assume things.
I'm waking up this morning to a Zeldin win in the New York gubernatorial primary. He won by a pretty good margin so that's interesting. I thought that the Giuliana name might have helped Andrew Giuliani coming down the stretch given how his dad, Rudy, is infamous in his own right being the ex-mayor of NYC and all. What are we to make of Zeldin's win? Is Rudy and the Giuliani name somehow tarnished or tainted as a result of all the shenanigans in the wake of the 2020 election? Did Zeldin win or did Giuliani lose? Is it possible that the voters in New York found Rudy's son too Trump-like? He certainly embraced Trump and the MAGA agenda so that has to count for something. No? Maybe New York voters know a good thing or two about what it takes for a republican to win the governor's seat in the otherwise very liberal state of New York.
Mrs G's new couch will be delivered next week so I hope she has everything in order. That is to say, she needs to arrange for the people running her facility to come and pick up her old couch so the guys delivering her new couch have a place to put it when they arrive. She was going on and on the other day about how the people at her facility have to wait for the weekend when they have access to a vehicle to use to move the couch. She was referring to the employees of the facility who have friends or family who can use an extra piece of furniture or two if and when they become available. Then, of course, you can always pay the facility to come and take the couch away like any other piece of trash. What I don't want to happen is to have the deliverymen arrive and have to deal one way or another with the old couch. Why should I even care? Right?
I think the missus thinks that she and I need to be there when they make the delivery. I'm not so sure. I think that Mrs G is perfectly capable of directing these fellas as necessary once they arrive on her doorstep. Getting them to her doorstep could be another story. They needn't carry the couch through any other door than the door that leads into her apartment from the outside of the building. Do not go into the front entrance of the building and do not bother signing in one way or another. All of that depends on how Mrs G directs them once she gets their call in the 30 minutes leading up to their arrival. Here's my advice to Mrs G: You can do this! Git er done!
This Monkeypox thing seems to getting a life of its own. Have you seen the pictures? That is one nasty affliction! They say it's spread by exchanging bodily fluids and is found primarily in the gay community. What, straight folks don't exchange bodily fluids? What are we talking about here? I gather that it's not all that deadly so it's not like it's a five-alarm fire or anything. It's also eerily reminiscent of what we saw during the AIDS epidemic in the '70s although people with AIDS back in the day were dropping like flies and there were no cures homestyle or otherwise. It's doubtful that you would see people suffering from this malady out in public but I, for one, will be keeping an eye out. They lied to us about Covid and how it was transmitted or not transmitted and a lot of people died so color me skeptical. I'm still not wearing a mask.
Do you remember me talking about the missus and how she works from time to time with someone who lives in another state? Sometimes she travels and sometimes she can do what she needs to do from home. Sometimes, she'll get a call from her employer out of the blue asking her this or that question having mostly to do with his computer. Either he can't find what he's looking for or he doesn't know how to do this that or the other thing that he is looking to accomplish. What I may have mentioned in passing is that I wanted very badly to find an application that would allow her to see and control his desktop. That would be just what the doctor ordered. In other words, the bee's knees. It would have to be a cross-platform application given that there are two operating systems in play. Well, we finally pulled all of that together and it works like a charm. There is a god.
I'm not sure that it means that she will be traveling less but what it does mean is that the time they spend together on the phone when she's working from home will be significantly less since she can now just hop on his desktop and cut to the chase. He can even watch her do what she does on his desktop in real-time so think of it as a learning tool. His limitations when it comes to the computer are mainly age-related but that can be a bear when you're not all that nimble or knowledgeable when it comes to computers to begin with. The missus knows just enough to be dangerous and that's a good thing. I'm there with an assist if necessary and I try as much as possible to stay undetected and in the background. Our only regret is that we didn't find out about this application a long time ago. God only knows that it would have saved everyone a lot of time and maybe even a trip or two to his home. Oh, well.
The Ev man is over for a visit today. I suspect that he'll stay the day, have dinner with us, and then return home. I'd like to take a look in his car while he's here and take everything out of his car that he doesn't need to be carrying around with him. I'm talking mostly clothes here which he's thrown in the back of his car for a variety of reasons and, for the most part, never got around to taking them up to his apartment. It's just a Hodge podge of stuff that he might as well leave here instead of carrying them around in his car. I'm a little worried that I'll find some half-eaten burgers or worse when I start to look around so that's another reason not to be loading up your car like a homeless person. I'm kidding a little bit about the burgers but I have thrown out my share of leftover bags from various fast food joints in going through his car here and there. What twenty-something isn't organizationally challenged. Right?
It sure was nice of our neighbor to drop off some Swiss chard from her garden. I had high hopes that I could make a nice salad for the missus and myself. Our neighbor gave us some last year and it sat so long in our refrigerator that I finally had to toss it out. I didn't want to make the same mistake this year so I assembled all the ingredients I thought I needed just ahead of the lunch hour in order to come up with the salads. I laid out the fresh lemons and olive oil for the dressing and I cut up some cherry tomatoes and Kalamari olives in preparation for the dressing and the mix-ins. I started to devein the leaves when, much to my horror, I started to see a bunch of little red ants running around on my cutting board. Damn. The more leaves I unpacked the more red ants appeared. I'll likely not give my benefactor this particular feedback but neither could I with good conscious move forward when moving forward meant not knowing how many red ants I'd missed or not seen in my desperate attempt to salvage the salads I had planned. It was over. Scuttled. Damn.
The Supreme Court issued their final findings of the season today before going out on vacation or whatever. One of the rulings had to do with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA has been doing the bidding of Biden and his clownish administration by issuing this ruling and that ruling is all designed to further their goals as it relates to Climate Change. It's the religion of the looney left don't you know. Their goal is to completely de-carbonize our economy at a time when any and all alternative technologies are in their infancy. By design or default, this nonsense puts our country at a distinct disadvantage to other countries like China and Russia who would given half a chance, eat our lunch either economically or militarily. Neither is acceptable.
The end result of this ruling is that Congress will now make the rules that the EPA was previously responsible for making and the EPA will be left with the responsibility of enforcing the legislation coming out of Congress. The good news is that getting Congress to agree on anything given the polarization of politics these days means that the "polluters" and the industries that have had their hands tied due to the EPA will now have free rein to do as they please without the oversight and heavy hand of the regulators of the EPA. Less regulation has always gone hand in hand with increased productivity and enhanced profits for corporations. The Climate Change nutters will have to find another way to vent their collective anger and rage if they are ever to survive in this new environment of ours. We Climate Change deniers are just getting the party started thanks to our wonderfully wise and wildly conservative members of the Supreme Court. Let the pissing and pearl-clutching begin!
This recession stuff is tricky. Technically, according to some people who pay attention to such things, a recession just means that we have two negative GDP readings in a row. With inflation raging in excess of 8% depending on which sectors you're watching, it is just unimaginably expensive for people to get by week after week. Gas prices aren't helping at $5 to $10 a gallon depending on where you live in the United States, and with winter coming, prices for home heating oil are going to leave a lot of families huddling together just to keep warm. Commodities are at an all-time high which means everything and anything you want to do costs more. When is the last time you got an estimate for a roof replacement? It was likely twice as expensive compared to just 12 months ago. Add to that the supply chain issues, and shortages will effectively drive prices even higher if that's possible. And then you have interest rates that are going up but don't even come close to keeping up with inflation. It's a witch's brew through and through.
The combination of interest rates and inflation is doing a good job of suppressing demand. With slowing growth rates due to lessening demand, prices are going to come down on everything from commodities to the price of labor. When you have less demand, companies need fewer people so layoff's become commonplace. With more people out of work, and fewer jobs available for those looking for work, defaults on everything from bank loans to mortgage payments increase exponentially. The Federal Reserve isn't helping by increasing interest rates into a recession which makes borrowing that much more expensive and it also makes existing and outstanding variable loans just crazy inexpensive. I'm keeping an eye on this website layoffs.fyi which tracks layoffs worldwide. Layoffs are the proverbial canary in the coal mine so something to keep tabs on.
I had a good mind to share the Layoffs.fyi site with my brother from another mother since I think he might find it interesting but I'm now wanting to rethink that idea. He is gainfully employed but he is in a position that could be considered more tenuous than not were we to continue down this nasty path we seem to be on. What I don't want him to see, were it to materialize more meaningfully, is the increasing number of layoffs in his particular industry or those industries upon which his company relies for their livelihood. I would hasten to add that he doesn't need me to tell him that things are getting uglier by the day out there since he likely sees it firsthand. Nonetheless, I want no part in adding to his fretful nature by sending him a link to this website that tracks layoffs. That is not what loving brothers from other mothers do. It just isn't.
You may recall that I too was fretting not that long ago about the price of oil and how it might affect our budget here on the homestead come winter. I was worried about the price of oil doubling which would mean paying somewhere around $10 a gallon for home heating oil. That reality conjures up all kinds of weirdness so there's that. The good news is that now that we seem to have a recession on our hands, commodities like oil, and home heating oil more specifically, are coming down in price. I'm also hearing about Biden wanting to shut down one or more oil fields in Texas so we shouldn't get too far out over our skis when it comes to experiencing any residual exuberance we might feel about seeing lower prices at the pump. Nobody said living in Biden's America was going to be easy. No sirree, fucking Bob.
As a hedge against higher prices for home heating oil this winter I think I might sign up for one of those deals that the oil companies offer. I'll have to read the fine print but it seems like it's the way to go if one has any concerns about prices getting out of hand. You'll never pay more than a certain amount and, if the price is lower at the time of delivery, you'll pay less. They don't return any money to you but rather they give you a credit towards future purchases. There is also a lump sum payment option so I'll have to think about that one. I had hoped that I might try to kick start our wood stove for the first time in a few years as that hedge but it's all so messy, isn't it? You have to stack the wood, carry the wood in and out of the house, stay on top of the wood stove to make sure that you ward off any creosote-related issues, and then there are the neighbors with allergies who would probably prefer that we not burn wood. I'm not sure who they are but we'd likely know soon enough once we started burning wood in earnest.
It was so funny. Jake Tapper (CNN) is overseas covering the G7 and he sat down for an interview with Boris Johnson. You know, the Prime Minister of Britain. That Boris. I'm still not sure how a child born in New York City grows up to be the Prime Minister of Britain but that's a story for another day. Anyway, Toadie Jake asks Boris a number of pointed questions about the January 6th hearings and all the hullabaloo around Trump and everything that happened on that fateful day. You could tell that Jake wanted very badly to have Boris rake Trump over the coals. That would make for some terrific headlines going into the Mid Terms. Boris was having none of it. Just an epic fail! What else have you got?
I saw a couple of photos coming out of the G7 which were interesting. One photo had the lot of them sitting around a roundtable looking mildly amused. Upon closer inspection, I couldn't help but notice that Joey Biden had his cue cards propped up on his lap and out of view of the other participants. You know he can't speak in complete sentences without his cue cards. Right? When is one or more of these "leaders' going to drop a dime on this fool and call him out for the demented fool that he is? What are they afraid of? Are they afraid that they'll pay a price somehow? Maybe they won't be invited to the White House? You know that to a person they know dementia when they see it. Right?
I don't know how I feel about the Republican gubernatorial primary in New York coming up the day after tomorrow. Zeldin seems like a likable enough chap but I have to wonder if likable gets you across the finish line? Giuliani, on the other hand, is about as tough as they come and maybe that's what New York needs after years of democratic "leadership." We're talking Andrew here and not Rudy just so you know. He's Rudy's boy, setting aside the four years that he worked in the Trump Administration, so he has the genes. I haven't watched all the debates so I'm not sure who is professing to be more MAGA but if I had to guess I'd say Andrew takes the lead there. One of the two will win. The real question is, who can win in the general? I just don't see people getting behind Hochul.
The caterwauling on the left continues after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade. If I hear one more loon cry out, "My body, my choice," I think I'm going to lose it. This was another topic that Jake Tapper of CNN tried to get Boris Johnson to weigh in on. Boris was just not willing to go so far as to say that he disagreed with the ruling coming out of our highest court in the land. He was about as diplomatic as one might expect from a sitting Prime Minister of a great country like Great Britain.
You couldn't listen to that interview without thinking to yourself that this is what a normal functioning leader sounds like. Compare that to the clown Biden who hasn't had a press conference in months and even when he does show up he's not without his cue cards. Just to be clear, the cue cards give him talking points but they are otherwise useless when it comes to commenting or responding to questions extemporaneously. More to the point, why wasn't Jake interviewing Biden? I think we know the answer to that question. The world knows the answer to that question. As an American through and through, I'm embarrassed for our country with this clown sitting in the White House.
I think we need to gird ourselves for the months ahead. If you think that the caterwauling is over the top now, it's likely to get a lot worse as we close in on the Mid Term elections in November. The media will be doing story after story about people of color and people in marginalized communities who are beset with this or that woe because of the decisions made by our Supreme Court as it relates to the abortion issue. We'll hear our share of stories about women who have lost their lives due to abortions done in back alleys, women who couldn't afford to travel to other states where abortions are legal and now have to bear the burden of having unwanted children, and children who will go unnourished because their mother couldn't afford to abort her latest in a burgeoning brood.
What I think we need, but it's something that we'll likely not see anytime soon, is a video of an actual abortion. The left doesn't want you to see just how hideous this practice is and they will go to extremes to make sure that you don't see it. None of it, of course, would pass muster on prime-time television and that probably is just as true when you consider cable television. I don't know how we get that story out in all of its hideousness but, were we to inject it into the mainstream of the American consciousness however that happens, you'd see a lot of suburban moms coast to coast changing their party affiliation from democrat to republican. We need to take the wind out of this "My body, my choice, movement at all costs. The Supreme Court decision is just the beginning. It's now all hands on deck.
I don't know how much more wining I can take. We had the Roe vs Wade decision and that was literally life-affirming. We had the gun ruling out of the Supreme Court and that put guns back in the hands, waistbands, and holsters of law-abiding citizens in the state of New York. That strengthens, not weakens, our collective second amendment rights. Then, just yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 for a coach who was fired from his position for kneeling in prayer on the field before his team's game. If that doesn't have you standing up and giving the baby Jesus a hallelujah, I don't know what does. Free speech is alive and well in our great republic but don't take my word for it. The Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, says so. And, how about that ruling from the NY Supreme Court yesterday saying, in so many words, that illegal aliens aren't eligible to vote in local elections? We're on a roll!
The missus and I drove into Boston yesterday for a follow-up visitation for the missus. We decided that we wouldn't spend the night before in a hotel so that had us up at the crack of dawn looking to beat the traffic into the city. I wouldn't say that it was a painless drive once we hit the road at 5:30 am but it was pretty close. Weather conditions were good, traffic was maybe a little lighter than expected, and all told, we probably caught a couple of breaks here and there which put us in the city somewhere around 7 am. With time to waste before the 8:30 appointment, the missus and I walked across town and down to Faneuil Hall and back. So many familiar sights and sounds. We walked through a city just waking up and there wasn't but a hint of the hustle and bustle that was to follow.
I'd be lying if I didn't tell you that the so-called walk across town was a bit of a trudge-fest. I was carrying a backpack and, at some point along the way, I noticed that the missus was struggling so I put her handbag inside my backpack. She may not have said it but I could tell that she was feeling relieved not to have to carry that bag even one more block. We were a little disappointed to find that so many of the shops and stores that we used to frequent down in the Faneuil Hall area had yet to open their doors. What we wouldn't have given to have maybe a little muffin and maybe a little liquid refreshment of some kind. We were also quite amazed to see some of the stores and restaurants that we used to frequent back in the day were still standing and still in business.
By the time the missus and I got back home in the late afternoon, we were reminded of the fact that there is a certain resiliency of mind that comes with doing that which is routine. You get on that treadmill of life and familiarity becomes the path of least resistance. Intentionally or not, you construct guardrails along the way which make for a more predictable and maybe less perilous path day in and day out. The minute you get off that treadmill and start doing things and going places the likes of which we did yesterday, you start to appreciate just how exhausting getting off the beaten path can prove to be. By the time we got home, our collective equilibrium was turned inside out and upside down. I wanted nothing more than to get back on that treadmill of mine and return to the fantasy land that is my life. I wasn't alone.
What is this I'm hearing about NATO increasing troop strength in Europe from 30k to 100k? And then you have Biden giving some speech in Europe about tossing another few billion to do this or that to assist Ukraine. Add to the mix comments from Russia about hitting London with a nuclear device if things were to go down a certain path and we've got ourselves a shit show on steroids. So, after all of this nonsense about letting Ukraine fight its own battles on its territory, it's now time to up the ante and do what? Is NATO planning to declare war on Russia? Are we looking at World War three here? What is this bewildering old fool, Biden, getting us into? Does he think that his chances of political survival, and those of his party, are more likely or even enhanced if he stands tall in the breach as a wartime president? I hate to tell him but that is the last thing we Americans want or need. Nothing could be scarier than a demented old fool like Biden with his shaky hands on the nuclear briefcase.
I wonder sometimes if I don't sound like a broken record week in and week out in this here blog. Not that I should care about such things but no one wants to come across as humdrum when all is said and done. I guess I just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other and maybe care a little less about where it takes me or where I end up. Continuity is the key. Any good blogger will tell you that writing every day is a discipline in itself. It's taken me a good while to get to the point where I have the discipline to sit down and do what I do here every morning, well almost every morning, of every week. And, truth be told, there is no shortage of grist for the mill as it were so thank the baby Jesus for that.
I think the January 6th committee in our nation's Capitol really stepped in it yesterday. You know, that "bipartisan" group of congressmen looking into what transpired on January 6th, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. I don't know that the committee's goal is to send a criminal referral to the Department of Justice so much as it is to dirty up Trump and render him ineligible to run for president in 2024. The committee called an emergency meeting yesterday to hear the testimony of a surprise witness. It was all hands on deck for the Main Street media. This was the moment when they would tighten the proverbial noose around Trump's neck and having a surprise witness would only heighten the drama and, with any luck, exponentially increase the number of eyeballs on the event. By the end of the day, all one could reasonably conclude was that the hearing was more akin than not to that offered up by the serial liar, Christine Blasey Ford, during the Senate hearings for Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court, Justice Kavanaugh.
Some of the stories told by the surprise witness were ludicrous on their face. Many of her stories were second and third hand which, under any reasonable cross-examination, would never pass muster in a court of law. In fact, her accounts were immediately disputed by any number of people who spoke up and offered to come in and give their own testimony under oath to the contrary. It was so bad that every media outlet, seeing that things were going south in a hurry as they too watched the testimony of this witness, took members of the committee who were willing to be interviewed after the fact to task about the credibility of their witness. If the committee thought for even a minute that this witness was going to be the John Dean (Watergate fame) of the hearings, they were sadly mistaken. If anything, this sham of a hearing put the credibility of the entire committee on display and it exposed them for the kangaroo court that they are. Good luck finding another job in Washington, DC, missy.
Of course, you're going to have your clapping seals on the left talking about how devastating the testimony was for Trump and his minions who allegedly ran a failed coup on that fateful day. If I had to guess, I'd say that this particular witness made it less likely that the Department of Justice will indict Trump anytime soon. We all know the DOJ is watching the hearings very closely and, given half a chance, would do Biden's bidding and indict Trump at the drop of a hat if they had even a scintilla of evidence that Trump was behind any of it. It's one thing to indict some of Trump's people for their involvement in whatever schemes they can dream up and it's quite another to indict an ex-president of our country. That's banana republic-level stuff and not something that we ever want to see in our country. Then again, there's a lot about the Biden presidency that says "banana republic" so you know what they say about people who assume things.
I'm waking up this morning to a Zeldin win in the New York gubernatorial primary. He won by a pretty good margin so that's interesting. I thought that the Giuliana name might have helped Andrew Giuliani coming down the stretch given how his dad, Rudy, is infamous in his own right being the ex-mayor of NYC and all. What are we to make of Zeldin's win? Is Rudy and the Giuliani name somehow tarnished or tainted as a result of all the shenanigans in the wake of the 2020 election? Did Zeldin win or did Giuliani lose? Is it possible that the voters in New York found Rudy's son too Trump-like? He certainly embraced Trump and the MAGA agenda so that has to count for something. No? Maybe New York voters know a good thing or two about what it takes for a republican to win the governor's seat in the otherwise very liberal state of New York.
Mrs G's new couch will be delivered next week so I hope she has everything in order. That is to say, she needs to arrange for the people running her facility to come and pick up her old couch so the guys delivering her new couch have a place to put it when they arrive. She was going on and on the other day about how the people at her facility have to wait for the weekend when they have access to a vehicle to use to move the couch. She was referring to the employees of the facility who have friends or family who can use an extra piece of furniture or two if and when they become available. Then, of course, you can always pay the facility to come and take the couch away like any other piece of trash. What I don't want to happen is to have the deliverymen arrive and have to deal one way or another with the old couch. Why should I even care? Right?
I think the missus thinks that she and I need to be there when they make the delivery. I'm not so sure. I think that Mrs G is perfectly capable of directing these fellas as necessary once they arrive on her doorstep. Getting them to her doorstep could be another story. They needn't carry the couch through any other door than the door that leads into her apartment from the outside of the building. Do not go into the front entrance of the building and do not bother signing in one way or another. All of that depends on how Mrs G directs them once she gets their call in the 30 minutes leading up to their arrival. Here's my advice to Mrs G: You can do this! Git er done!
This Monkeypox thing seems to getting a life of its own. Have you seen the pictures? That is one nasty affliction! They say it's spread by exchanging bodily fluids and is found primarily in the gay community. What, straight folks don't exchange bodily fluids? What are we talking about here? I gather that it's not all that deadly so it's not like it's a five-alarm fire or anything. It's also eerily reminiscent of what we saw during the AIDS epidemic in the '70s although people with AIDS back in the day were dropping like flies and there were no cures homestyle or otherwise. It's doubtful that you would see people suffering from this malady out in public but I, for one, will be keeping an eye out. They lied to us about Covid and how it was transmitted or not transmitted and a lot of people died so color me skeptical. I'm still not wearing a mask.
Do you remember me talking about the missus and how she works from time to time with someone who lives in another state? Sometimes she travels and sometimes she can do what she needs to do from home. Sometimes, she'll get a call from her employer out of the blue asking her this or that question having mostly to do with his computer. Either he can't find what he's looking for or he doesn't know how to do this that or the other thing that he is looking to accomplish. What I may have mentioned in passing is that I wanted very badly to find an application that would allow her to see and control his desktop. That would be just what the doctor ordered. In other words, the bee's knees. It would have to be a cross-platform application given that there are two operating systems in play. Well, we finally pulled all of that together and it works like a charm. There is a god.
I'm not sure that it means that she will be traveling less but what it does mean is that the time they spend together on the phone when she's working from home will be significantly less since she can now just hop on his desktop and cut to the chase. He can even watch her do what she does on his desktop in real-time so think of it as a learning tool. His limitations when it comes to the computer are mainly age-related but that can be a bear when you're not all that nimble or knowledgeable when it comes to computers to begin with. The missus knows just enough to be dangerous and that's a good thing. I'm there with an assist if necessary and I try as much as possible to stay undetected and in the background. Our only regret is that we didn't find out about this application a long time ago. God only knows that it would have saved everyone a lot of time and maybe even a trip or two to his home. Oh, well.
The Ev man is over for a visit today. I suspect that he'll stay the day, have dinner with us, and then return home. I'd like to take a look in his car while he's here and take everything out of his car that he doesn't need to be carrying around with him. I'm talking mostly clothes here which he's thrown in the back of his car for a variety of reasons and, for the most part, never got around to taking them up to his apartment. It's just a Hodge podge of stuff that he might as well leave here instead of carrying them around in his car. I'm a little worried that I'll find some half-eaten burgers or worse when I start to look around so that's another reason not to be loading up your car like a homeless person. I'm kidding a little bit about the burgers but I have thrown out my share of leftover bags from various fast food joints in going through his car here and there. What twenty-something isn't organizationally challenged. Right?
It sure was nice of our neighbor to drop off some Swiss chard from her garden. I had high hopes that I could make a nice salad for the missus and myself. Our neighbor gave us some last year and it sat so long in our refrigerator that I finally had to toss it out. I didn't want to make the same mistake this year so I assembled all the ingredients I thought I needed just ahead of the lunch hour in order to come up with the salads. I laid out the fresh lemons and olive oil for the dressing and I cut up some cherry tomatoes and Kalamari olives in preparation for the dressing and the mix-ins. I started to devein the leaves when, much to my horror, I started to see a bunch of little red ants running around on my cutting board. Damn. The more leaves I unpacked the more red ants appeared. I'll likely not give my benefactor this particular feedback but neither could I with good conscious move forward when moving forward meant not knowing how many red ants I'd missed or not seen in my desperate attempt to salvage the salads I had planned. It was over. Scuttled. Damn.
The Supreme Court issued their final findings of the season today before going out on vacation or whatever. One of the rulings had to do with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA has been doing the bidding of Biden and his clownish administration by issuing this ruling and that ruling is all designed to further their goals as it relates to Climate Change. It's the religion of the looney left don't you know. Their goal is to completely de-carbonize our economy at a time when any and all alternative technologies are in their infancy. By design or default, this nonsense puts our country at a distinct disadvantage to other countries like China and Russia who would given half a chance, eat our lunch either economically or militarily. Neither is acceptable.
The end result of this ruling is that Congress will now make the rules that the EPA was previously responsible for making and the EPA will be left with the responsibility of enforcing the legislation coming out of Congress. The good news is that getting Congress to agree on anything given the polarization of politics these days means that the "polluters" and the industries that have had their hands tied due to the EPA will now have free rein to do as they please without the oversight and heavy hand of the regulators of the EPA. Less regulation has always gone hand in hand with increased productivity and enhanced profits for corporations. The Climate Change nutters will have to find another way to vent their collective anger and rage if they are ever to survive in this new environment of ours. We Climate Change deniers are just getting the party started thanks to our wonderfully wise and wildly conservative members of the Supreme Court. Let the pissing and pearl-clutching begin!
This recession stuff is tricky. Technically, according to some people who pay attention to such things, a recession just means that we have two negative GDP readings in a row. With inflation raging in excess of 8% depending on which sectors you're watching, it is just unimaginably expensive for people to get by week after week. Gas prices aren't helping at $5 to $10 a gallon depending on where you live in the United States, and with winter coming, prices for home heating oil are going to leave a lot of families huddling together just to keep warm. Commodities are at an all-time high which means everything and anything you want to do costs more. When is the last time you got an estimate for a roof replacement? It was likely twice as expensive compared to just 12 months ago. Add to that the supply chain issues, and shortages will effectively drive prices even higher if that's possible. And then you have interest rates that are going up but don't even come close to keeping up with inflation. It's a witch's brew through and through.
The combination of interest rates and inflation is doing a good job of suppressing demand. With slowing growth rates due to lessening demand, prices are going to come down on everything from commodities to the price of labor. When you have less demand, companies need fewer people so layoff's become commonplace. With more people out of work, and fewer jobs available for those looking for work, defaults on everything from bank loans to mortgage payments increase exponentially. The Federal Reserve isn't helping by increasing interest rates into a recession which makes borrowing that much more expensive and it also makes existing and outstanding variable loans just crazy inexpensive. I'm keeping an eye on this website layoffs.fyi which tracks layoffs worldwide. Layoffs are the proverbial canary in the coal mine so something to keep tabs on.
I had a good mind to share the Layoffs.fyi site with my brother from another mother since I think he might find it interesting but I'm now wanting to rethink that idea. He is gainfully employed but he is in a position that could be considered more tenuous than not were we to continue down this nasty path we seem to be on. What I don't want him to see, were it to materialize more meaningfully, is the increasing number of layoffs in his particular industry or those industries upon which his company relies for their livelihood. I would hasten to add that he doesn't need me to tell him that things are getting uglier by the day out there since he likely sees it firsthand. Nonetheless, I want no part in adding to his fretful nature by sending him a link to this website that tracks layoffs. That is not what loving brothers from other mothers do. It just isn't.
You may recall that I too was fretting not that long ago about the price of oil and how it might affect our budget here on the homestead come winter. I was worried about the price of oil doubling which would mean paying somewhere around $10 a gallon for home heating oil. That reality conjures up all kinds of weirdness so there's that. The good news is that now that we seem to have a recession on our hands, commodities like oil, and home heating oil more specifically, are coming down in price. I'm also hearing about Biden wanting to shut down one or more oil fields in Texas so we shouldn't get too far out over our skis when it comes to experiencing any residual exuberance we might feel about seeing lower prices at the pump. Nobody said living in Biden's America was going to be easy. No sirree, fucking Bob.
As a hedge against higher prices for home heating oil this winter I think I might sign up for one of those deals that the oil companies offer. I'll have to read the fine print but it seems like it's the way to go if one has any concerns about prices getting out of hand. You'll never pay more than a certain amount and, if the price is lower at the time of delivery, you'll pay less. They don't return any money to you but rather they give you a credit towards future purchases. There is also a lump sum payment option so I'll have to think about that one. I had hoped that I might try to kick start our wood stove for the first time in a few years as that hedge but it's all so messy, isn't it? You have to stack the wood, carry the wood in and out of the house, stay on top of the wood stove to make sure that you ward off any creosote-related issues, and then there are the neighbors with allergies who would probably prefer that we not burn wood. I'm not sure who they are but we'd likely know soon enough once we started burning wood in earnest.
Decisions Decisions
26/06/22 07:07
Here we go, folks. Another week coming up and we're just getting the party started. Well, let's just say that we're getting started. Does that mean that the party is over? No, not necessarily. We just need a reason to party and we don't seem to have one at the moment. That's not to say that we won't have one by the end of the week or whatever but as of this very moment we do not. I have a little Laura Nyro on the turntable so that should tell you a little bit about my mood this morning. Gotta start somewhere. Right?
I have a little food shopping to do today so I'll be heading out to the market later this morning. We've been doing a lot of salads lately so here's hoping they have a nice selection of romaine on hand by the time I arrive. I really should make a list. There are a lot of things that I need and I could probably go from memory but that too has its limits. One thing we don't need is berries. We have too many berries. If we don't start eating more of them and soon they will likely go bad and I'll need to throw them away. Berries are expensive so I'd rather not be throwing them away if I can at all help it. And, I don't know how it is that I'm finding myself short on humus. I need to do a better job of staying on top of the staples. Oh, and I can't forget the cold brew. The missus would never forgive me.
She made a nice black bean salad yesterday for Father's Day. I inquired as to why she thought it made sense to go as hard and heavy as she did on the cilantro. It ended up looking and tasting like a cilantro salad with black beans thrown in as an after thought. I like leafy greens but not when it comes to greens like cilantro. I mean, who does that? I never did get a straight answer from the missus but, have no doubt, she's a cilantro lover and there is no such thing in her mind as having too much cilantro on anything. Am I incorrect in assuming that it is intended as nothing more than a garnish when used in dishes like black bean salads? I think I am not incorrect.
The missus was apparently gobsmacked with how good the fish looked at our local seafood store when she dropped by yesterday to buy some cooked shrimp. I know she wants to buy some scallops and I suppose she'll get around to doing just that soon enough. I inquired about their seasonal Atlantic salmon and she told me that they had a nice selection of just about everything under the sun. Did I mention that she bought some Ritz crackers with which to make a nice crust for her broiled scallops? Those Ritz crackers are going fast just hanging around the house so if she's going to do her thing with the scallops I suggested that she get on the stick. In so many words, that is.
I was surprised that the missus was out and about in the local stores as much was she was yesterday. I suspect that since I was indisposed so to speak that she was getting on without me. Maybe I should be indisposed more often. The missus is otherwise disinclined to do much shopping and she leaves it all to me. I'll not get into why I was indisposed other than to say that I didn't sleep well the night before and I felt the need to make up for the lost sleep. I ended up spending more time than I wanted to in bed and under the covers. I was literally down for the count. It was indulgent to say the least but it was what I wanted to do for Father's Day so that's what I did. How was your Father's Day?
I told the missus in the early evening that having spent the better part of the day and night in bed that I was privy to the comings and goings of the our local hummingbirds. Well, the hummingbirds that come and go from the feeder that we have just outside our bedroom window that is. I was shocked to see how often they were feeding at the feeder. Shocked in a good way is what I would say. It made me feel good about the amount of time that I spend making sure that they have what they need when they come to the feeder. That means changing their homemade sugar water concoction at least once a week and even more often when we see a few days in a row of relentless heat and humidity.
What is this I'm hearing about Trump donors pouring money into Ron DeSantis's gubenatorial run? Maybe they're hedging their bets in the event that Trump does not run in 2024? Maybe they think that Trump is less appealing as a candidate after all of this January 6th falderal. Maybe they think that the January 6th stuff can peel away just enough republican and independent voters to ensure that the democrat candidate in 2024, whoever she or he may be, wins going away. Mark Halperin seems to think that DeSantis is good but he doesn't have Trump's political skills. I think I would agree with that assessment by Halperin. That said, I don't think DeSantis has a choice but to run in 2024 since he'll still be governor of Florida which has him running from a position of strength.
Here's hoping we'll be hearing from the Supreme Court today on one or more rulings. I'll be interested to see how they come down on the Roe vs Wade decision. The leaked draft seemed to suggest that they are going to deep-six the decision and send it back to the states to decide. If they decide something less rigorous, I'll be wondering just how much of a difference it might have made had that draft not been leaked some months ago. In other words, were the conservative Justices intimidated into watering down the decision because of the kerfuffle we all experienced when the drift was leaked? Did the threats to the Justices as a result of the leaked draft somehow force them to put their lives and the lives of their family members ahead of any decision that they might make on the Roe vs Wade case? I guess we'll see although maybe not today.
I really don't know anything about the other cases that they have in front of them. There is some gun case that might have something to do with the second amendment but I'm not entirely sure. I read these decisions that they make and I sometimes have a hard time understanding the arguments that each side is making much less the nitty gritty detail in and around the final decision. Sometimes I just want to know whether the decision is good for the conservatives or good for the liberals. If the damn liberals pull one or more out of the coals then it's only because one or more of the conservatives came over to their side since the conservatives have a 6-3 majority on the court. It works the other way around as well although less often. You almost never see a unanimous decision.
We've also got some run-off elections and primaries today to keep an eye on. There are so many of them, in fact, that I had to bookmark an online news story that broke down all the various races so I could go back to it to see how they all played out. There are two or three headliners that are considered pivotal when and where the MAGA vote is concerned so those will be front and center when they start to tally the votes later this evening. I'd like to see Vernon Jones pull out a win in his congressional race in Georgia and, in Alabama, I think I like Brooks over Britt in the senatorial race despite the fact that Britt got Trump's endorsement. I just don't trust Britt to be true MAGA. She's too well spoken and she's an establishment hack as far as I can tell. She'll tell you what you want to hear and then fuck you up when you turn your back.
I don't follow foreign races either but I'm happy to see that Macron has lost his majority in the parliament in France. The liberals on our side of the pond couldn't have been happier when Macron won the presidency over LePenn. They crowed endlessly about how great his win was for democracy and how it was the end of the conservative movement in France and how it was one for ages. You know what we're going to hear from these very same liberals this morning after his loss of his majority in the parliament? Not a fucking word. It will be non-stop crickets. At least one higher-up in France is now asking for Macron's resignation although that's likely to go nowhere. I'm taking a victory lap since I've always considered Macron something of a pussy. Or, as they say in France, a poosey. Just a little no-good rat bastard. A Napoleonic toadie whose never met a camera he didn't like.
I follow this guy named Wifey on Twitter and he's saying that we're now entering Bear Market rally number three. He's been spot on so far going back to November 2021. I wholeheartedly agree with him when he says if you're going to lose make sure that you lose small. That seems like sage advice. He posts all sorts of things to educate the "normies" who follow him and he places family (fam) above all else when it comes to investing. We've seen bear markets materialize and then fizzle in the course of a day or two since this bear market started so you do everything you do at your own risk. Wifey is good enough to give you just enough information so that you can make whatever decisions you're wanting to make that affect your own portfolio. I'll be holding my fire until I see the whites of their eyes or, better yet, when someone calls the bottom. Not a bottom, the bottom. I could be waiting a while.
Well, fast forward 24 hours and we have results from the primary races. My boy, Vernon Jones, did not win. In fact, he lost with a margin of 73% to 24% or something like that. Funny thing is, Vernon was neck and neck with his opponent (Collins) after the first primary so I'm having a hard time digesting this so-called loss. I mean, how do you now account for a 50% difference between the two candidates who were nearly tied just two weeks ago after their primary? This was a runoff for the two top candidates and Vernon gained nothing while his opponent jumped some 50% points? I mean, you can't make this stuff up. I'm calling a fraud here, folks. We've seen some serious shenanigans coming out of the Georgia elections as of late and this is just one more example.
A very small part of me is quite happy with the fact that the republicans in Georgia now have the upper hand when it comes to stealing elections. Democrats have been stealing elections for generations in Georgia and I'm quite sure that they have every intention of installing their candidate, Stacey Abrams, as governor in the upcoming gubernatorial election. With republicans in control of the internal machinations, she will likely be on the losing end of whatever skullduggery her party comes up with to try and steal the election away from the rightful winner in the race. It comes down to whomever has the most stolen votes and with both sides playing the same game I think the advantage goes to the party in power. Some of this is clearly in jest so maybe you file this under, "Where there's a will, there's a way."
I'm getting increasingly concerned about justice and the equal application of the law in our country. How is it exactly that every last January 6th trespasser has been locked up and denied bail while staffers for some clown on television (Colbert) who did the very same thing are jailed for one night and then released? How is it that the BLM rioters raged and pillaged for an entire summer and not one of them spent so much as a night in jail while January 6th trespassers remain behind bars? How is it that patriots like Peter Navarro are taken into custody by the FBI while boarding a plane for his failure to respond to a subpoena while other governmental officials in the democratic regime get a pass when they do the same thing? If no one else will say it, I will. If you're a democrat, do as you please because there will be no accountability. If you're a republican, take one step out of line and you will be hogtied and frog marched before the judiciary. If you're a Trump supporter, God help you.
And then this clown, Colbert, goes on television and makes light of the crimes committed by his staff while taking comfort in the fact that he knew all along that his staffers would not be held accountable. He's one of the elite, of course, and we all know how our justice system deals with the elites. Think Hillary Clinton. So, Colbert can dispatch a handful of his staffers to our nation's capitol where they are allowed into one of the buildings occupied by our country's congressman and congresswomen. They are summarily dismissed after officials find out that they are not properly credentialed and, somehow, they find their way back inside the building where they are arrested for trespassing some hours later. How is this any different than what many of the January 6th trespassers did? One group walks free while the other is kept in solitary confinement without the possibility of bail.
We've seen a lot of shooting sprees come and go over the years and republicans have always roundly refused to consider any changes to existing gun laws to mitigate future shootings or deny so-called shooters access to weaponry with which to do their dastardly deeds. The rationale has always been that it just never made sense to react emotionally and in the moment to events no matter how horrible. They would tell you that this is how bad law is made and they would be right. Truth of the matter is that the laws, once enacted, would likely do more to chip away at the rights that we as citizens have under the second amendment than they would to prevent future shooting sprees. The last thing you want to do as a republican, is to let the liberals get their nose under the tent door when it comes to the second amendment. They would like nothing more than to confiscate every last weapon.
So, why are the republicans in Congress now joining up with the democrats to update our gun laws in the wake of the Uvalde school shootings? None of the laws they're talking about implementing would have stopped the Uvalde shooting or any other one or more of the recent school shootings we've seen in the last year or two. They are doing the bidding of the democrat party at a time in our history when the democrat party is at its weakest under the pitiful and demented presidency of one Joe Biden from Delaware. Biden has wreaked misery upon our citizenry in every conceivable way from leaving our borders open to the millions of migrants from 151 countries across the globe to shutting down our domestic energy production at a time when gas at the pump ranges anywhere from $5 a gallon on the East Coast to $10 a gallon on the West Coast. When your political opposition is in the proverbial ditch, the last thing you want to do is to throw him or her a rope.
When these so-called republicans tell us who they are we need to listen. We now know their names so our mission near term is to mobilize the citizenry in their respective states to vote them out of office. They've exposed themselves as the RINO's (Republican in name only) that they are and they need to be taken to task. They need to be held accountable. It's that simple. I'll give the liberals one thing. They speak with one voice when they want something. No one, and I mean no one, breaks from the pack. There have been a couple of exceptions like Manchin and Sinema this year and you might say that they saved the democrats from their own worse tendencies. Had they passed the legislation that their party wanted, our inflation rates would be in the double digits now. I'm not sure how we account for the fact that fourteen republicans are voting with the democrats on this gun legislation. It's a fucking travesty if you ask me.
The Red Flag law shit in the bill being proposed is very concerning. It allows anyone to drop a dime on someone they don't like, someone they think might be a danger to himself or herself, or you name it. It's been proposed here in my state but it was either vetoed by the governor or it never got the votes it needed to pass. You can see where a law like this would give license to every last law enforcement agency to grab people's guns using false pretenses. Worse yet, were it to turn on the whims of certain political parties, they might well try to make a case that their political opponents are a danger to our Republic and then all bets are off. Look at what they've done to the Trump supporters who trespassed in our nation's capitol on January 6th. They've criminalized their behavior and the democrat loyalists at large, were they to get their way, would put every last Trump supporter in jail. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times. This is who they are. This is what they do. Where is our Supreme Court?
The financial guy I listen to on the radio is talking a lot lately about how people who hold jobs need to make themselves indispensable to their employers. He's reporting on certain industries laying off hundreds if not thousands of employees due to any number of economic factors. It's a near certainty these days that we're going into a recession so I think his advice is both timely and necessary. Can you imagine being laid off in an environment that we're in these days with skyrocketing rents, inflation rates above 8%, gas at the pumps averaging some $5 to $$6, and a tightening job market? Once unemployed, you may well be competing for positions with any number of refugees that Demented Joe is letting come across our Southern border and who are willing to work for a lot less than what it might cost the employer to hire you. If you're not working, you're not going out to eat, you're not taking in a show from time to time, you're not buying a new car, and all that contributes to the downward spiral in our economy.
I just don't know how prepared we are as Americans for hard times were it to come to that. We've got a generation or two of Americans who know nothing but a stock market that goes up, who have never seen gas lines the likes of what we saw back in the days of Jimmy Carter, and certainly we've not experienced shortages the likes of which we've seen more recently with baby formula and tampons. As an aside, I have to laugh. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman from Georgia, says that we're experiencing a tampon shortage because so many liberals are putting tampon machines in men's rooms across our country.
There have been any number of food production facilities across our fruited plain that have been destroyed lately and for a variety of reasons. We'd probably have to go back to the days of the Great Depression of the 20's to see the kinds of food shortages that may be just around the corner for we unsuspecting Americans. Imagine now competing for food with the some ten million hungry mouths that Demented Joe is importing from other countries and you can see how we can go from bad to worse in a heartbeat. If you've got a plan, it's time to dust that mother fucker off.
Let's give a shout out to the Supremes for their ruling on the New York gun law that came down yesterday. I'm going to cut to the chase: The Court ruled that the NY law is unconsitituional. The NY law was so restrictive that almost no one got a concealed-carry permit and that was by design. Only the bad guys get to carry guns on the streets and subways of New York City. The decision was 6-3 with the conservatives carrying the day. The three liberals voted against allowing God fearing Americans to carry guns for their personal protection. Imagine that. What does that tell you about what might happen to our second amendment rights were the court to have a liberal majority? I suppose if you have fewer good guys carrying guns you will probably end up with more bad guys carrying guns and, to no one's surprise, you'll need more government to step in when and where you need protection. See how that works?
There are a handful of blue states that have laws on the books that mirror or are maybe even stricter than those on the books in New York. The officials from each and every one of those blue states spoke publicly and to a person declared that they would work with their legislatures to come up with workarounds to counter the ruling from the Supremes. The speeches no doubt were designed to placate the concerns and outrage of their leftist constituencies who yelled from the rooftops about renewed hopes of packing the Supreme Court and "taking back what was rightfully theirs." I wonder if these politicians know how clownish and stupid they both looked and sounded? The mayor of New York City went on and on about the streets of his city turning red with blood now that the good guys will have the right to carry forearms. Wat? The pearl clutching was clearly beyond the pale but delicious to observe from afar. There is a God!
I would have liked nothing better yesterday than to sit on my sofa and look at my Twitter feed all day. I wouldn't say that watching liberals lose their minds on Twitter is one of my all time favorite past times but let's just say it's a close second. The missus and I had a more important task to attend to so I never got the chance to do what I wanted to do. That's the way it works sometimes. We promised Mrs G that we'd take her out to look at a couple of couches that she's had her eye on. It has to be long enough for Debbie-Rah-Rah to sleep on but, that aside, Mrs G was not overly particular. Oh, and Mrs G doesn't care for certain fabrics and styles so it was easy to tease out the bad choices fairly quickly. She was getting out and about using her little walker thingy. When you're as old as she is you are eternally thankful for something or somebody to lean on. Some crutches are more obvious than others.
We actually went to three furniture showrooms which were, thankfully, in close proximity to each other. That should give you some sense as to just how motivated Mrs G was to take care of business. Having decided which couch she wanted, I urged Mrs G to place her order and be done with it. You never know these days with supply chain issues and all the rest whether waiting to place your order might not unduly delay delivery of said furniture. If the salesman says that they have the couch you want in stock, you place your order and move on. I think Mrs G was just too pooped by the time we were finished looking around that going back to the store to place the order was just a bridge too far. It wasn't a point worth arguing so Mrs G and the missus made plans to place the order the following day. And then there's the issue of getting rid of her existing couch.
On our way out to the main road, Mrs G noticed that we were within spitting distance of a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) outlet store. She started talking, haltingly almost, about how she and Mr G used to come this area of town back in the day, go to Lowes, and then stop by Kentucky Fried Chicken for a little lunch before heading home. Well, I can take a clue as much as the next guy so I swung into action and made my way directly behind a line of cars that were ordering from their take-out window. "Oh, no," Mrs G said. "You don't need to wait in line just for me." '"The line is going to take too long," she went on. She had wanted to go into the store but the store was not open for walk-in's. I settled in behind five maybe six cars already in line and assured Mrs G that the line was likely to move pretty quickly so there was no need to worry about a thing. The only decision left for her to make was whether she wanted a three piece combo meal or a four piece combo meal.
The missus and I didn't tell her that we'd not had chicken from KFC in ages because of our desire to avoid saturated fats and everything else under the sun that clogs the fuck out of your arteries. It sure tastes good going down but you'll need emergency bypass surgery by the time you're done with the rolls, the gravy, and the mashed potatoes. She must have thought that we were an order of fries short of a happy meal not to grab a combo meal but she was too polite and probably too hungry to even broach the subject. The only challenge left was to get her home and sitting on her couch with her combo meal and her diet Pepsi before the meal turned cold. That turned out to be a bigger challenge than we thought since the missus and I had every intention to stop by one more store where we hoped to grab something to eat for dinner. All in good time.
Just when we conservatives thought we'd seen it all this week after the Supremes overturned a gun law in New York, we found out that they had one more shoe to drop before heading to the Hamptons for the long weekend. They overturned the Roe vs Wade decision that has been established law for some 50 years. It was bad law when they decided it 50 years ago and conservatives have been praying night and day ever since that it might someday be overturned. And, much to the delight of conservatives country wide, our Supreme Court with their 6-3 conservative majority in the year of the Lord 2020, did just that. It never made any sense that a handful of Supreme Court justices would make decisions on something as impactful on our society and citizenry as abortion. The Court has now decided, and rightly so, that those decisions are better left to the people and their elected representatives. So, the States will now decide the fate of abortion one way or another and for better or worse.
For those states that now choose to ban abortions, its citizenry can travel to an adjoining state assuming they offer abortion services. That's my way of saying that if someone wants to get an abortion they will always have that opportunity. The Karens marching in downtowns across our fruited plains and holding their placards "My body, my choice" after the decision came down can take their signs and their collective rancor and go find another cause to fight for since this fight is, for all intents and purposes, over. Stick a fork in it, it's done. You'll not find much sympathy amongst the people in our country who value life and who wonder what the hell there is to piss and moan about knowing full well that anyone who wants an abortion can still get one. The Nancy Pelosi's and Chuck Schumer's of the world would have you believe that the November elections will be all about Roe. Poppycock. That's just wishful thinking.
Lastly, aside from the Justices themselves, we have Donald J Trump to thank for these momentous decisions coming-out of the Supreme Court this week. Were it not for the Donald, none of this would have happened. He put these Justices on the Court knowing full well that they would overturn Roe vs Wade given half a chance. The Right-to-Life movement owes Trump a huge solid for his commitment to their cause. If this doesn't fire them up to put Trump in office for another four years come 2024, then nothing will. Trump has had their back from day one and now it's their turn to have his back. Trump's capital in the wake of this decision has risen tenfold and conservatives coast to coast will hopefully show their appreciation at the polls both in the Mid Term elections in November and in the presidential election in 2024. God willing.
I have a little food shopping to do today so I'll be heading out to the market later this morning. We've been doing a lot of salads lately so here's hoping they have a nice selection of romaine on hand by the time I arrive. I really should make a list. There are a lot of things that I need and I could probably go from memory but that too has its limits. One thing we don't need is berries. We have too many berries. If we don't start eating more of them and soon they will likely go bad and I'll need to throw them away. Berries are expensive so I'd rather not be throwing them away if I can at all help it. And, I don't know how it is that I'm finding myself short on humus. I need to do a better job of staying on top of the staples. Oh, and I can't forget the cold brew. The missus would never forgive me.
She made a nice black bean salad yesterday for Father's Day. I inquired as to why she thought it made sense to go as hard and heavy as she did on the cilantro. It ended up looking and tasting like a cilantro salad with black beans thrown in as an after thought. I like leafy greens but not when it comes to greens like cilantro. I mean, who does that? I never did get a straight answer from the missus but, have no doubt, she's a cilantro lover and there is no such thing in her mind as having too much cilantro on anything. Am I incorrect in assuming that it is intended as nothing more than a garnish when used in dishes like black bean salads? I think I am not incorrect.
The missus was apparently gobsmacked with how good the fish looked at our local seafood store when she dropped by yesterday to buy some cooked shrimp. I know she wants to buy some scallops and I suppose she'll get around to doing just that soon enough. I inquired about their seasonal Atlantic salmon and she told me that they had a nice selection of just about everything under the sun. Did I mention that she bought some Ritz crackers with which to make a nice crust for her broiled scallops? Those Ritz crackers are going fast just hanging around the house so if she's going to do her thing with the scallops I suggested that she get on the stick. In so many words, that is.
I was surprised that the missus was out and about in the local stores as much was she was yesterday. I suspect that since I was indisposed so to speak that she was getting on without me. Maybe I should be indisposed more often. The missus is otherwise disinclined to do much shopping and she leaves it all to me. I'll not get into why I was indisposed other than to say that I didn't sleep well the night before and I felt the need to make up for the lost sleep. I ended up spending more time than I wanted to in bed and under the covers. I was literally down for the count. It was indulgent to say the least but it was what I wanted to do for Father's Day so that's what I did. How was your Father's Day?
I told the missus in the early evening that having spent the better part of the day and night in bed that I was privy to the comings and goings of the our local hummingbirds. Well, the hummingbirds that come and go from the feeder that we have just outside our bedroom window that is. I was shocked to see how often they were feeding at the feeder. Shocked in a good way is what I would say. It made me feel good about the amount of time that I spend making sure that they have what they need when they come to the feeder. That means changing their homemade sugar water concoction at least once a week and even more often when we see a few days in a row of relentless heat and humidity.
What is this I'm hearing about Trump donors pouring money into Ron DeSantis's gubenatorial run? Maybe they're hedging their bets in the event that Trump does not run in 2024? Maybe they think that Trump is less appealing as a candidate after all of this January 6th falderal. Maybe they think that the January 6th stuff can peel away just enough republican and independent voters to ensure that the democrat candidate in 2024, whoever she or he may be, wins going away. Mark Halperin seems to think that DeSantis is good but he doesn't have Trump's political skills. I think I would agree with that assessment by Halperin. That said, I don't think DeSantis has a choice but to run in 2024 since he'll still be governor of Florida which has him running from a position of strength.
Here's hoping we'll be hearing from the Supreme Court today on one or more rulings. I'll be interested to see how they come down on the Roe vs Wade decision. The leaked draft seemed to suggest that they are going to deep-six the decision and send it back to the states to decide. If they decide something less rigorous, I'll be wondering just how much of a difference it might have made had that draft not been leaked some months ago. In other words, were the conservative Justices intimidated into watering down the decision because of the kerfuffle we all experienced when the drift was leaked? Did the threats to the Justices as a result of the leaked draft somehow force them to put their lives and the lives of their family members ahead of any decision that they might make on the Roe vs Wade case? I guess we'll see although maybe not today.
I really don't know anything about the other cases that they have in front of them. There is some gun case that might have something to do with the second amendment but I'm not entirely sure. I read these decisions that they make and I sometimes have a hard time understanding the arguments that each side is making much less the nitty gritty detail in and around the final decision. Sometimes I just want to know whether the decision is good for the conservatives or good for the liberals. If the damn liberals pull one or more out of the coals then it's only because one or more of the conservatives came over to their side since the conservatives have a 6-3 majority on the court. It works the other way around as well although less often. You almost never see a unanimous decision.
We've also got some run-off elections and primaries today to keep an eye on. There are so many of them, in fact, that I had to bookmark an online news story that broke down all the various races so I could go back to it to see how they all played out. There are two or three headliners that are considered pivotal when and where the MAGA vote is concerned so those will be front and center when they start to tally the votes later this evening. I'd like to see Vernon Jones pull out a win in his congressional race in Georgia and, in Alabama, I think I like Brooks over Britt in the senatorial race despite the fact that Britt got Trump's endorsement. I just don't trust Britt to be true MAGA. She's too well spoken and she's an establishment hack as far as I can tell. She'll tell you what you want to hear and then fuck you up when you turn your back.
I don't follow foreign races either but I'm happy to see that Macron has lost his majority in the parliament in France. The liberals on our side of the pond couldn't have been happier when Macron won the presidency over LePenn. They crowed endlessly about how great his win was for democracy and how it was the end of the conservative movement in France and how it was one for ages. You know what we're going to hear from these very same liberals this morning after his loss of his majority in the parliament? Not a fucking word. It will be non-stop crickets. At least one higher-up in France is now asking for Macron's resignation although that's likely to go nowhere. I'm taking a victory lap since I've always considered Macron something of a pussy. Or, as they say in France, a poosey. Just a little no-good rat bastard. A Napoleonic toadie whose never met a camera he didn't like.
I follow this guy named Wifey on Twitter and he's saying that we're now entering Bear Market rally number three. He's been spot on so far going back to November 2021. I wholeheartedly agree with him when he says if you're going to lose make sure that you lose small. That seems like sage advice. He posts all sorts of things to educate the "normies" who follow him and he places family (fam) above all else when it comes to investing. We've seen bear markets materialize and then fizzle in the course of a day or two since this bear market started so you do everything you do at your own risk. Wifey is good enough to give you just enough information so that you can make whatever decisions you're wanting to make that affect your own portfolio. I'll be holding my fire until I see the whites of their eyes or, better yet, when someone calls the bottom. Not a bottom, the bottom. I could be waiting a while.
Well, fast forward 24 hours and we have results from the primary races. My boy, Vernon Jones, did not win. In fact, he lost with a margin of 73% to 24% or something like that. Funny thing is, Vernon was neck and neck with his opponent (Collins) after the first primary so I'm having a hard time digesting this so-called loss. I mean, how do you now account for a 50% difference between the two candidates who were nearly tied just two weeks ago after their primary? This was a runoff for the two top candidates and Vernon gained nothing while his opponent jumped some 50% points? I mean, you can't make this stuff up. I'm calling a fraud here, folks. We've seen some serious shenanigans coming out of the Georgia elections as of late and this is just one more example.
A very small part of me is quite happy with the fact that the republicans in Georgia now have the upper hand when it comes to stealing elections. Democrats have been stealing elections for generations in Georgia and I'm quite sure that they have every intention of installing their candidate, Stacey Abrams, as governor in the upcoming gubernatorial election. With republicans in control of the internal machinations, she will likely be on the losing end of whatever skullduggery her party comes up with to try and steal the election away from the rightful winner in the race. It comes down to whomever has the most stolen votes and with both sides playing the same game I think the advantage goes to the party in power. Some of this is clearly in jest so maybe you file this under, "Where there's a will, there's a way."
I'm getting increasingly concerned about justice and the equal application of the law in our country. How is it exactly that every last January 6th trespasser has been locked up and denied bail while staffers for some clown on television (Colbert) who did the very same thing are jailed for one night and then released? How is it that the BLM rioters raged and pillaged for an entire summer and not one of them spent so much as a night in jail while January 6th trespassers remain behind bars? How is it that patriots like Peter Navarro are taken into custody by the FBI while boarding a plane for his failure to respond to a subpoena while other governmental officials in the democratic regime get a pass when they do the same thing? If no one else will say it, I will. If you're a democrat, do as you please because there will be no accountability. If you're a republican, take one step out of line and you will be hogtied and frog marched before the judiciary. If you're a Trump supporter, God help you.
And then this clown, Colbert, goes on television and makes light of the crimes committed by his staff while taking comfort in the fact that he knew all along that his staffers would not be held accountable. He's one of the elite, of course, and we all know how our justice system deals with the elites. Think Hillary Clinton. So, Colbert can dispatch a handful of his staffers to our nation's capitol where they are allowed into one of the buildings occupied by our country's congressman and congresswomen. They are summarily dismissed after officials find out that they are not properly credentialed and, somehow, they find their way back inside the building where they are arrested for trespassing some hours later. How is this any different than what many of the January 6th trespassers did? One group walks free while the other is kept in solitary confinement without the possibility of bail.
We've seen a lot of shooting sprees come and go over the years and republicans have always roundly refused to consider any changes to existing gun laws to mitigate future shootings or deny so-called shooters access to weaponry with which to do their dastardly deeds. The rationale has always been that it just never made sense to react emotionally and in the moment to events no matter how horrible. They would tell you that this is how bad law is made and they would be right. Truth of the matter is that the laws, once enacted, would likely do more to chip away at the rights that we as citizens have under the second amendment than they would to prevent future shooting sprees. The last thing you want to do as a republican, is to let the liberals get their nose under the tent door when it comes to the second amendment. They would like nothing more than to confiscate every last weapon.
So, why are the republicans in Congress now joining up with the democrats to update our gun laws in the wake of the Uvalde school shootings? None of the laws they're talking about implementing would have stopped the Uvalde shooting or any other one or more of the recent school shootings we've seen in the last year or two. They are doing the bidding of the democrat party at a time in our history when the democrat party is at its weakest under the pitiful and demented presidency of one Joe Biden from Delaware. Biden has wreaked misery upon our citizenry in every conceivable way from leaving our borders open to the millions of migrants from 151 countries across the globe to shutting down our domestic energy production at a time when gas at the pump ranges anywhere from $5 a gallon on the East Coast to $10 a gallon on the West Coast. When your political opposition is in the proverbial ditch, the last thing you want to do is to throw him or her a rope.
When these so-called republicans tell us who they are we need to listen. We now know their names so our mission near term is to mobilize the citizenry in their respective states to vote them out of office. They've exposed themselves as the RINO's (Republican in name only) that they are and they need to be taken to task. They need to be held accountable. It's that simple. I'll give the liberals one thing. They speak with one voice when they want something. No one, and I mean no one, breaks from the pack. There have been a couple of exceptions like Manchin and Sinema this year and you might say that they saved the democrats from their own worse tendencies. Had they passed the legislation that their party wanted, our inflation rates would be in the double digits now. I'm not sure how we account for the fact that fourteen republicans are voting with the democrats on this gun legislation. It's a fucking travesty if you ask me.
The Red Flag law shit in the bill being proposed is very concerning. It allows anyone to drop a dime on someone they don't like, someone they think might be a danger to himself or herself, or you name it. It's been proposed here in my state but it was either vetoed by the governor or it never got the votes it needed to pass. You can see where a law like this would give license to every last law enforcement agency to grab people's guns using false pretenses. Worse yet, were it to turn on the whims of certain political parties, they might well try to make a case that their political opponents are a danger to our Republic and then all bets are off. Look at what they've done to the Trump supporters who trespassed in our nation's capitol on January 6th. They've criminalized their behavior and the democrat loyalists at large, were they to get their way, would put every last Trump supporter in jail. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times. This is who they are. This is what they do. Where is our Supreme Court?
The financial guy I listen to on the radio is talking a lot lately about how people who hold jobs need to make themselves indispensable to their employers. He's reporting on certain industries laying off hundreds if not thousands of employees due to any number of economic factors. It's a near certainty these days that we're going into a recession so I think his advice is both timely and necessary. Can you imagine being laid off in an environment that we're in these days with skyrocketing rents, inflation rates above 8%, gas at the pumps averaging some $5 to $$6, and a tightening job market? Once unemployed, you may well be competing for positions with any number of refugees that Demented Joe is letting come across our Southern border and who are willing to work for a lot less than what it might cost the employer to hire you. If you're not working, you're not going out to eat, you're not taking in a show from time to time, you're not buying a new car, and all that contributes to the downward spiral in our economy.
I just don't know how prepared we are as Americans for hard times were it to come to that. We've got a generation or two of Americans who know nothing but a stock market that goes up, who have never seen gas lines the likes of what we saw back in the days of Jimmy Carter, and certainly we've not experienced shortages the likes of which we've seen more recently with baby formula and tampons. As an aside, I have to laugh. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman from Georgia, says that we're experiencing a tampon shortage because so many liberals are putting tampon machines in men's rooms across our country.
There have been any number of food production facilities across our fruited plain that have been destroyed lately and for a variety of reasons. We'd probably have to go back to the days of the Great Depression of the 20's to see the kinds of food shortages that may be just around the corner for we unsuspecting Americans. Imagine now competing for food with the some ten million hungry mouths that Demented Joe is importing from other countries and you can see how we can go from bad to worse in a heartbeat. If you've got a plan, it's time to dust that mother fucker off.
Let's give a shout out to the Supremes for their ruling on the New York gun law that came down yesterday. I'm going to cut to the chase: The Court ruled that the NY law is unconsitituional. The NY law was so restrictive that almost no one got a concealed-carry permit and that was by design. Only the bad guys get to carry guns on the streets and subways of New York City. The decision was 6-3 with the conservatives carrying the day. The three liberals voted against allowing God fearing Americans to carry guns for their personal protection. Imagine that. What does that tell you about what might happen to our second amendment rights were the court to have a liberal majority? I suppose if you have fewer good guys carrying guns you will probably end up with more bad guys carrying guns and, to no one's surprise, you'll need more government to step in when and where you need protection. See how that works?
There are a handful of blue states that have laws on the books that mirror or are maybe even stricter than those on the books in New York. The officials from each and every one of those blue states spoke publicly and to a person declared that they would work with their legislatures to come up with workarounds to counter the ruling from the Supremes. The speeches no doubt were designed to placate the concerns and outrage of their leftist constituencies who yelled from the rooftops about renewed hopes of packing the Supreme Court and "taking back what was rightfully theirs." I wonder if these politicians know how clownish and stupid they both looked and sounded? The mayor of New York City went on and on about the streets of his city turning red with blood now that the good guys will have the right to carry forearms. Wat? The pearl clutching was clearly beyond the pale but delicious to observe from afar. There is a God!
I would have liked nothing better yesterday than to sit on my sofa and look at my Twitter feed all day. I wouldn't say that watching liberals lose their minds on Twitter is one of my all time favorite past times but let's just say it's a close second. The missus and I had a more important task to attend to so I never got the chance to do what I wanted to do. That's the way it works sometimes. We promised Mrs G that we'd take her out to look at a couple of couches that she's had her eye on. It has to be long enough for Debbie-Rah-Rah to sleep on but, that aside, Mrs G was not overly particular. Oh, and Mrs G doesn't care for certain fabrics and styles so it was easy to tease out the bad choices fairly quickly. She was getting out and about using her little walker thingy. When you're as old as she is you are eternally thankful for something or somebody to lean on. Some crutches are more obvious than others.
We actually went to three furniture showrooms which were, thankfully, in close proximity to each other. That should give you some sense as to just how motivated Mrs G was to take care of business. Having decided which couch she wanted, I urged Mrs G to place her order and be done with it. You never know these days with supply chain issues and all the rest whether waiting to place your order might not unduly delay delivery of said furniture. If the salesman says that they have the couch you want in stock, you place your order and move on. I think Mrs G was just too pooped by the time we were finished looking around that going back to the store to place the order was just a bridge too far. It wasn't a point worth arguing so Mrs G and the missus made plans to place the order the following day. And then there's the issue of getting rid of her existing couch.
On our way out to the main road, Mrs G noticed that we were within spitting distance of a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) outlet store. She started talking, haltingly almost, about how she and Mr G used to come this area of town back in the day, go to Lowes, and then stop by Kentucky Fried Chicken for a little lunch before heading home. Well, I can take a clue as much as the next guy so I swung into action and made my way directly behind a line of cars that were ordering from their take-out window. "Oh, no," Mrs G said. "You don't need to wait in line just for me." '"The line is going to take too long," she went on. She had wanted to go into the store but the store was not open for walk-in's. I settled in behind five maybe six cars already in line and assured Mrs G that the line was likely to move pretty quickly so there was no need to worry about a thing. The only decision left for her to make was whether she wanted a three piece combo meal or a four piece combo meal.
The missus and I didn't tell her that we'd not had chicken from KFC in ages because of our desire to avoid saturated fats and everything else under the sun that clogs the fuck out of your arteries. It sure tastes good going down but you'll need emergency bypass surgery by the time you're done with the rolls, the gravy, and the mashed potatoes. She must have thought that we were an order of fries short of a happy meal not to grab a combo meal but she was too polite and probably too hungry to even broach the subject. The only challenge left was to get her home and sitting on her couch with her combo meal and her diet Pepsi before the meal turned cold. That turned out to be a bigger challenge than we thought since the missus and I had every intention to stop by one more store where we hoped to grab something to eat for dinner. All in good time.
Just when we conservatives thought we'd seen it all this week after the Supremes overturned a gun law in New York, we found out that they had one more shoe to drop before heading to the Hamptons for the long weekend. They overturned the Roe vs Wade decision that has been established law for some 50 years. It was bad law when they decided it 50 years ago and conservatives have been praying night and day ever since that it might someday be overturned. And, much to the delight of conservatives country wide, our Supreme Court with their 6-3 conservative majority in the year of the Lord 2020, did just that. It never made any sense that a handful of Supreme Court justices would make decisions on something as impactful on our society and citizenry as abortion. The Court has now decided, and rightly so, that those decisions are better left to the people and their elected representatives. So, the States will now decide the fate of abortion one way or another and for better or worse.
For those states that now choose to ban abortions, its citizenry can travel to an adjoining state assuming they offer abortion services. That's my way of saying that if someone wants to get an abortion they will always have that opportunity. The Karens marching in downtowns across our fruited plains and holding their placards "My body, my choice" after the decision came down can take their signs and their collective rancor and go find another cause to fight for since this fight is, for all intents and purposes, over. Stick a fork in it, it's done. You'll not find much sympathy amongst the people in our country who value life and who wonder what the hell there is to piss and moan about knowing full well that anyone who wants an abortion can still get one. The Nancy Pelosi's and Chuck Schumer's of the world would have you believe that the November elections will be all about Roe. Poppycock. That's just wishful thinking.
Lastly, aside from the Justices themselves, we have Donald J Trump to thank for these momentous decisions coming-out of the Supreme Court this week. Were it not for the Donald, none of this would have happened. He put these Justices on the Court knowing full well that they would overturn Roe vs Wade given half a chance. The Right-to-Life movement owes Trump a huge solid for his commitment to their cause. If this doesn't fire them up to put Trump in office for another four years come 2024, then nothing will. Trump has had their back from day one and now it's their turn to have his back. Trump's capital in the wake of this decision has risen tenfold and conservatives coast to coast will hopefully show their appreciation at the polls both in the Mid Term elections in November and in the presidential election in 2024. God willing.
Canaries
19/06/22 07:03
This inflation thing is getting out of control. The gas prices are around $5.75 per gallon for premium gas and that's up from the $2 plus when Trump left office in 2020. Food is getting wicked expensive too and you have to wonder if this isn't what Bumbles Joey and his leftist minions are trying to foist upon our citizenry. Why would he do that? What political playbook calls for bringing your constituents to their knees financially? What sacrifices will they expect from us next? When will they be satisfied that we're sufficiently impoverished?
They say that it's all about dampening consumer demand as one of many tools they have in their toolbox to bring inflation under control. I'm just not sure how much demand there is if people have little to no money left with which to make purchases. The only question now seems to be how soon before we see a real bust. That means assets classes of all types come down in value some 80-90%. If you bought a home for $500k, you'll soon be sitting in a house worth maybe $200k and seriously underwater on your mortgage. That's probably not a call you'll want to take if the bank decides to right-size your debt obligation to them. Lots of banks will be sitting on portfolios heavily weighted with underwater mortgages and that's a recipe for disaster when unemployment rates are likely to rise to some 15 to 20% as the bust deepens.
I'm waking up his morning to financial markets across the globe that have fallen seriously overnight by 3% or more. Here in the United States, all of the major indices are down roughly 2% or more and that's before the market even opens. This cascade of stock values has been in something of a free fall since last November. You know what they say when we get a bust in the market. Right? Eventually, they come for them all. Don't even get me started on crypto. I've never understood crypto and I've never made an attempt to understand crypto. I think I recall seeing Bitcoin with a market value of maybe $66k last year sometime. I'm waking up this morning to Bitcoin at $23k. It's been crushed along with every other coin out there. Not that I care, but it's maybe the canary in the coal mine? Like I said, no asset class will be spared when they come for them all.
I'm listening to my talk show guy out of Boston this morning and he's talking about the misery that Joe Biden and his policies have caused the average Joe at the gas pumps and everywhere else. This guy calls is talking about the fact that he commutes some 160 miles a day and he's spending close to $200 a week in gas. He and his wife just bought a house and he thought they were doing just fine until Joey Biden and his band of idiots took control of our government. Now, he just doesn't know how much longer he's going to be able to hang on. He started weeping on the phone and had to take a breath or two before he could resume his comments. It was just very sad. Very sad indeed.
The missus and I drove over to one of our favorite little shops in Southern Maine yesterday afternoon. We wanted to pick up a little something for dinner and, God willing, maybe a little dessert. We ordered a few things from the deli area and we grabbed a couple of pre-cooked salmon and chicken parmesan dishes as entrees to have that evening. The missus commented on the fact that prices for their products were nowhere in sight. We didn't much care since we were going to buy them regardless. I mean, how expensive could they be? I looked more closely at the packaging once we arrived back home and found the price tags on the bottom of the packaging. So, we're supposed to turn a pre-made meal upside down to see the price tag? That's one way to lessen sticker shock, I suppose.
We took Mrs G out to a little farm called Wellington Farms just up the road from her place yesterday afternoon. She and the missus pursued the aisles of the greenhouses on the property and we filled a cardboard flat with various annuals that were intended to go in pots and flower boxes back home. Mrs G is always game for anything that gets her out and about and away from her facility for however long. She is especially tickled when it comes to making sure that her neighbors see her leaving her facility with her daughter or other. Those old wives tales about family's dropping of their elderly parents at these facilities to wither away and die by their lonesome is just poppycock and she's living proof that it doesn't have to be that way. Others should take from that lesson what they will but seeing is believing. Where are we going today, little darlings?
We'll collect Mrs G this coming week for a trip to a furniture store across town. She's badly in need of a new couch and, God willing, a new bed stand. Both purchases are long overdue so I think this is step or two in the right direction. I know Mrs G is in with both feet or, at least, that's what I took from her reaction. I think it's something that has been on her mind for a good while so we're going to git er done as they say. We'll need to measure carefully to make sure that the couch she purchases is higher than her existing couch since getting on and off the couch has been something of an issue since her surgery. It will be good to see them hauling away that old couch that goes back a lot of years.
Yesterday was one of those warm and muggy days here at the house but cooler and more comfortable once I got down to the coast on my bike. It's just a few minutes away but the temperatures are completely different and more often than not there is a refreshing coolness that comes off the ocean that can actually be a little chilly if you're not dressed properly. I'm well into the first leg of my bike ride by the time I hit the coast so I'm warm to the core and largely welcoming of the cooler temperatures. The beach areas seem less crowded these days and I'm guessing that has something to do with the average price of a gallon of gas which is now over five dollars. Less crowded is always a good thing when I'm going balls-to-the-walls down Ocean Boulevard on my bike. Well, moving along at a pretty good clip is probably a more apt description.
I watched the televised debate of republican gubernatorial candidates in New York last night. I was specifically interested in listening to both Zeldin and Guliani on the issues and I was wanting to get a sense of the men and whether or not they seemed to have the appropriate gravitas as it were to be governor of that great state. I know it's a blue state but that is not to say that a republican governor can't be voted in especially in light of the economic and cultural havoc that one Joey Bumbles Biden and his party have wreaked on the state of New York and our nation more broadly. I thought Guliani seemed a little too hard nosed and intractable in his arguments while Zeldin came across as a school boy looking to oust his superiors. I don't think either of them even mentioned the current governor's name. Were they not wanting to alienate the female vote? What the heck? Zeldin holds a decent lead in the polls so we'll see how long that lasts.
I'll be happy when this January 6th bullshit show trial is over and done with. I suppose it won't really be over until the DOJ decides and maybe announces that no charges will be brought against Trump for his role in the proceedings. Until then, that is all the leftist loons are wanting to talk about. They live and breathe in the hopes that Trump will be hogtied and frog marched before a judge who will hold him over to trial without bail for inciting a riot or some such bullshit. They think it's their only hope to hold on to the White House in 2024 and maybe one or both houses of Congress later this year. I'd like to get back to listening to them clutching their pearls while spewing their usual nonsense on the progressive radio stations that I have access to. I stopped listening to them when the hearings started since it's all just so ridiculous. I think I'm not alone in shutting them down and out. Let's wrap it up, folks. It's time to move on.
All in all, last night was a good night for republicans in the primaries in various States. The narrative that republicans are likely to rout the democrats in a tsunami in the Fall was strengthened even more with the wins put on the board by Republicans last night. The Maya Flores (Republican) win in the deep blue section of Texas tells you all you need to know about how the Latina vote has moved lock, stock, and barrel to the Republican Party. In South Carolina House races, any number of House seats held by liberal leaning republicans were lost to their more conservative brethren and with room to spare. I was hoping that Katie Arrington, Trump's pick, would beat her fellow republican, Mace, but it was not to be. Tom Rice, a republican from South Carolina, who voted for Trump's second impeachment, got beaten like a rented mule so that makes five of the ten who voted for Trump's impeachment who will not be returning to Washington in January of 2023. As for the remaining five, we're coming for you.
Elon Musk apparently cast his vote for Ms Flores last night and went on Twitter to say that it was the first Republican that he'd ever voted for. Having Elon's support can't hurt. She'll be facing serious headwinds in the November election since she is battling it out in a strongly democratic district. That said, times are a changing given what Biden has done to our country so, with Elon's support, that could make the difference between wining and losing. If the Republicans are to have a true tsunami of a win in November, they'll need her win and wins like hers straight across each and every district across the southern border of Texas. Elon also said something about being partial to DeSantis in 2024. I guess it can't hurt to get it out there. We'll see what it means for Trump in the days and months ahead. We've got a long way to go before we get to the 2024 race.
The missus never believes me when I tell her that everything that Biden is doing to destroy our country is intentional. I don't know if that's some kind of naiveté on her part or just an unwillingness to believe that a President of the United States could be that evil (or stupid). To call it evil suggests that he is actively engaged in whatever it is that he's doing to bring our country to its knees. I probably ought to find another word since I don't think Biden has a clue as to where he is half the time much less a clue about what it is that he's doing or not doing. He reads the words put in front of him by his handlers and not particularly well by all accounts. One minute he's whispering into the microphone and in the next breath he's gritting his teeth in anger with that stupid Joker-like smile of his. Tucker Carlson want on television last night talking about this "intentional" thing and he agrees with me. I think the missus, believe it or not, is still on the fence.
My plan this morning was to go food shopping with the Ev man. I'd rather not since I want to listen to my radio shows as they dissect last night's election results. I want to hear the progressives and the middle-of-the-roaders clutching their pearls about what this means for the Fall and I want to hear my stalwart republican friends taking a well deserved victory lap. I think I can do both. That is, I can catch most of my shows and I can go shopping with the Ev man. I can have my cake and eat it too. My priority is the Ev man truth be told so let's put that out there. These visits to the store are typically pretty quick and we'll get him what he needs or enough, at least, to hold him over for a good week or two. I wish we had a more well defined list of things to go shopping for but we don't. It's catch as catch can for the most part. Up and down the aisles we'll go from one end of the store to the other. I think we can get it all done in a good thirty minutes if the good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise. That will leave me plenty of time for my shows.
The Supreme Court could report out on a couple of cases they have on their roster today so that could make for an interesting day. They have both a gun case and an abortion case outstanding. If they decide the cases in favor of the conservatives, which I expect they will, the leftists will be out with their pussy hats and pom pom's ranting and raving like the lunatics that they are. You never see the conservatives pissing and moaning when they get rulings or decisions that are seemingly against their better interests. But, that's what the leftists do when they don't get their way. I don't know who the fuck they think they are half the time or why they think they're so damn entitled. Both sides enjoy seeing the other side lose regardless of the issue and the more spectacular the loss the louder the applause. This is how civil wars start. So much entrenchment.
I was watching the returns come in the other night in several primary states. I tuned into CNN which usually has pretty good coverage. John King works the board like the pro that he is and he knows his stuff inside and out. I was gobsmacked to hear every other word coming out his mouth about the big lie and a thousand different variations on same. Couldn't he just talk about who was winning and who was losing without throwing in the usual democrat talking points? It was stunning, really. And, just so you know, saying that it was a big lie doesn't make it a big lie. In fact, a huge percentage of Republicans and maybe even a smattering of democrats believe that the 2020 election was stolen by the democrats. I suppose that this is who the democrats are. They think that the more they say it the more people will believe it. I suppose to some extent, it may be true.
Word has it that the head of the company that runs CNN put the word out that the talking heads on the network are not to use the expression, "The Big Lie." They believe, and rightly so, that it is nothing more than a talking point put out by the democrat party and CNN, under their new leadership, is trying to get back to straight reporting. I tuned in to Anderson Cooper on CNN briefly last night when he was talking about the ramifications of certain races and he was doing his level best to avoid using the expression (The Big Lie) but was not completely successful.
The element of partisanship is so baked in at the network that trying to rein it all in might well prove futile. It may be necessary to fire them all and just start over again. CNN is denying a report that certain contracts will not be renewed when they expire. Maybe the mere reporting of this will send the appropriate message. Oh, and to nobody's surprise, not a word was mentioned of Maya Flores's win. You know, the first time since the Civil War that a republican won that district in Southern Texas. And, let's not forget the icing on the cake, she is a woman to boot! And still, crickets!
The thought of nationalizing one or more of our industries by our Federal Government never crossed my mind until I heard some talk show guy talking about it. There's been lots of talk coming out of the Biden White House about using the Defense Production Act (DPA) to help with the production of baby formula and other things. These are the same ass clowns that ridiculed Trump for not using the defense production act to make face masks and other things back in the day when Covid was raging.
Trump always viewed using the DPA as a last resort and preferred to work closely with the manufacturers instead of having the government step in when it wasn't completely necessary. Biden and his minions are apparently now using the DPA as an instrument of governmental overreach in order to take over the means of production. Don't think for a moment that their more recent tirades about oil companies and their exorbitant profits "at the expense of the American public" are just the rantings of a lunatic left wing Administration. It's a precursor to nationalizing the oil industries and having the Federal Government run the oil companies. They're just getting started. Think Venezuela.
I'm not sure why Biden's people would want control over the oil companies since Biden has promised since day one that he wants to eliminate our use of and our reliance on all fossil fuels in our country. Might the plan be to first nationalize them and then shut them down? They've made it more and more difficult if not impossible for US oil companies to conduct their business here in the United States while fattening the coffers of leftists regimes in places like Venezuela and Russia by buying their oil and passing along the increased expense of same to the consumer at the pumps.
One oil industry executive was quoted as saying that the refining of crude oil here in the US will come to a complete halt, or words to that effect, in the near term thanks to Biden's policies on domestic energy production. Did people not believe Biden when he said what he said about fossil fuels during his run for the Presidency? I guess not since they voted for the fool anyway. I guess Trump's mean tweets were just a bridge too far.
When you hear the word "inflation" you think about prices going up. That isn't always the case. Companies far and wide have gotten smarter about concealing the obvious when it comes to inflation. I've heard and seen examples of where company's are now putting less and less in their packages but charging not a nickel more. This is happening across the board on everything from bags of potato ships to candy bars. Everything is smaller. I suppose it even appeals to the good folks looking to lose a couple of pounds since smaller is better.
It means less guilt for the consumer and more room on the store shelves for a wider variety of products. I'm old enough to remember when a box of Corn Flakes used to last a good few days if you sat down to a reasonably sized bowl every morning. Now, it's gone in three sittings. The same is true for a loaf of bread. You could make quite a few sandwiches before you got to the heel of the loaf at the far end of the packaging. Now, you pull a couple of slices out of the middle of the loaf and the two heels of bread that you've always avoided are just about all you have left. We're on to you, mother fuckers.
I think today is one of those days when I ought to get out on my bike early because rain is in the forecast for the afternoon. It always works better when I decide early on that that's what I'm wanting to do. It's almost as though I'm making a commitment to myself and maybe even holding myself accountable if I fail to follow through on my own plans. Guilt can be a powerful motivator. Yes, I'd likely regret not getting my bike ride in when I had no excuses whatever for not doing it. It would be a lost opportunity so to speak. Lost opportunities don't go over well with me. I'm old school about these kinds of things.
What else you got this morning, Johnny Boy? The missus is trying to drag me along with her on a little shopping trip to Walmart. I want nothing to do with it. Sorry, Honey. You are on your own. And what's this I'm hearing about Walmart canceling their contract with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy? I thought all the big box stores cancelled his ass a long time ago. I like Mike, don't get me wrong. He's a first rate patriot for the cause. He stood, and still stands, with Donald J Trump on the now infamous stolen election in 2020. But I have to tell you, I don't want any of his employees to lose their jobs, or for Mike to lose his business, because the woke mother fuckers at Walmart are doing the bidding of the Bidenistas and cancelling their contract with MyPillow for purely political reasons. Maybe I vote with my feet this morning and give the missus a "Hell No!" when she asks if I want to go to Walmart with her to do a little shopping.
Sometimes, I think that the longer I sit here the more ideas I'll come up with and that will be good for the blog on any given week. The groove I'm getting into seems to see me putting down just enough on "paper" such that I can press the page down arrow on my keyboard eight or nine times and I'll be right as rain. Who knows if that is the right answer or not. Maybe it's too much for the average browser to take in in any one sitting. Maybe people stopping by to read the blog will pick and choose what they wish to read. Maybe they're getting tired of all the politics I kick around on any given week. Maybe they stopped looking at this here blog long ago because they are Biden fan boys or girls and they can only stand so much negative press when it comes to their hero in the White House. I get it. Maybe they want more of Joe and less of Mrs G and the Ev man.
Word has it that Elon Musk sat down with the employees of Twitter yesterday for the first time since he purchased the company a few months back. There are still some issues outstanding (Bot counts?) that need to be cleared up before the sale is finalized but it looks like a done deal for all intents and purposes. You know those skinny little mother fuckers with multiple pronouns working behind the scenes at Twitter never wanted Musk anywhere near their company. In fact, word has it that they took exception to a comment Musk made about "All lives mattering." I'm quite certain that Elon took note of those little pussies in the front row who twisted and turned on their multi-colored prayer rugs as he outed them like the little turds in the fishbowl that they are. I'm hoping that he told them to take their "wokeness" elsewhere if they aren't happy with the new sheriff in town.
The missus and I did a little shopping at McKinnon's in Portsmouth last night where we picked up a little something for dinner. I spied with my little eye a nice blueberry loaf that I thought Mrs might like so I tossed it into the basket. We'll give it to her when we see her later today. I sometimes wonder if she likes the things that we bring her or maybe she just says that she does when she really doesn't. Maybe she's starting to take us and our little gifts for granted. There's that too. Maybe I'll hold off on bringing gifts until she says something or other about the dearth of gifts that she's been receiving from us. Or, maybe she''ll attempt to shame us into resuming our gift bringing by telling us about this gift or that gift that she received from this or that person. I have a good mind to take a peek in her freezer one day to see just how many of our gifts have been put aside for a rainy day. Maybe our gifts are just not that memorable or even remarkable. I suppose that's possible. Anything is possible.
Did I mention the company, Revlon, declared bankruptcy? I noticed that toward the end of last week their stock dropped some 52% in one day. I'm talking about the cosmetic company here. And, not just any cosmetic company. This is a company known globally for their products. I had to look it up because I had no sense as to the value of the stock. In 2019 the stock was trading at $27 a share. It closed recently at $3.98 a share. Talk about a fall from grace. Anyway, the question I have is, who the hell was selling all their shares of stock ahead of their declaring bankruptcy? Are Revlon's principles allowed to cash out at the expense of the common and preferred stockholders? If not, isn't there a law against insider trading? Somebody got tipped off and they sold their stock before the filing. Someone needs to go to jail. Do I need to drop a dime with the Securities and Exchange Commission? Tell me there is a God. Speaking of the baby Jesus, Revlon closed 91% higher today (June 17th). And you thought they were dead in the water after declaring bankruptcy. Think again. FYI, S&P ends week down a crushing 5.8%. Brutal.
Temperatures are in the mid eighties today here along the coast. I waited a little too long to go for my bike ride and it had heated up just enough to make me want to cut my ride short. No sense in getting myself a heat stroke in the process. That's not going to help anybody. The humidity also isn't helping. I can usually catch a nice cool breeze along the ocean when I go for my bike ride but I usually don't know how that's gong to work out until I get down there. I don't usually cut my ride short but I made an exception today. If I thought I was going to cut my ride short so that I'd have enough energy later on to do something else, I was wrong. The only reason that I'm sitting here writing in this here journal is because I got tired of laying in bed trying to ride out this heat. If I sound sluggish, it's because I am.
They say that it's all about dampening consumer demand as one of many tools they have in their toolbox to bring inflation under control. I'm just not sure how much demand there is if people have little to no money left with which to make purchases. The only question now seems to be how soon before we see a real bust. That means assets classes of all types come down in value some 80-90%. If you bought a home for $500k, you'll soon be sitting in a house worth maybe $200k and seriously underwater on your mortgage. That's probably not a call you'll want to take if the bank decides to right-size your debt obligation to them. Lots of banks will be sitting on portfolios heavily weighted with underwater mortgages and that's a recipe for disaster when unemployment rates are likely to rise to some 15 to 20% as the bust deepens.
I'm waking up his morning to financial markets across the globe that have fallen seriously overnight by 3% or more. Here in the United States, all of the major indices are down roughly 2% or more and that's before the market even opens. This cascade of stock values has been in something of a free fall since last November. You know what they say when we get a bust in the market. Right? Eventually, they come for them all. Don't even get me started on crypto. I've never understood crypto and I've never made an attempt to understand crypto. I think I recall seeing Bitcoin with a market value of maybe $66k last year sometime. I'm waking up this morning to Bitcoin at $23k. It's been crushed along with every other coin out there. Not that I care, but it's maybe the canary in the coal mine? Like I said, no asset class will be spared when they come for them all.
I'm listening to my talk show guy out of Boston this morning and he's talking about the misery that Joe Biden and his policies have caused the average Joe at the gas pumps and everywhere else. This guy calls is talking about the fact that he commutes some 160 miles a day and he's spending close to $200 a week in gas. He and his wife just bought a house and he thought they were doing just fine until Joey Biden and his band of idiots took control of our government. Now, he just doesn't know how much longer he's going to be able to hang on. He started weeping on the phone and had to take a breath or two before he could resume his comments. It was just very sad. Very sad indeed.
The missus and I drove over to one of our favorite little shops in Southern Maine yesterday afternoon. We wanted to pick up a little something for dinner and, God willing, maybe a little dessert. We ordered a few things from the deli area and we grabbed a couple of pre-cooked salmon and chicken parmesan dishes as entrees to have that evening. The missus commented on the fact that prices for their products were nowhere in sight. We didn't much care since we were going to buy them regardless. I mean, how expensive could they be? I looked more closely at the packaging once we arrived back home and found the price tags on the bottom of the packaging. So, we're supposed to turn a pre-made meal upside down to see the price tag? That's one way to lessen sticker shock, I suppose.
We took Mrs G out to a little farm called Wellington Farms just up the road from her place yesterday afternoon. She and the missus pursued the aisles of the greenhouses on the property and we filled a cardboard flat with various annuals that were intended to go in pots and flower boxes back home. Mrs G is always game for anything that gets her out and about and away from her facility for however long. She is especially tickled when it comes to making sure that her neighbors see her leaving her facility with her daughter or other. Those old wives tales about family's dropping of their elderly parents at these facilities to wither away and die by their lonesome is just poppycock and she's living proof that it doesn't have to be that way. Others should take from that lesson what they will but seeing is believing. Where are we going today, little darlings?
We'll collect Mrs G this coming week for a trip to a furniture store across town. She's badly in need of a new couch and, God willing, a new bed stand. Both purchases are long overdue so I think this is step or two in the right direction. I know Mrs G is in with both feet or, at least, that's what I took from her reaction. I think it's something that has been on her mind for a good while so we're going to git er done as they say. We'll need to measure carefully to make sure that the couch she purchases is higher than her existing couch since getting on and off the couch has been something of an issue since her surgery. It will be good to see them hauling away that old couch that goes back a lot of years.
Yesterday was one of those warm and muggy days here at the house but cooler and more comfortable once I got down to the coast on my bike. It's just a few minutes away but the temperatures are completely different and more often than not there is a refreshing coolness that comes off the ocean that can actually be a little chilly if you're not dressed properly. I'm well into the first leg of my bike ride by the time I hit the coast so I'm warm to the core and largely welcoming of the cooler temperatures. The beach areas seem less crowded these days and I'm guessing that has something to do with the average price of a gallon of gas which is now over five dollars. Less crowded is always a good thing when I'm going balls-to-the-walls down Ocean Boulevard on my bike. Well, moving along at a pretty good clip is probably a more apt description.
I watched the televised debate of republican gubernatorial candidates in New York last night. I was specifically interested in listening to both Zeldin and Guliani on the issues and I was wanting to get a sense of the men and whether or not they seemed to have the appropriate gravitas as it were to be governor of that great state. I know it's a blue state but that is not to say that a republican governor can't be voted in especially in light of the economic and cultural havoc that one Joey Bumbles Biden and his party have wreaked on the state of New York and our nation more broadly. I thought Guliani seemed a little too hard nosed and intractable in his arguments while Zeldin came across as a school boy looking to oust his superiors. I don't think either of them even mentioned the current governor's name. Were they not wanting to alienate the female vote? What the heck? Zeldin holds a decent lead in the polls so we'll see how long that lasts.
I'll be happy when this January 6th bullshit show trial is over and done with. I suppose it won't really be over until the DOJ decides and maybe announces that no charges will be brought against Trump for his role in the proceedings. Until then, that is all the leftist loons are wanting to talk about. They live and breathe in the hopes that Trump will be hogtied and frog marched before a judge who will hold him over to trial without bail for inciting a riot or some such bullshit. They think it's their only hope to hold on to the White House in 2024 and maybe one or both houses of Congress later this year. I'd like to get back to listening to them clutching their pearls while spewing their usual nonsense on the progressive radio stations that I have access to. I stopped listening to them when the hearings started since it's all just so ridiculous. I think I'm not alone in shutting them down and out. Let's wrap it up, folks. It's time to move on.
All in all, last night was a good night for republicans in the primaries in various States. The narrative that republicans are likely to rout the democrats in a tsunami in the Fall was strengthened even more with the wins put on the board by Republicans last night. The Maya Flores (Republican) win in the deep blue section of Texas tells you all you need to know about how the Latina vote has moved lock, stock, and barrel to the Republican Party. In South Carolina House races, any number of House seats held by liberal leaning republicans were lost to their more conservative brethren and with room to spare. I was hoping that Katie Arrington, Trump's pick, would beat her fellow republican, Mace, but it was not to be. Tom Rice, a republican from South Carolina, who voted for Trump's second impeachment, got beaten like a rented mule so that makes five of the ten who voted for Trump's impeachment who will not be returning to Washington in January of 2023. As for the remaining five, we're coming for you.
Elon Musk apparently cast his vote for Ms Flores last night and went on Twitter to say that it was the first Republican that he'd ever voted for. Having Elon's support can't hurt. She'll be facing serious headwinds in the November election since she is battling it out in a strongly democratic district. That said, times are a changing given what Biden has done to our country so, with Elon's support, that could make the difference between wining and losing. If the Republicans are to have a true tsunami of a win in November, they'll need her win and wins like hers straight across each and every district across the southern border of Texas. Elon also said something about being partial to DeSantis in 2024. I guess it can't hurt to get it out there. We'll see what it means for Trump in the days and months ahead. We've got a long way to go before we get to the 2024 race.
The missus never believes me when I tell her that everything that Biden is doing to destroy our country is intentional. I don't know if that's some kind of naiveté on her part or just an unwillingness to believe that a President of the United States could be that evil (or stupid). To call it evil suggests that he is actively engaged in whatever it is that he's doing to bring our country to its knees. I probably ought to find another word since I don't think Biden has a clue as to where he is half the time much less a clue about what it is that he's doing or not doing. He reads the words put in front of him by his handlers and not particularly well by all accounts. One minute he's whispering into the microphone and in the next breath he's gritting his teeth in anger with that stupid Joker-like smile of his. Tucker Carlson want on television last night talking about this "intentional" thing and he agrees with me. I think the missus, believe it or not, is still on the fence.
My plan this morning was to go food shopping with the Ev man. I'd rather not since I want to listen to my radio shows as they dissect last night's election results. I want to hear the progressives and the middle-of-the-roaders clutching their pearls about what this means for the Fall and I want to hear my stalwart republican friends taking a well deserved victory lap. I think I can do both. That is, I can catch most of my shows and I can go shopping with the Ev man. I can have my cake and eat it too. My priority is the Ev man truth be told so let's put that out there. These visits to the store are typically pretty quick and we'll get him what he needs or enough, at least, to hold him over for a good week or two. I wish we had a more well defined list of things to go shopping for but we don't. It's catch as catch can for the most part. Up and down the aisles we'll go from one end of the store to the other. I think we can get it all done in a good thirty minutes if the good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise. That will leave me plenty of time for my shows.
The Supreme Court could report out on a couple of cases they have on their roster today so that could make for an interesting day. They have both a gun case and an abortion case outstanding. If they decide the cases in favor of the conservatives, which I expect they will, the leftists will be out with their pussy hats and pom pom's ranting and raving like the lunatics that they are. You never see the conservatives pissing and moaning when they get rulings or decisions that are seemingly against their better interests. But, that's what the leftists do when they don't get their way. I don't know who the fuck they think they are half the time or why they think they're so damn entitled. Both sides enjoy seeing the other side lose regardless of the issue and the more spectacular the loss the louder the applause. This is how civil wars start. So much entrenchment.
I was watching the returns come in the other night in several primary states. I tuned into CNN which usually has pretty good coverage. John King works the board like the pro that he is and he knows his stuff inside and out. I was gobsmacked to hear every other word coming out his mouth about the big lie and a thousand different variations on same. Couldn't he just talk about who was winning and who was losing without throwing in the usual democrat talking points? It was stunning, really. And, just so you know, saying that it was a big lie doesn't make it a big lie. In fact, a huge percentage of Republicans and maybe even a smattering of democrats believe that the 2020 election was stolen by the democrats. I suppose that this is who the democrats are. They think that the more they say it the more people will believe it. I suppose to some extent, it may be true.
Word has it that the head of the company that runs CNN put the word out that the talking heads on the network are not to use the expression, "The Big Lie." They believe, and rightly so, that it is nothing more than a talking point put out by the democrat party and CNN, under their new leadership, is trying to get back to straight reporting. I tuned in to Anderson Cooper on CNN briefly last night when he was talking about the ramifications of certain races and he was doing his level best to avoid using the expression (The Big Lie) but was not completely successful.
The element of partisanship is so baked in at the network that trying to rein it all in might well prove futile. It may be necessary to fire them all and just start over again. CNN is denying a report that certain contracts will not be renewed when they expire. Maybe the mere reporting of this will send the appropriate message. Oh, and to nobody's surprise, not a word was mentioned of Maya Flores's win. You know, the first time since the Civil War that a republican won that district in Southern Texas. And, let's not forget the icing on the cake, she is a woman to boot! And still, crickets!
The thought of nationalizing one or more of our industries by our Federal Government never crossed my mind until I heard some talk show guy talking about it. There's been lots of talk coming out of the Biden White House about using the Defense Production Act (DPA) to help with the production of baby formula and other things. These are the same ass clowns that ridiculed Trump for not using the defense production act to make face masks and other things back in the day when Covid was raging.
Trump always viewed using the DPA as a last resort and preferred to work closely with the manufacturers instead of having the government step in when it wasn't completely necessary. Biden and his minions are apparently now using the DPA as an instrument of governmental overreach in order to take over the means of production. Don't think for a moment that their more recent tirades about oil companies and their exorbitant profits "at the expense of the American public" are just the rantings of a lunatic left wing Administration. It's a precursor to nationalizing the oil industries and having the Federal Government run the oil companies. They're just getting started. Think Venezuela.
I'm not sure why Biden's people would want control over the oil companies since Biden has promised since day one that he wants to eliminate our use of and our reliance on all fossil fuels in our country. Might the plan be to first nationalize them and then shut them down? They've made it more and more difficult if not impossible for US oil companies to conduct their business here in the United States while fattening the coffers of leftists regimes in places like Venezuela and Russia by buying their oil and passing along the increased expense of same to the consumer at the pumps.
One oil industry executive was quoted as saying that the refining of crude oil here in the US will come to a complete halt, or words to that effect, in the near term thanks to Biden's policies on domestic energy production. Did people not believe Biden when he said what he said about fossil fuels during his run for the Presidency? I guess not since they voted for the fool anyway. I guess Trump's mean tweets were just a bridge too far.
When you hear the word "inflation" you think about prices going up. That isn't always the case. Companies far and wide have gotten smarter about concealing the obvious when it comes to inflation. I've heard and seen examples of where company's are now putting less and less in their packages but charging not a nickel more. This is happening across the board on everything from bags of potato ships to candy bars. Everything is smaller. I suppose it even appeals to the good folks looking to lose a couple of pounds since smaller is better.
It means less guilt for the consumer and more room on the store shelves for a wider variety of products. I'm old enough to remember when a box of Corn Flakes used to last a good few days if you sat down to a reasonably sized bowl every morning. Now, it's gone in three sittings. The same is true for a loaf of bread. You could make quite a few sandwiches before you got to the heel of the loaf at the far end of the packaging. Now, you pull a couple of slices out of the middle of the loaf and the two heels of bread that you've always avoided are just about all you have left. We're on to you, mother fuckers.
I think today is one of those days when I ought to get out on my bike early because rain is in the forecast for the afternoon. It always works better when I decide early on that that's what I'm wanting to do. It's almost as though I'm making a commitment to myself and maybe even holding myself accountable if I fail to follow through on my own plans. Guilt can be a powerful motivator. Yes, I'd likely regret not getting my bike ride in when I had no excuses whatever for not doing it. It would be a lost opportunity so to speak. Lost opportunities don't go over well with me. I'm old school about these kinds of things.
What else you got this morning, Johnny Boy? The missus is trying to drag me along with her on a little shopping trip to Walmart. I want nothing to do with it. Sorry, Honey. You are on your own. And what's this I'm hearing about Walmart canceling their contract with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy? I thought all the big box stores cancelled his ass a long time ago. I like Mike, don't get me wrong. He's a first rate patriot for the cause. He stood, and still stands, with Donald J Trump on the now infamous stolen election in 2020. But I have to tell you, I don't want any of his employees to lose their jobs, or for Mike to lose his business, because the woke mother fuckers at Walmart are doing the bidding of the Bidenistas and cancelling their contract with MyPillow for purely political reasons. Maybe I vote with my feet this morning and give the missus a "Hell No!" when she asks if I want to go to Walmart with her to do a little shopping.
Sometimes, I think that the longer I sit here the more ideas I'll come up with and that will be good for the blog on any given week. The groove I'm getting into seems to see me putting down just enough on "paper" such that I can press the page down arrow on my keyboard eight or nine times and I'll be right as rain. Who knows if that is the right answer or not. Maybe it's too much for the average browser to take in in any one sitting. Maybe people stopping by to read the blog will pick and choose what they wish to read. Maybe they're getting tired of all the politics I kick around on any given week. Maybe they stopped looking at this here blog long ago because they are Biden fan boys or girls and they can only stand so much negative press when it comes to their hero in the White House. I get it. Maybe they want more of Joe and less of Mrs G and the Ev man.
Word has it that Elon Musk sat down with the employees of Twitter yesterday for the first time since he purchased the company a few months back. There are still some issues outstanding (Bot counts?) that need to be cleared up before the sale is finalized but it looks like a done deal for all intents and purposes. You know those skinny little mother fuckers with multiple pronouns working behind the scenes at Twitter never wanted Musk anywhere near their company. In fact, word has it that they took exception to a comment Musk made about "All lives mattering." I'm quite certain that Elon took note of those little pussies in the front row who twisted and turned on their multi-colored prayer rugs as he outed them like the little turds in the fishbowl that they are. I'm hoping that he told them to take their "wokeness" elsewhere if they aren't happy with the new sheriff in town.
The missus and I did a little shopping at McKinnon's in Portsmouth last night where we picked up a little something for dinner. I spied with my little eye a nice blueberry loaf that I thought Mrs might like so I tossed it into the basket. We'll give it to her when we see her later today. I sometimes wonder if she likes the things that we bring her or maybe she just says that she does when she really doesn't. Maybe she's starting to take us and our little gifts for granted. There's that too. Maybe I'll hold off on bringing gifts until she says something or other about the dearth of gifts that she's been receiving from us. Or, maybe she''ll attempt to shame us into resuming our gift bringing by telling us about this gift or that gift that she received from this or that person. I have a good mind to take a peek in her freezer one day to see just how many of our gifts have been put aside for a rainy day. Maybe our gifts are just not that memorable or even remarkable. I suppose that's possible. Anything is possible.
Did I mention the company, Revlon, declared bankruptcy? I noticed that toward the end of last week their stock dropped some 52% in one day. I'm talking about the cosmetic company here. And, not just any cosmetic company. This is a company known globally for their products. I had to look it up because I had no sense as to the value of the stock. In 2019 the stock was trading at $27 a share. It closed recently at $3.98 a share. Talk about a fall from grace. Anyway, the question I have is, who the hell was selling all their shares of stock ahead of their declaring bankruptcy? Are Revlon's principles allowed to cash out at the expense of the common and preferred stockholders? If not, isn't there a law against insider trading? Somebody got tipped off and they sold their stock before the filing. Someone needs to go to jail. Do I need to drop a dime with the Securities and Exchange Commission? Tell me there is a God. Speaking of the baby Jesus, Revlon closed 91% higher today (June 17th). And you thought they were dead in the water after declaring bankruptcy. Think again. FYI, S&P ends week down a crushing 5.8%. Brutal.
Temperatures are in the mid eighties today here along the coast. I waited a little too long to go for my bike ride and it had heated up just enough to make me want to cut my ride short. No sense in getting myself a heat stroke in the process. That's not going to help anybody. The humidity also isn't helping. I can usually catch a nice cool breeze along the ocean when I go for my bike ride but I usually don't know how that's gong to work out until I get down there. I don't usually cut my ride short but I made an exception today. If I thought I was going to cut my ride short so that I'd have enough energy later on to do something else, I was wrong. The only reason that I'm sitting here writing in this here journal is because I got tired of laying in bed trying to ride out this heat. If I sound sluggish, it's because I am.
Bulls and Bears
12/06/22 07:09
I'm getting a bit of a late start this morning. I had a couple of thoughts that I wanted to kick off with so here is what I have. There was some bicycle race in and around London this weekend past which was sold as a bicycle race ostensibly for women. You know how that works these days. No sooner had they announced the race when a couple of trannies signed up thinking, of course, that they had every right to join the race since they identified as women. I know, I know. You can't make this stuff up.
I'm probably using the word "trannies" incorrectly since I am singularly ignorant when it comes to utilizing the urban dictionary one needs to use when referring to such individuals. Let's just say that these are men who think that they are women forgetting for a moment that they have nothing in common with women when it comes to their plumbing. In fact, they have certain advantages over women when it comes to sports given their musculature and sheer size if nothing else. It came as no surprise then when these two "women" won the race taking first and second place respectively.
The headline and associated picture that was featured in all the newspapers around the world after the winners took to the stage was one of the first and second place winners embracing with a kiss on the stage while the third place winner, a real woman, stood off to the side holding her infant and looking incredulously at the two males kissing on the podium. If this doesn't adequately capture where we are in this era of dystopian weirdness then I don't know what does. When is someone going to stand up and say what needs to be said. This is wrong and it needs to stop now. The solution might be something as simple as giving the trannies their own gigs. It would be step in the right direction.
Someone turned me on to this website that is basically a webcam of Peregrine Falcons and their brood. The caretakers of this so-called roost built a pretty nice nesting structure high atop the tallest building in a city some 200 miles south of where I'm located. I'm not sure if I'm using the right terminology when it comes to using words like "roost" and "brood" but we'll let that go. Anyway, I've been watching these birds quite carefully from the time the female Peregrine sat on the eggs to now, some two months later, when the hatchlings have now shed their fluffy white feathers and are starting to assert themselves in new and interesting ways. Don't take my word for it. Go see for yourself. https://asri.org/view/peregrine-cam.html
Two of the four fledgling Peregrines have left the nest, the two males I think, and are now spending all of their waking hours moving in and around the vicinity adjacent to the roosting structure. What's amazing to me is that they move about on the rooftop like they have no fear whatsoever of heights, no fear of losing their footing, no fear of anything really. What I wouldn't give to be able to see what they see. They aren't quite mature enough to take flight but that hasn't stopped them from getting around on the rooftop. It reminds me a little of what the Wright brothers probably experienced. Two steps forward and one step backwards until they got it right.
The parents couldn't be more attentive so that's good to see. The maternal and paternal instincts of our fellow species are as enduring as time itself. They dote equally on both the birds outside the nest as well as the birds still in the nest. The doting I refer to has mostly to do with feeding them and they do that with the utmost care. Maybe that means tearing the flesh of their prey into bite-sized pieces so the young birds can consume it more easily. It's hard to make out what the parents are bringing back to the nest precisely due to the low resolution of the video but I'm guessing that they are mostly birds since I can see the parents plucking feathers aplenty.
When mom or dad appears with a meal, it's up to the youngsters to make their way over to the parent if they want to eat. As for the youngsters still in the nest, I'm seeing one of the birds take the food off in one corner for itself while the other goes hungry. The birds are very similar in appearance so unless I start to see a failure to thrive on the part of the bird not getting his share, I'll not be able to sort out which one is which. It does look like one of the two birds in the nest is starting to think about joining his counterparts on the roof. I can't tell if it's the stronger of the two birds still in the nest, maybe because she's the stronger of the two by virtue of the hoarded meals, or the weaker of the two who thinks that she'd stand a better chance of being fed we're she to join her siblings on the rooftop.
I'm thinking about ordering a cord of wood for this upcoming winter. We haven't burned wood for a lot of years for various reasons. Now that I'm seeing gas prices edge over the $5 mark it might make some sense to get some wood in the event that oil gets to the $10 per gallon mark by the middle of December. If that happens, filling up our oil tank would go from an average of $600 per fill-up last winter to $2,750 per fill-up this coming winter. This is all happening, just so you know, while our country sits on an ocean of oil just waiting to be tapped. But, as Joey Biden and his Green Energy socialists running our country would have it, they would rather we all go out and buy electric vehicles while slapping solar roofs made in China on our homes. If they have to make buying carbon based energy unaffordable for the general public, which is what they're doing, then that's what they'll do.
If a cord of wood can get us through the period before the real cold arrives mid December or so, then that might work. I do wonder though if I'll even be able to find a cord of wood given the demand that is likely out there for alternative sources of heat. Our home is a small home relatively speaking so it will be less expensive to heat than some of the larger homes hereabouts. I really feel for the good folks who don't have the resources to pay the price of what we're likely to see for heating oil this winter. What the heck do they do? How many people have to freeze to death before we see one or more governmental agencies declare a national emergency? I haven't even talked about inflation yet. Add that to the mix and you have even bigger problems. Again, this is all the doing of one Joey Biden and his gang of socialists. We'd still be paying $2 a gallon at the pump if Trump were in office. Who still believes Joey Biden got 81 million votes?
It does make you wonder who Joey Biden is working for. It certainly isn't for the American people. Everything that he does results in a ruination of one kind or another and, in many instances, country's like China, Iran, and Venezuela benefit more from his policies than do the American people. Did I mention that there are some 12,000 people from 50 or so different countries just south of our southern border that are heading up to our country on foot? Add those illegal aliens to the millions already allowed to enter our country illegally by the Biden Administration and you have a quantifiable humanitarian tragedy. I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record but there is something criminal happening and we have a president sitting in the White House who is not only not turning a blind eye to matters but he's actually greasing the skids to make it happen.
I never used to think twice before going off in the car but I do now. Is it a necessary trip? Can I wait until I have more than one thing to accomplish before getting behind the wheel? You know, like grocery shopping and going to pick up some dry cleaning? That's what paying more than $5 a gallon at the gas pumps will do to you. Our weekly rides across town to see Mrs G at her facility are no longer just the willy nilly rides that they once were. When it comes to getting behind the wheel, everything comes down to budgets and what we might be willing to sacrifice in other areas of our lives just to make that or other trips in the car. We used to take Mrs G out for a ride here and there and it was carefree and fun. A change of scenery is good for everyone. Now, not so much. Our outings will be shorter if we have an outing at all. We'll just have to make do.
Y'all understand that there are downstream impacts to these types of policies coming out of our nation's White House. Right? If we have less money because we're paying more at the pumps or more for this or that item due to crushing inflation, then stores will have fewer customers. More stores will go out of business as a result of having fewer customers. Rents and mortgages will go unpaid due to the doubling of variable mortgage rates. Home prices, which have heretofore gone to the highest bidder, will now come down dramatically and most people will quickly be upside down on their mortgages. With fewer dollars circulating in the economy, our nation's GDP will suffer and recession can't be far off. We've already seen one month of negative GDP. One more and we're technically in a recession. It feels more like a depression coming our way but that's just me. Life is a bitch and then you die.
There were a bunch of primaries in various states yesterday. I don't know that any of them will be key to what I'm hoping will happen in November but the sense that I get this morning in looking at the results are encouraging. I think Trump is now 100-6 in terms of his endorsements after last night. That leftist clown of a District Attorney in San Fransicko, Chris Bodin, who is about as soft on crime as one can be, was recalled in a landslide vote of 61%-39%. I think the good people in San Francisco had had enough with him failing to put criminals in jail and his failure to do what it takes to protect the interests of the city's people. When the left turns on the left, we're talking tsunami here. So much for the defund the police movement. People want law and order when all is said and done. It's time to come for the rest of these clowns countrywide.
Do you suppose we'll be hearing from the Supreme Court today? I don't have a good feel for the kinds of rulings that we're expecting them to rule on but the Roe v Wade ruling will be a big deal. If they effectively send the matter back to the states to make their own decisions on abortion related matters then I think that's a good start. Let the people decide what abortion looks like or doesn't look like in their respective states. Such a decision would effectively suck the oxygen out of the air when it comes to the democrat's plan to air the January 6th hearings starting a day after tomorrow. Not that anyone will be watching the January 6th nonsense so there's that. Nonetheless, it's safe to say that the die hard leftists that do plan to watch have already made up their minds on who is responsible for the so-called insurrection. It's none other than Donald J Trump, of course.
They want Trump to be indicted so bad that they can taste it. It's their only hope, or so they think, for being able to keep the White House in November of 2024. Shorter term, I also have to believe that they think these hearings will somehow lessen the disaster that awaits them at the polls on November 9th. It seems a stretch to think that they believe that the hearings will help them keep their majority in the House of Representatives but, as they say, hope springs eternal. If they can keep the Senate, and that will be hard to do since everyone gets taken out with the trash when we have a tsunami election, they might be satisfied with that. Should Trump not run for whatever reason, the republicans have a deep bench starting with Governor DeSantis of Florida. Democrats need to be careful what they wish for. A nightmare awaits one way or another.
I'm trying very hard to get the party started when it comes to painting the Ev man's room here at our house. I even stood in line at Home Depot yesterday with the intent of buying a gallon of flat white paint with which to paint his room. I was second in line and I was getting tired of being second in line so I scuttled the mission. Did I scuttle the mission because the prospect of doing this job is more than daunting? Did I scuttle the mission because I know in my heart of hearts that I'm just not into doing it? Is it about my seemingly increasing inability to make a decision about such things? Have I become less decisive over time? Would this task already be done were it the old me back in the day? Why am I dragging my feet exactly? What am I afraid of? I told myself that I'd get around to doing this after doing the other little jobs on my list. Well, they're all done now so I have no excuses for not getting started but therein lies the problem. I just can't get started. Who have I to blame? Johnny?
I don't know what's going on with my new Oriole feeder. I bought some nice jam to put in the feeder and I hung it out on our deck where, with any luck or so I thought, I'd be able to attract an Oriole or two. It's been a good week now and I not only haven't been able to attract so much as an Oriole but I've had no songbirds show any interest whatsoever. I know it takes a while sometimes before the birds come around to noticing the feeder but, honestly, they've had more than enough time. I'm beginning to think that I bought a pig in poke when I bought that damn feeder. Who would put a feeder on the market knowing full well that it didn't work worth a damn? It sure is pretty enough or so I thought when I paid some $16 for it at a local hardware store. If I see nothing in another week or so, I'll be taking the feeder down and calling it a day. Well, with the Oriole feeder anyway. You can't say that I didn't try.
I've got to hand it to Mrs G. She's not waiting for anyone or anything when and where it comes to taking care of things. She has a dentist appointment coming up and I was telling the missus that she needs to reach out to her mom to inquire about transportation and such as it relates to her mom's appointment. I think the missus had every intention of following up on these things but as the date drew near I sensed a bit of foot dragging on the part of me missus. "You are going to call your mom," ain't you sweetie? That's me being me. Come to find out that Mrs G had already arranged for her own transportation to and from her appointment. That came as no surprise to me. Absent an offer from one of her children, Mrs G was going to step up to the plate and get the job done. Here's me being me again: "You can't possibly let your mother take public transportation to her appointment," can you sweetie? I don't know if I shamed her into it or whether or not she had planned to do it all along, but the next thing I know the missus is telling me not to make any plans on that particular day. Will do, sweetie. You're the boss. File that under, "The lord works in mysterious ways."
Who is this loon who showed up at the home of one of our Supreme Court justices yesterday carrying duct tape, a hammer, a gun, plastic zip ties, and god only knows what else? He was there, by his own admission, to kill this particular Justice so that he could get a more favorable ruling on both abortion and gun rights. That's a big story but that's not the story. The story, in my humble opinion, is how quickly the media had the information about what the loon had in his possession and how eager they were to report out on what the loon intended to do once he landed on the Justice's doorstep. Complicit in this nefarious arrangement were the law enforcement groups who eagerly released an affadavit taken from his loon so that too could be released to the public through the media post haste. Keep in mind that less than eight hours elapsed between the time they picked up the loon and the time the news story hit the front pages of every news outlet in America.
Nothing happens that quickly with law enforcement when you have a sinister plot of this magnitude. Who else might have been involved? Who, if anyone, happen to radicalize this particular young man? Who are his parents? Did they know what he as up to? What social media sites did he visit in the days and weeks leading up to this day? Were they reviewed and, if so, what did they reveal about the alleged killer and his intentions? Without answers to these and other questions, nothing should have been leaked much less pushed to the media. Why were they so eager to get this story out? Was it one last attempt to intimidate a Justice of the Supreme Court before the Court releases its landmark rulings involving abortion and gun rights? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see what they were up to here. Maybe the goal was to show just how easy it is to do what this loon was intending to do. A green light of sorts to every fringe group and nut job on the planet to do their part for the cause if you will.
I wouldn't put it past these fruitcakes to try as they might to turn a 6-3 conservative majority into a 5-4 conservative majority through whatever means possible. In order to implement their agenda, whatever the hell that means, they will need a liberal majority on the Court. They've already seen just how easy it is to put radicals like the most recent addition to the Court, Katanji Jackson, on the court and it has whet their appetites for more of the same. Maybe they fear that that the Senate is likely to turn red after Election Day on November 9th and a red Senate would never agree to put a nut job like Jackson on the Court. Hell, they might not approve any of Biden's picks assuming he gets another pick, and wouldn't that rile the left. Maybe they're just looking to take advantage of the fact that everything in our country is just in such a cocked hat at this moment in our history. Never let a good crisis go to waste. Right?
It's raining cats and dogs out there this morning. If I get a bike ride in today it will be a miracle. The good news is that nobody needs to water anything in the garden or elsewhere. If anything, I need to make sure that I've not left anything out in the rain that shouldn't be out in the rain. You know, things like lawn mowers, weed whackers, and that sort of stuff. I wouldn't mind if the rain let up just a bit so that when we go to bring Mrs G to her dentist's visit that we'll not get caught up in things as it were. Mrs G doesn't move too fast and I'm not sure what niceties this office offers by way of protecting their customers from inclement weather and all the rest. Maybe that's why God made umbrellas. We'll be there with bells on come hell or high water. We contemplated stopping by one or more of our favorite eateries while in Exeter but decided that we'd be doing that smack dab in the middle of the lunch hour. I won't stand in line to spend my money. I simply won't. Fuck em.
The financial markets have been a bit of a grind lately. Up one day, down the next, ad nauseum. The monthly CPI (Inflation) number is due out tomorrow and Biden's dysfunctional White House has already put everyone on notice that it is going to be "elevated." It ticked down ever so slightly last month (8.5% to 8.3% I think) and the bulls were off and running in the stock market on the hopes that there was a new trend under way. "Biden's policies are bringing inflation to heel," they bellowed! Nonsense! Nothing could be further from the truth. I don't know what we're going to see when the number comes out but the markets will do what markets do regardless. You've heard the expression, buy the rumor - sell the news. Right? Not sure if it applies here so here's my advice: Hedge your fucking bets, boys and girls! If you haven't already lost your life savings in this bear market maybe you want to think "Capital Preservation" and put a few shekels off to the side when odds favor a return of the bulls. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
I'm beginning to wonder if this January 6th production being brought to you by the democrat party and the major television networks isn't going to catch the Republican Party somewhat flat footed at the end of the day. I'm not planning to watch it but what if they hit it out of the park and then some? What if they convince just enough people that what the democrats have been saying all along about republicans as being deplorable and white supremacists is true? Where does that leave us come Election Day this coming November? No one cares if they convince democrats since we all know how they plan to vote, but what if their narrative crosses the aisle and starts to get traction with Independents and suburban moms? And, where the hell is Trump? He's the penultimate counterpuncher but we have yet to hear how he plans to respond. A rally might help, Mr President. Lest we forget, this is a show trial being brought to you by the Democrat party. You'll not hear any counter arguments or anything else from the other side. That's by design. Don't buy the "bipartisan" bullshit.
The missus and I were off yesterday afternoon to our weekly visit to Whole Foods Market. I think we've decided that there are certain things that we like to purchase from Whole Foods while other more mainstream items like condiments and such can be had from other retailers who probably have the same or similar items on their shelves but charge less. One day last week I actually went to three different stores in one day in order to pick up the things I had on my list. As for Whole Foods, they have the freshest and best fruit and vegetables around by far so we stock up on things like raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, and watermelon at least once a week. You can usually find these items on sale if you get the timing right so that's an extra bonus. By comparison, the very same types of fruit at other retailers looks sad, old, less appetizing, and maybe worst of all, you need to look closely to make sure mold isn't setting in the fruit that hugs the bottom of the containers. You'll see none of that at Whole Foods.
The missus scouted out the seafood section at Whole Foods while we were there and reported back that scallops were going for $32 a pound. Say what? How do they justify putting such an exorbitant price tag on something as mundane as scallops? We like scallops but we don't like them enough to pay that kind of price for them. The missus had a nice recipe that she wanted to make with Ritz crackers and scallops but that's not happening now that we know that it's going to cost a king's ransom to make the meal. I didn't say that we can't afford it. What I'm saying is that I'm not interested in paying that much for something that I can pass on and not lose any sleep over it. Just for context, we used to be able to buy scallops for $18 to $20 a pound. That was before gas prices doubled, inflation raged, and the cost of labor skyrocketed since nobody wanted to put in a full day's work after getting their stimmie checks during the pandemic.
It does beg the question, though, as to what happens when everyone starts to stay away from products like seafood because it's too expensive. It's a supply and demand thing. Right? If there is no demand because the price is too high then the price has to come down if they want to move their product. But, they can't move their product at lower prices because the underlying expenses like fuel, labor, and the like are still sky high and there is no relief in sight. They've essentially priced themselves out of the market. Boats will sit in dry dock. Scallopers will take other jobs. Suppliers up and down the supply chain will need fewer employees to service the dwindling number of scallopers. They will have trouble meeting fixed costs much less everything else that comes along with a collapsing supply chain. Now apply these very same concepts to real estate, automobiles, hot dogs and hamburgers, and you've got yourself a recession or worse. Welcome to Joe Biden's America!
I have to laugh, though, that the January 6th committee thinks that bringing in a senior executive from ABC to choreograph their televised hearings is going to somehow make any of it more palatable to those who have no interest in watching it in the first place. It's not exactly another season of "Lost", is it? Just so you know, programming by the three major non-cable networks rate at the bottom of the barrel in terms of quality programming. They are still of the mindset that they and their networks are relevant but the ratings simply don't bear that out. That might explain why they arranged for all three networks to carry the coverage. If you have no where else to turn, maybe you'd be stuck with watching their schlock. They still don't get it. There are plenty of places to find quality shows without tuning into the three major networks. Personally, I watched Tucker Carlson for an hour and then turned to one of my previously recorded shows before calling it a night. They can stick their televised January 6th hearings where the sun don't shine. How's that for a rebuttal?
I'm probably using the word "trannies" incorrectly since I am singularly ignorant when it comes to utilizing the urban dictionary one needs to use when referring to such individuals. Let's just say that these are men who think that they are women forgetting for a moment that they have nothing in common with women when it comes to their plumbing. In fact, they have certain advantages over women when it comes to sports given their musculature and sheer size if nothing else. It came as no surprise then when these two "women" won the race taking first and second place respectively.
The headline and associated picture that was featured in all the newspapers around the world after the winners took to the stage was one of the first and second place winners embracing with a kiss on the stage while the third place winner, a real woman, stood off to the side holding her infant and looking incredulously at the two males kissing on the podium. If this doesn't adequately capture where we are in this era of dystopian weirdness then I don't know what does. When is someone going to stand up and say what needs to be said. This is wrong and it needs to stop now. The solution might be something as simple as giving the trannies their own gigs. It would be step in the right direction.
Someone turned me on to this website that is basically a webcam of Peregrine Falcons and their brood. The caretakers of this so-called roost built a pretty nice nesting structure high atop the tallest building in a city some 200 miles south of where I'm located. I'm not sure if I'm using the right terminology when it comes to using words like "roost" and "brood" but we'll let that go. Anyway, I've been watching these birds quite carefully from the time the female Peregrine sat on the eggs to now, some two months later, when the hatchlings have now shed their fluffy white feathers and are starting to assert themselves in new and interesting ways. Don't take my word for it. Go see for yourself. https://asri.org/view/peregrine-cam.html
Two of the four fledgling Peregrines have left the nest, the two males I think, and are now spending all of their waking hours moving in and around the vicinity adjacent to the roosting structure. What's amazing to me is that they move about on the rooftop like they have no fear whatsoever of heights, no fear of losing their footing, no fear of anything really. What I wouldn't give to be able to see what they see. They aren't quite mature enough to take flight but that hasn't stopped them from getting around on the rooftop. It reminds me a little of what the Wright brothers probably experienced. Two steps forward and one step backwards until they got it right.
The parents couldn't be more attentive so that's good to see. The maternal and paternal instincts of our fellow species are as enduring as time itself. They dote equally on both the birds outside the nest as well as the birds still in the nest. The doting I refer to has mostly to do with feeding them and they do that with the utmost care. Maybe that means tearing the flesh of their prey into bite-sized pieces so the young birds can consume it more easily. It's hard to make out what the parents are bringing back to the nest precisely due to the low resolution of the video but I'm guessing that they are mostly birds since I can see the parents plucking feathers aplenty.
When mom or dad appears with a meal, it's up to the youngsters to make their way over to the parent if they want to eat. As for the youngsters still in the nest, I'm seeing one of the birds take the food off in one corner for itself while the other goes hungry. The birds are very similar in appearance so unless I start to see a failure to thrive on the part of the bird not getting his share, I'll not be able to sort out which one is which. It does look like one of the two birds in the nest is starting to think about joining his counterparts on the roof. I can't tell if it's the stronger of the two birds still in the nest, maybe because she's the stronger of the two by virtue of the hoarded meals, or the weaker of the two who thinks that she'd stand a better chance of being fed we're she to join her siblings on the rooftop.
I'm thinking about ordering a cord of wood for this upcoming winter. We haven't burned wood for a lot of years for various reasons. Now that I'm seeing gas prices edge over the $5 mark it might make some sense to get some wood in the event that oil gets to the $10 per gallon mark by the middle of December. If that happens, filling up our oil tank would go from an average of $600 per fill-up last winter to $2,750 per fill-up this coming winter. This is all happening, just so you know, while our country sits on an ocean of oil just waiting to be tapped. But, as Joey Biden and his Green Energy socialists running our country would have it, they would rather we all go out and buy electric vehicles while slapping solar roofs made in China on our homes. If they have to make buying carbon based energy unaffordable for the general public, which is what they're doing, then that's what they'll do.
If a cord of wood can get us through the period before the real cold arrives mid December or so, then that might work. I do wonder though if I'll even be able to find a cord of wood given the demand that is likely out there for alternative sources of heat. Our home is a small home relatively speaking so it will be less expensive to heat than some of the larger homes hereabouts. I really feel for the good folks who don't have the resources to pay the price of what we're likely to see for heating oil this winter. What the heck do they do? How many people have to freeze to death before we see one or more governmental agencies declare a national emergency? I haven't even talked about inflation yet. Add that to the mix and you have even bigger problems. Again, this is all the doing of one Joey Biden and his gang of socialists. We'd still be paying $2 a gallon at the pump if Trump were in office. Who still believes Joey Biden got 81 million votes?
It does make you wonder who Joey Biden is working for. It certainly isn't for the American people. Everything that he does results in a ruination of one kind or another and, in many instances, country's like China, Iran, and Venezuela benefit more from his policies than do the American people. Did I mention that there are some 12,000 people from 50 or so different countries just south of our southern border that are heading up to our country on foot? Add those illegal aliens to the millions already allowed to enter our country illegally by the Biden Administration and you have a quantifiable humanitarian tragedy. I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record but there is something criminal happening and we have a president sitting in the White House who is not only not turning a blind eye to matters but he's actually greasing the skids to make it happen.
I never used to think twice before going off in the car but I do now. Is it a necessary trip? Can I wait until I have more than one thing to accomplish before getting behind the wheel? You know, like grocery shopping and going to pick up some dry cleaning? That's what paying more than $5 a gallon at the gas pumps will do to you. Our weekly rides across town to see Mrs G at her facility are no longer just the willy nilly rides that they once were. When it comes to getting behind the wheel, everything comes down to budgets and what we might be willing to sacrifice in other areas of our lives just to make that or other trips in the car. We used to take Mrs G out for a ride here and there and it was carefree and fun. A change of scenery is good for everyone. Now, not so much. Our outings will be shorter if we have an outing at all. We'll just have to make do.
Y'all understand that there are downstream impacts to these types of policies coming out of our nation's White House. Right? If we have less money because we're paying more at the pumps or more for this or that item due to crushing inflation, then stores will have fewer customers. More stores will go out of business as a result of having fewer customers. Rents and mortgages will go unpaid due to the doubling of variable mortgage rates. Home prices, which have heretofore gone to the highest bidder, will now come down dramatically and most people will quickly be upside down on their mortgages. With fewer dollars circulating in the economy, our nation's GDP will suffer and recession can't be far off. We've already seen one month of negative GDP. One more and we're technically in a recession. It feels more like a depression coming our way but that's just me. Life is a bitch and then you die.
There were a bunch of primaries in various states yesterday. I don't know that any of them will be key to what I'm hoping will happen in November but the sense that I get this morning in looking at the results are encouraging. I think Trump is now 100-6 in terms of his endorsements after last night. That leftist clown of a District Attorney in San Fransicko, Chris Bodin, who is about as soft on crime as one can be, was recalled in a landslide vote of 61%-39%. I think the good people in San Francisco had had enough with him failing to put criminals in jail and his failure to do what it takes to protect the interests of the city's people. When the left turns on the left, we're talking tsunami here. So much for the defund the police movement. People want law and order when all is said and done. It's time to come for the rest of these clowns countrywide.
Do you suppose we'll be hearing from the Supreme Court today? I don't have a good feel for the kinds of rulings that we're expecting them to rule on but the Roe v Wade ruling will be a big deal. If they effectively send the matter back to the states to make their own decisions on abortion related matters then I think that's a good start. Let the people decide what abortion looks like or doesn't look like in their respective states. Such a decision would effectively suck the oxygen out of the air when it comes to the democrat's plan to air the January 6th hearings starting a day after tomorrow. Not that anyone will be watching the January 6th nonsense so there's that. Nonetheless, it's safe to say that the die hard leftists that do plan to watch have already made up their minds on who is responsible for the so-called insurrection. It's none other than Donald J Trump, of course.
They want Trump to be indicted so bad that they can taste it. It's their only hope, or so they think, for being able to keep the White House in November of 2024. Shorter term, I also have to believe that they think these hearings will somehow lessen the disaster that awaits them at the polls on November 9th. It seems a stretch to think that they believe that the hearings will help them keep their majority in the House of Representatives but, as they say, hope springs eternal. If they can keep the Senate, and that will be hard to do since everyone gets taken out with the trash when we have a tsunami election, they might be satisfied with that. Should Trump not run for whatever reason, the republicans have a deep bench starting with Governor DeSantis of Florida. Democrats need to be careful what they wish for. A nightmare awaits one way or another.
I'm trying very hard to get the party started when it comes to painting the Ev man's room here at our house. I even stood in line at Home Depot yesterday with the intent of buying a gallon of flat white paint with which to paint his room. I was second in line and I was getting tired of being second in line so I scuttled the mission. Did I scuttle the mission because the prospect of doing this job is more than daunting? Did I scuttle the mission because I know in my heart of hearts that I'm just not into doing it? Is it about my seemingly increasing inability to make a decision about such things? Have I become less decisive over time? Would this task already be done were it the old me back in the day? Why am I dragging my feet exactly? What am I afraid of? I told myself that I'd get around to doing this after doing the other little jobs on my list. Well, they're all done now so I have no excuses for not getting started but therein lies the problem. I just can't get started. Who have I to blame? Johnny?
I don't know what's going on with my new Oriole feeder. I bought some nice jam to put in the feeder and I hung it out on our deck where, with any luck or so I thought, I'd be able to attract an Oriole or two. It's been a good week now and I not only haven't been able to attract so much as an Oriole but I've had no songbirds show any interest whatsoever. I know it takes a while sometimes before the birds come around to noticing the feeder but, honestly, they've had more than enough time. I'm beginning to think that I bought a pig in poke when I bought that damn feeder. Who would put a feeder on the market knowing full well that it didn't work worth a damn? It sure is pretty enough or so I thought when I paid some $16 for it at a local hardware store. If I see nothing in another week or so, I'll be taking the feeder down and calling it a day. Well, with the Oriole feeder anyway. You can't say that I didn't try.
I've got to hand it to Mrs G. She's not waiting for anyone or anything when and where it comes to taking care of things. She has a dentist appointment coming up and I was telling the missus that she needs to reach out to her mom to inquire about transportation and such as it relates to her mom's appointment. I think the missus had every intention of following up on these things but as the date drew near I sensed a bit of foot dragging on the part of me missus. "You are going to call your mom," ain't you sweetie? That's me being me. Come to find out that Mrs G had already arranged for her own transportation to and from her appointment. That came as no surprise to me. Absent an offer from one of her children, Mrs G was going to step up to the plate and get the job done. Here's me being me again: "You can't possibly let your mother take public transportation to her appointment," can you sweetie? I don't know if I shamed her into it or whether or not she had planned to do it all along, but the next thing I know the missus is telling me not to make any plans on that particular day. Will do, sweetie. You're the boss. File that under, "The lord works in mysterious ways."
Who is this loon who showed up at the home of one of our Supreme Court justices yesterday carrying duct tape, a hammer, a gun, plastic zip ties, and god only knows what else? He was there, by his own admission, to kill this particular Justice so that he could get a more favorable ruling on both abortion and gun rights. That's a big story but that's not the story. The story, in my humble opinion, is how quickly the media had the information about what the loon had in his possession and how eager they were to report out on what the loon intended to do once he landed on the Justice's doorstep. Complicit in this nefarious arrangement were the law enforcement groups who eagerly released an affadavit taken from his loon so that too could be released to the public through the media post haste. Keep in mind that less than eight hours elapsed between the time they picked up the loon and the time the news story hit the front pages of every news outlet in America.
Nothing happens that quickly with law enforcement when you have a sinister plot of this magnitude. Who else might have been involved? Who, if anyone, happen to radicalize this particular young man? Who are his parents? Did they know what he as up to? What social media sites did he visit in the days and weeks leading up to this day? Were they reviewed and, if so, what did they reveal about the alleged killer and his intentions? Without answers to these and other questions, nothing should have been leaked much less pushed to the media. Why were they so eager to get this story out? Was it one last attempt to intimidate a Justice of the Supreme Court before the Court releases its landmark rulings involving abortion and gun rights? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see what they were up to here. Maybe the goal was to show just how easy it is to do what this loon was intending to do. A green light of sorts to every fringe group and nut job on the planet to do their part for the cause if you will.
I wouldn't put it past these fruitcakes to try as they might to turn a 6-3 conservative majority into a 5-4 conservative majority through whatever means possible. In order to implement their agenda, whatever the hell that means, they will need a liberal majority on the Court. They've already seen just how easy it is to put radicals like the most recent addition to the Court, Katanji Jackson, on the court and it has whet their appetites for more of the same. Maybe they fear that that the Senate is likely to turn red after Election Day on November 9th and a red Senate would never agree to put a nut job like Jackson on the Court. Hell, they might not approve any of Biden's picks assuming he gets another pick, and wouldn't that rile the left. Maybe they're just looking to take advantage of the fact that everything in our country is just in such a cocked hat at this moment in our history. Never let a good crisis go to waste. Right?
It's raining cats and dogs out there this morning. If I get a bike ride in today it will be a miracle. The good news is that nobody needs to water anything in the garden or elsewhere. If anything, I need to make sure that I've not left anything out in the rain that shouldn't be out in the rain. You know, things like lawn mowers, weed whackers, and that sort of stuff. I wouldn't mind if the rain let up just a bit so that when we go to bring Mrs G to her dentist's visit that we'll not get caught up in things as it were. Mrs G doesn't move too fast and I'm not sure what niceties this office offers by way of protecting their customers from inclement weather and all the rest. Maybe that's why God made umbrellas. We'll be there with bells on come hell or high water. We contemplated stopping by one or more of our favorite eateries while in Exeter but decided that we'd be doing that smack dab in the middle of the lunch hour. I won't stand in line to spend my money. I simply won't. Fuck em.
The financial markets have been a bit of a grind lately. Up one day, down the next, ad nauseum. The monthly CPI (Inflation) number is due out tomorrow and Biden's dysfunctional White House has already put everyone on notice that it is going to be "elevated." It ticked down ever so slightly last month (8.5% to 8.3% I think) and the bulls were off and running in the stock market on the hopes that there was a new trend under way. "Biden's policies are bringing inflation to heel," they bellowed! Nonsense! Nothing could be further from the truth. I don't know what we're going to see when the number comes out but the markets will do what markets do regardless. You've heard the expression, buy the rumor - sell the news. Right? Not sure if it applies here so here's my advice: Hedge your fucking bets, boys and girls! If you haven't already lost your life savings in this bear market maybe you want to think "Capital Preservation" and put a few shekels off to the side when odds favor a return of the bulls. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
I'm beginning to wonder if this January 6th production being brought to you by the democrat party and the major television networks isn't going to catch the Republican Party somewhat flat footed at the end of the day. I'm not planning to watch it but what if they hit it out of the park and then some? What if they convince just enough people that what the democrats have been saying all along about republicans as being deplorable and white supremacists is true? Where does that leave us come Election Day this coming November? No one cares if they convince democrats since we all know how they plan to vote, but what if their narrative crosses the aisle and starts to get traction with Independents and suburban moms? And, where the hell is Trump? He's the penultimate counterpuncher but we have yet to hear how he plans to respond. A rally might help, Mr President. Lest we forget, this is a show trial being brought to you by the Democrat party. You'll not hear any counter arguments or anything else from the other side. That's by design. Don't buy the "bipartisan" bullshit.
The missus and I were off yesterday afternoon to our weekly visit to Whole Foods Market. I think we've decided that there are certain things that we like to purchase from Whole Foods while other more mainstream items like condiments and such can be had from other retailers who probably have the same or similar items on their shelves but charge less. One day last week I actually went to three different stores in one day in order to pick up the things I had on my list. As for Whole Foods, they have the freshest and best fruit and vegetables around by far so we stock up on things like raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, and watermelon at least once a week. You can usually find these items on sale if you get the timing right so that's an extra bonus. By comparison, the very same types of fruit at other retailers looks sad, old, less appetizing, and maybe worst of all, you need to look closely to make sure mold isn't setting in the fruit that hugs the bottom of the containers. You'll see none of that at Whole Foods.
The missus scouted out the seafood section at Whole Foods while we were there and reported back that scallops were going for $32 a pound. Say what? How do they justify putting such an exorbitant price tag on something as mundane as scallops? We like scallops but we don't like them enough to pay that kind of price for them. The missus had a nice recipe that she wanted to make with Ritz crackers and scallops but that's not happening now that we know that it's going to cost a king's ransom to make the meal. I didn't say that we can't afford it. What I'm saying is that I'm not interested in paying that much for something that I can pass on and not lose any sleep over it. Just for context, we used to be able to buy scallops for $18 to $20 a pound. That was before gas prices doubled, inflation raged, and the cost of labor skyrocketed since nobody wanted to put in a full day's work after getting their stimmie checks during the pandemic.
It does beg the question, though, as to what happens when everyone starts to stay away from products like seafood because it's too expensive. It's a supply and demand thing. Right? If there is no demand because the price is too high then the price has to come down if they want to move their product. But, they can't move their product at lower prices because the underlying expenses like fuel, labor, and the like are still sky high and there is no relief in sight. They've essentially priced themselves out of the market. Boats will sit in dry dock. Scallopers will take other jobs. Suppliers up and down the supply chain will need fewer employees to service the dwindling number of scallopers. They will have trouble meeting fixed costs much less everything else that comes along with a collapsing supply chain. Now apply these very same concepts to real estate, automobiles, hot dogs and hamburgers, and you've got yourself a recession or worse. Welcome to Joe Biden's America!
I have to laugh, though, that the January 6th committee thinks that bringing in a senior executive from ABC to choreograph their televised hearings is going to somehow make any of it more palatable to those who have no interest in watching it in the first place. It's not exactly another season of "Lost", is it? Just so you know, programming by the three major non-cable networks rate at the bottom of the barrel in terms of quality programming. They are still of the mindset that they and their networks are relevant but the ratings simply don't bear that out. That might explain why they arranged for all three networks to carry the coverage. If you have no where else to turn, maybe you'd be stuck with watching their schlock. They still don't get it. There are plenty of places to find quality shows without tuning into the three major networks. Personally, I watched Tucker Carlson for an hour and then turned to one of my previously recorded shows before calling it a night. They can stick their televised January 6th hearings where the sun don't shine. How's that for a rebuttal?
Pissah
05/06/22 07:03
Here we go boys and girls. We're starting another week come hell or high water. It's 7 am and it's time to get moving. Well, writing anyway. It's also Memorial Day so there's that. The Ev man, the missus, and I sat down to a nice meal last night since the Ev man was nice enough to stop by to say hello. The missus had some leftover fish something while the Ev man and I chowed down on Boar's Head hot dogs and Tater Tot's. We cooked up the dogs on the George Forman grill and they came out quite nice. You know, with grill marks and everything. I warmed up the buns in the microwave and we were off and running.
I've assembled my new jelly/jam Oriole feeder and I'm just now waiting for the jelly stuff to get delivered by FedEx before putting out the feeder. I had originally intended to use this feeder to attract Oriole's but after reading the materials that came in the box I understand that I can also use it to feed certain song birds and that's fine. It's probably a good thing since I think I've seen one Oriole hereabouts in the last ten years. Maybe I'll see more now that I have something to offer them. I thought putting fresh fruit out last year would do the trick but that seemed to attract everything but Oriole's.
The missus insisted that I put up a fence around our garden so put up a fence I did. We've always had a fence around the garden in year's past so this is nothing new. I think the only thing we're keeping out at this point are the occasional rabbits who wander in looking for something new and exciting to nibble on. I won't allow that to happen for the sake of a fence that takes me literally minutes to put together. I haven't seen any groundhogs around but I suppose they could do some damage as well should they have a mind to find their way in there. We do have deer around but I'm less concerned about them.
The Ev man is up early and looking to scoot before any of our neighbors are up and about. Not sure what that's all about but we helped him pack up a few milks and cold brews and he's good to go. A fist bump here and a fist bump there and he's out the door and gone. He may or may not attend a cookout at his place this afternoon but if I had to guess I would say that he's unlikely to attend. Probably for the same reason that he's wanting to avoid any unnecessary contact with our neighbors here this morning. Suffice it to say that that's the way that he rolls.
I was a little surprised yesterday that when we were out and about the traffic was very light. I told the missus that it was probably as light as it was for one of two reasons. On one hand, gas prices are very high here on the coast with prices at the pump close to five dollars a gallon for regular gas. With inflation raging at some 8% and gas prices surging, there isn't much left in the budget to go sightseeing or driving around willy nilly as you might have when prices at the pump were closer to two dollars a gallon. Secondly, is it possible that people were escaping to the Lakes Region for the long weekend? I just think the Lakes idea is a reach. It's more likely folks are doing what we did. You know, throwing a thing or two on the barbie and staying close to home.
It was such a nice day yesterday weather wise and I was thinking a little bit about Mrs G and how she was probably hunkering down at her facility without so much as a picnic to attend or a friend with whom to play whatever little games people play at her facility. Would it have been that much trouble for the missus and I to get over there and get her out of her apartment for a few hours? Then again, we were just over there not that long ago so maybe my idea was something of a bridge too far. I didn't share it with the missus so she didn't have a chance to say yea or nay. I don't know why I concern myself with such things when these things are not of my concern. She's not my mother, after all, but that doesn't mean I can't step up when stepping up is the right thing to do.
Did I mention that Mrs G has a new neighbor at her facility? Well, her apartment is kind of kitty corner to Mr's G's unit as the crow flies. Put another way, her patio is within spitting distance of Mrs G's patio. No sooner did she move in than she began to pull up this and that ground cover in and around the perimeter of her patio that borders on Mrs G's patio. She didn't ask anybody. She didn't consult anybody. If anything, she seemed to be doing what she was doing in order to establish her territory regardless of the concerns of others. She wasn't unlike a wild dog that marks his or her territory with urine and feces. Loosely translated, the message she was sending was clear: I'm here to stay and if you don't like it you can go fuck yourself.
I've not known Mrs G to get her dander up but get her dander up she did. This new neighbor of hers knew all the right buttons to push and push she did. I don't know if Mrs G was feeling more threatened than annoyed as she told us all about what she thought her new neighbor was up to but you could see the anguish in her face getting more and more twisted and distorted with every new revelation. Adding insult to injury, her new neighbor had the unmitigated audacity more recently to lay the house watering hose across Mrs G's patio while she watered the plants on her patio without a word of caution to anyone. Is this what good neighbors do? Is this what thoughtful neighbors do? What if Mrs G happened to trip across the hose while out and about on her patio? Keep in mind that Mrs G is still using a walker to get about. She is still in recovery.
I swear to God that there are days when I feel like a Tesla. I'm good for only so many miles before I need to recharge. That means thinking twice before planning trips between points A and B. Sometimes, recharging means taking a nap. The longer I nap, the better the charge and the longer I can go between charges. I do autopilot but I'm better off if the autopilot is disengaged and I'm going fully manual. I think the missus prefers me on manual although I'm more predictable when I'm on autopilot. The usual idiot lights come and go regardless of the mode that I'm in. Just before my eyes open in the morning I can feel my circuitry coming alive and going online with visual artifacts of what I accomplished the day before and mental blueprints or roadmaps on how I might continue that progress in the day ahead. It's artificial intelligence at its finest.
All right, little birdies. I have my new feeder up. It's time to come around for a snack. This always happens when I put up new feeders. It's like they go unnoticed for a period of time for whatever reason. Once the birds "find" it we're off and running but until then it's like it doesn't exist. There is nothing to be done to change any of it. If I could, I would. I got the feeder to attract Oriole's but I'd be happy to see a couple of songbirds stop by until the Oriole's show up. We have Carolina Wrens around and I have to believe that they might find the jelly/jam concoctions to their liking. I was so concerned that the jelly/jam concoction wasn't the healthiest that I ordered some online. The shit they put in the food that comes off the store shelves these days isn't fit to be eaten by birds much less humans.
Word on the street has it that Bumbling Joe Biden has a meeting today with the head of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell. What's that all about? Bumbles is probably worried about the impact of higher interest rates on the upcoming midterm elections and the plans Powell has for raising rates going forward. I thought the Fed was supposed to be an independent operator when it comes to creating monetary policy. Haven't they done enough damage to the everyday Joe on Main Street with the endless printing of money? You know you have a problem when consumers show up at their local grocer with a wheelbarrow of dollar bills to buy a loaf of bread. That's a slight exaggeration but not that far off the mark when you consider the damage that printing endless streams of money does to the economy. Think Venezuela.
Then again, Bumbles and his minions have been doing their level best to destroy the middle class here in America so crashing the economy to destroy the so-called wealth effect might be just what the doctor ordered. It's also true that reducing consumer demand also brings inflation down and bringing down inflation should be the top priority of any administration. I guess the challenge for the Fed is, how do they do what they need to do with inflation without bringing down the party in power responsible for contributing to the inflation in the first place. It's what they call a "conundrum." Raising interest rates is its own kind of hell. Just ask home owners who are now paying significantly more each month for their mortgages because interest rates are on the rise. Don't get me started on housing issues and the affordability of same.
The more I hear about this Texas school shooting the more I wonder if it wasn't a deliberate sort of thing in the sense that we're now finding out that the Chief of police in charge on site that day was a woke type who had made multiple contributions to Beto's campaign for governor. What better way to set up his candidate (Beto) for a win in the upcoming election that to frame him as an anti-gun proponent on the heels of a tragic school shooting. The greater the number of young lives taken, the better Beto's chances are of winning a battle against the gun toting Texans who are all now, by extension, culpable in the deaths of these young children. That's the only thing that makes any sense. Why else would the Chief have his men stand down when children were being slaughtered in a classroom just steps away from the hallway where 19 fully armed Texas lawmen stood awaiting orders. POP POP POP POP POP
Is it a coincidence that just when the Spanish vote starts to trend away from democrats and towards the Republican Party that we have this seismic event unfold in the heart of Texas? Is there anyone in their right mind who would put it past the democrat party to do whatever they could, including taking advantage of a deadly incident the likes of which we saw at the school that day, to further their gains or, alternatively, stop the bleeding of voters who are moving en masse away from their party? Never let a crisis go to waste is what they love to say. It's who they are. It's what they do. The ends justify the means. I don't know how they put the gun into the hands of this killer or how they managed to place him in the school that day but everything fell into place either by hook or crook. I know that's a stretch but how else do you explain what we saw play out that day? Someone knows something.
I was reading a rag (Boston Globe) out of the city of Boston the other day and they were talking about drones. Nothing says Big Brother like drones flying overhead watching, documenting, listening, and spying on your every move. I'm not sure how it compares to other technologies like facial recognition and the like but it's about invasive as you can get without inserting chips into the citizenry at birth. Even the Communist Chinese decided that using facial recognition technologies was a bridge too far and it was rarely or never deployed in major cities in China. But the leftist's running the City of Boston these days are not your Irishmen of old. They are young upstarts from Asia and could give two hoots about your rights. It makes me wonder how the citizenry will react when they decide to arm the drones. You know, to protect the children.
And what's this I'm reading about blacks leaving the Biden Administration in droves? It looks like they hired a boatload of blacks just because of the color of their skin. What else can you conclude now that we know that they're leaving because of a lack of mentorship and upward mobility within the White House? Does any of this surprise anyone knowing what we know about the hypocrisy of the democrats? They pretend to have the backs of the blacks but what they really want is to keep them on the plantation picking cotton and not asking too many questions. Oh, and if you need a ride to the polls on Election Day, Joe Biden and his minions will be there to give you a lift. Here's your ballot already filled out. Extra portions of sausage will be served at dinner for you and your family. You done good.
The United States has been sending money hand over fist to the Ukrainians so they can better fight back against the Russians who have invaded their country. Let's call a spade a spade. We're in a proxy war with Russia. I don't know that any other country is sending what we're sending to Ukraine by way of financial assets and military hardware. Does our sending money to Ukraine have anything to do preserving Ukraine's independence? In what way is Ukraine vital to our national interests? There seems to be something far more insidious going on here and nobody's talking about it. I'm not sure where all of this is going but I'm reading something about Russia preparing missiles that are capable of vaporizing the East and West coasts of America. They're just letting us know what's at stake should we keep pushing the envelope. You think Bumbles Biden gives a good shit about any of their threats? Does he even know what day it is?
Given Putin's heated rhetoric, there are definitely other places that I'd rather be living than the ground zero location where I'm currently residing. I'm a stone's throw away from both a nuclear power plant and a naval base. It's smack dab in the middle of one of the two geographic epicenters mentioned by Putin as likely targets should push come to shove. Maybe the good news is that it would all be over in an instant should one of those devices detonate overhead here on the East Coast. There would be none of the "duck and cover" bullshit that we went through during the Cuban Missile Crisis during the Kennedy Administration back in the sixties. There won't be any children running through the streets of our major cities hereabouts with their clothes burned off their bodies the likes of which we saw in the pictures coming out of Hiroshima in 1945. I wonder what Kansas is like this time of year?
The Ev man was texting me like a crazy man this morning. Of course, I'm sitting here trying to finish my blogging stuff so I can get off on the right foot for the day and his relentless texting is just a bit distracting. You hate to say that about your children and you'd hate to think that the day would come when you would regret saying stuff like that so I did what any self respecting father would do. I suggested that his mom was up and about and he might want to give her a call. Bend her ear for a while and let me finish what I'm trying to finish here. That was me thinking out loud. I could hear them off in the other room and he was on a tear. It sounded like a very caffeinated conversation and it sounded like she was talking him down off this or that cliff the likes of which he ends up on when he's had too much of the stuff. I figured that it was just more of the same since she said nothing to me when they were done talking. The Ev man got whatever it was off his chest that he wanted to get off his chest and all is now well with the world. For now, anyway.
Did I mention that June is Pride Month? What the fuck is Pride month, you ask? I gather it's the month that we're all supposed to celebrate all things gay. Who dreams up this shit? If the LGBTQ folks want to be gay and celebrate everything that being gay means to them then let them get a Facebook page and have their own hoo-haw. I won't be in attendance and I won't be shamed into celebrating something that I don't wish to celebrate. I guess that makes me a prune, or a prude, or whatever. We breeders need to stick together and stand up for what we believe in. We simply can't let the other side suck all of the oxygen out of the air which is what it feels like every year when Pride Month rolls around. I've had it up to here with these newfangled concepts like "diversity" and "marginalized communities." This frog is fighting back. That is to say, I'm jumping out of the pot of boiling water before it comes to a boil. Just sayin'.
That reminds me. Bumbling Biden's new Press Secretary is a self professed lesbian. I don't have anything against lesbians, per se, but having a lesbian stand at the podium in our nation's capitol each day giving her pressers on behalf of the President of the United States seems, well, oddly odd. Maybe it's Bumbling Joe's way of saying that he and his political party embrace diversity and it's something we need to get used to at least as long as he and his party are in office. I've read comments elsewhere that suggested that having this self professed lesbian at the podium represents some sort of societal degradation that we as Americans need to carefully consider lest we go down a path from which there is no return. It's just not Main Street USA if you know what I mean. I want more of Main Street USA and less of Main Street you-name-the-town when it comes to hiring town criers.
I do think that the LGBTQ folks country wide are having something of a come-to-Jesus moment in the wake of the Disney kerfuffle. They came across as a fringe group of nut jobs trying to impose their values and cultural mores on the kindergarteners and first graders of Florida. As employees of Disney, they implored Disney leadership to fight their fight and it was, for all intents and purposes, a battle that Disney continues to lose to this very day. The "Don't Say Gay" bill was passed with flying colors and we're not talking about the colors of the rainbow if you get my drift. Eighty percent of Floridians agreed with the bill that was signed by Governor DeSantis. Maybe these LGBTQ folks were part of some more radical group but that isn't what America saw or heard as the battle brewed on day in and day out. I think the biblical reference "You reap what you sew" seems appropriate here.
What is it with democrats wanting to take our guns? Who the hell trusts democrats in an environment where they have all the guns? Look at what they're doing to our country while we responsible gun owners do what responsible gun owners do. I'm not a gun owner but I might fancy having a nice firearm with which to protect my family in a pinch. The bigger the clip, the better. I think I want one of those canons that Clint Eastwood used in one or more of his movies back in the seventies. What was that? I think it was a 44 Magnum. I can hear him now as he stood over the piece of shit of a robber or whatever, "make my day, punk." "Do you feel lucky"? You need something that's going to get the job done. No? I asked the missus last night if she might like to go to a shooting range. We can rent a couple of pistols and have a little fun. She was having none of it. I think I knew the answer before I asked the question.
I mean, if someone is nutty enough to want to pull off whatever with a gun then there is probably not much anyone can do to stop him or her. If you raise the age to purchase a certain type of gun, then the criminal is going to find another way to get that gun. If you take certain types of weapons out of circulation, then the criminals are just going to get something else that will do the job. I agree that gang bangers, criminals, and the mentally ill ought not have access to guns. I might be ok with a limited red flag law thing which allows for the taking of firearms from people who, for whatever reason, have become unhinged and shouldn't have a weapon in their possession both for their protection and the protection of the community. But the democrats are not to be trusted when it comes to looking for ways to disarm legal gun owners the majority of whom will never commit a crime with a gun. It's a ruse to render their political enemies defenseless. It's the wet dream of every leftist.
The governor of South Dakota was on the Tucker Carlson show last night. She was talking about the fact that Bumbles Biden was threatening to withdraw funding for the feeding of school aged children in her state if she pressed on with her plans to keep biological males out of women's sports in her state. Maybe it had more to do with the use of restrooms. If there is a bigger turd in the proverbial punchbowl than Bumbles Biden, I'm unaware of who that might be. I mean, who the fuck does he think he is? What kind of tomfoolery is having males compete against women in any sport? Bumbles doesn't like what she's doing so he's taking food out of the mouths of babes? This is a real low point for Bumbles. Not that anybody thought that he wasn't capable of going this low if someone pushed back against his ridiculous policies as it relates to this issue. Her legislature will pass the bill and she'll sign it. That's how you rein in fools like Bumbles Biden. Good for her.
It's also somewhat true that these school shooting things provide the democrats with an issue going into the Mid Term elections come November. If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade in the next week or two, that will give them additional ammo to get their voters out to the pols. I think their efforts to whip up public sentiment against the republicans for something that a deranged shooter does on any given day is not going to work. Everyone knows where the blame for such things lies. And, the 300 million gun owners in our country get a vote too and most of them aren't buying what the democrats are selling. Those who are buying their bullshit have probably already turned their guns into the police in their towns or cities. It's sad to think that the democrats are on their knees daily praying for mass shootings so they continue to push for gun confiscation and, with any luck, save a seat or two in Congress in the Mid Term elections. That is, unfortunately, how they roll.
The Ev man was over for dinner last night. We ordered out for calamari fra diablo at the only place in town that offers the dish. It just seemed like the right kind of meal to have given the cool weather and something hot and mildly spicy sounded good to all of us. Ordering this meal has always been a catch-as-catch can with this particular restaurant. That is to say, we never know quite what to expect when we order it. We brought home one order last summer and found to our dismay that the squid had soured. Evan made the mistake of taking a taste and it was nasty. We could literally smell it so I'm not sure how we even let Evan get to the point where he even put it close to his lips. That was the last time we ordered it for a good while. There have been other times when the dish was too spicy. Last night's order was good in a lot of ways but deficient in the sense that we were having trouble finding any calamari in the dish. It was pissah. It just wasn't the same without those chewy little tentacles. I think we're done with them. Did I mention that it was not an inexpensive dish?
Someone posted a copy of a memo to Twitter that Elon Musk sent to his Tesla employees basically telling them to return to the office or look elsewhere for a job. I'm a little surprised that any employees anywhere are still working from home after leaving the office during the Covid-19 shutdowns. But, let that go. Anyway, who doesn't love Elon Musk taking the bull by the horns and laying down the law. Good for him. I wonder if the person responsible for posting the memo thought that it would deter Elon from going through with his plans to bring employees back to the office. Well, they would be wrong. If anything it sounds like he's doubling down. I've always despised these namby-pamby bosses who kowtow to their employees and who, at every turn, give in to their every whim. In no small way, we're talking about the pussification of the American male. Enough already. Is it any surprise that Elon says he's now voting Republican this Fall?
I've assembled my new jelly/jam Oriole feeder and I'm just now waiting for the jelly stuff to get delivered by FedEx before putting out the feeder. I had originally intended to use this feeder to attract Oriole's but after reading the materials that came in the box I understand that I can also use it to feed certain song birds and that's fine. It's probably a good thing since I think I've seen one Oriole hereabouts in the last ten years. Maybe I'll see more now that I have something to offer them. I thought putting fresh fruit out last year would do the trick but that seemed to attract everything but Oriole's.
The missus insisted that I put up a fence around our garden so put up a fence I did. We've always had a fence around the garden in year's past so this is nothing new. I think the only thing we're keeping out at this point are the occasional rabbits who wander in looking for something new and exciting to nibble on. I won't allow that to happen for the sake of a fence that takes me literally minutes to put together. I haven't seen any groundhogs around but I suppose they could do some damage as well should they have a mind to find their way in there. We do have deer around but I'm less concerned about them.
The Ev man is up early and looking to scoot before any of our neighbors are up and about. Not sure what that's all about but we helped him pack up a few milks and cold brews and he's good to go. A fist bump here and a fist bump there and he's out the door and gone. He may or may not attend a cookout at his place this afternoon but if I had to guess I would say that he's unlikely to attend. Probably for the same reason that he's wanting to avoid any unnecessary contact with our neighbors here this morning. Suffice it to say that that's the way that he rolls.
I was a little surprised yesterday that when we were out and about the traffic was very light. I told the missus that it was probably as light as it was for one of two reasons. On one hand, gas prices are very high here on the coast with prices at the pump close to five dollars a gallon for regular gas. With inflation raging at some 8% and gas prices surging, there isn't much left in the budget to go sightseeing or driving around willy nilly as you might have when prices at the pump were closer to two dollars a gallon. Secondly, is it possible that people were escaping to the Lakes Region for the long weekend? I just think the Lakes idea is a reach. It's more likely folks are doing what we did. You know, throwing a thing or two on the barbie and staying close to home.
It was such a nice day yesterday weather wise and I was thinking a little bit about Mrs G and how she was probably hunkering down at her facility without so much as a picnic to attend or a friend with whom to play whatever little games people play at her facility. Would it have been that much trouble for the missus and I to get over there and get her out of her apartment for a few hours? Then again, we were just over there not that long ago so maybe my idea was something of a bridge too far. I didn't share it with the missus so she didn't have a chance to say yea or nay. I don't know why I concern myself with such things when these things are not of my concern. She's not my mother, after all, but that doesn't mean I can't step up when stepping up is the right thing to do.
Did I mention that Mrs G has a new neighbor at her facility? Well, her apartment is kind of kitty corner to Mr's G's unit as the crow flies. Put another way, her patio is within spitting distance of Mrs G's patio. No sooner did she move in than she began to pull up this and that ground cover in and around the perimeter of her patio that borders on Mrs G's patio. She didn't ask anybody. She didn't consult anybody. If anything, she seemed to be doing what she was doing in order to establish her territory regardless of the concerns of others. She wasn't unlike a wild dog that marks his or her territory with urine and feces. Loosely translated, the message she was sending was clear: I'm here to stay and if you don't like it you can go fuck yourself.
I've not known Mrs G to get her dander up but get her dander up she did. This new neighbor of hers knew all the right buttons to push and push she did. I don't know if Mrs G was feeling more threatened than annoyed as she told us all about what she thought her new neighbor was up to but you could see the anguish in her face getting more and more twisted and distorted with every new revelation. Adding insult to injury, her new neighbor had the unmitigated audacity more recently to lay the house watering hose across Mrs G's patio while she watered the plants on her patio without a word of caution to anyone. Is this what good neighbors do? Is this what thoughtful neighbors do? What if Mrs G happened to trip across the hose while out and about on her patio? Keep in mind that Mrs G is still using a walker to get about. She is still in recovery.
I swear to God that there are days when I feel like a Tesla. I'm good for only so many miles before I need to recharge. That means thinking twice before planning trips between points A and B. Sometimes, recharging means taking a nap. The longer I nap, the better the charge and the longer I can go between charges. I do autopilot but I'm better off if the autopilot is disengaged and I'm going fully manual. I think the missus prefers me on manual although I'm more predictable when I'm on autopilot. The usual idiot lights come and go regardless of the mode that I'm in. Just before my eyes open in the morning I can feel my circuitry coming alive and going online with visual artifacts of what I accomplished the day before and mental blueprints or roadmaps on how I might continue that progress in the day ahead. It's artificial intelligence at its finest.
All right, little birdies. I have my new feeder up. It's time to come around for a snack. This always happens when I put up new feeders. It's like they go unnoticed for a period of time for whatever reason. Once the birds "find" it we're off and running but until then it's like it doesn't exist. There is nothing to be done to change any of it. If I could, I would. I got the feeder to attract Oriole's but I'd be happy to see a couple of songbirds stop by until the Oriole's show up. We have Carolina Wrens around and I have to believe that they might find the jelly/jam concoctions to their liking. I was so concerned that the jelly/jam concoction wasn't the healthiest that I ordered some online. The shit they put in the food that comes off the store shelves these days isn't fit to be eaten by birds much less humans.
Word on the street has it that Bumbling Joe Biden has a meeting today with the head of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell. What's that all about? Bumbles is probably worried about the impact of higher interest rates on the upcoming midterm elections and the plans Powell has for raising rates going forward. I thought the Fed was supposed to be an independent operator when it comes to creating monetary policy. Haven't they done enough damage to the everyday Joe on Main Street with the endless printing of money? You know you have a problem when consumers show up at their local grocer with a wheelbarrow of dollar bills to buy a loaf of bread. That's a slight exaggeration but not that far off the mark when you consider the damage that printing endless streams of money does to the economy. Think Venezuela.
Then again, Bumbles and his minions have been doing their level best to destroy the middle class here in America so crashing the economy to destroy the so-called wealth effect might be just what the doctor ordered. It's also true that reducing consumer demand also brings inflation down and bringing down inflation should be the top priority of any administration. I guess the challenge for the Fed is, how do they do what they need to do with inflation without bringing down the party in power responsible for contributing to the inflation in the first place. It's what they call a "conundrum." Raising interest rates is its own kind of hell. Just ask home owners who are now paying significantly more each month for their mortgages because interest rates are on the rise. Don't get me started on housing issues and the affordability of same.
The more I hear about this Texas school shooting the more I wonder if it wasn't a deliberate sort of thing in the sense that we're now finding out that the Chief of police in charge on site that day was a woke type who had made multiple contributions to Beto's campaign for governor. What better way to set up his candidate (Beto) for a win in the upcoming election that to frame him as an anti-gun proponent on the heels of a tragic school shooting. The greater the number of young lives taken, the better Beto's chances are of winning a battle against the gun toting Texans who are all now, by extension, culpable in the deaths of these young children. That's the only thing that makes any sense. Why else would the Chief have his men stand down when children were being slaughtered in a classroom just steps away from the hallway where 19 fully armed Texas lawmen stood awaiting orders. POP POP POP POP POP
Is it a coincidence that just when the Spanish vote starts to trend away from democrats and towards the Republican Party that we have this seismic event unfold in the heart of Texas? Is there anyone in their right mind who would put it past the democrat party to do whatever they could, including taking advantage of a deadly incident the likes of which we saw at the school that day, to further their gains or, alternatively, stop the bleeding of voters who are moving en masse away from their party? Never let a crisis go to waste is what they love to say. It's who they are. It's what they do. The ends justify the means. I don't know how they put the gun into the hands of this killer or how they managed to place him in the school that day but everything fell into place either by hook or crook. I know that's a stretch but how else do you explain what we saw play out that day? Someone knows something.
I was reading a rag (Boston Globe) out of the city of Boston the other day and they were talking about drones. Nothing says Big Brother like drones flying overhead watching, documenting, listening, and spying on your every move. I'm not sure how it compares to other technologies like facial recognition and the like but it's about invasive as you can get without inserting chips into the citizenry at birth. Even the Communist Chinese decided that using facial recognition technologies was a bridge too far and it was rarely or never deployed in major cities in China. But the leftist's running the City of Boston these days are not your Irishmen of old. They are young upstarts from Asia and could give two hoots about your rights. It makes me wonder how the citizenry will react when they decide to arm the drones. You know, to protect the children.
And what's this I'm reading about blacks leaving the Biden Administration in droves? It looks like they hired a boatload of blacks just because of the color of their skin. What else can you conclude now that we know that they're leaving because of a lack of mentorship and upward mobility within the White House? Does any of this surprise anyone knowing what we know about the hypocrisy of the democrats? They pretend to have the backs of the blacks but what they really want is to keep them on the plantation picking cotton and not asking too many questions. Oh, and if you need a ride to the polls on Election Day, Joe Biden and his minions will be there to give you a lift. Here's your ballot already filled out. Extra portions of sausage will be served at dinner for you and your family. You done good.
The United States has been sending money hand over fist to the Ukrainians so they can better fight back against the Russians who have invaded their country. Let's call a spade a spade. We're in a proxy war with Russia. I don't know that any other country is sending what we're sending to Ukraine by way of financial assets and military hardware. Does our sending money to Ukraine have anything to do preserving Ukraine's independence? In what way is Ukraine vital to our national interests? There seems to be something far more insidious going on here and nobody's talking about it. I'm not sure where all of this is going but I'm reading something about Russia preparing missiles that are capable of vaporizing the East and West coasts of America. They're just letting us know what's at stake should we keep pushing the envelope. You think Bumbles Biden gives a good shit about any of their threats? Does he even know what day it is?
Given Putin's heated rhetoric, there are definitely other places that I'd rather be living than the ground zero location where I'm currently residing. I'm a stone's throw away from both a nuclear power plant and a naval base. It's smack dab in the middle of one of the two geographic epicenters mentioned by Putin as likely targets should push come to shove. Maybe the good news is that it would all be over in an instant should one of those devices detonate overhead here on the East Coast. There would be none of the "duck and cover" bullshit that we went through during the Cuban Missile Crisis during the Kennedy Administration back in the sixties. There won't be any children running through the streets of our major cities hereabouts with their clothes burned off their bodies the likes of which we saw in the pictures coming out of Hiroshima in 1945. I wonder what Kansas is like this time of year?
The Ev man was texting me like a crazy man this morning. Of course, I'm sitting here trying to finish my blogging stuff so I can get off on the right foot for the day and his relentless texting is just a bit distracting. You hate to say that about your children and you'd hate to think that the day would come when you would regret saying stuff like that so I did what any self respecting father would do. I suggested that his mom was up and about and he might want to give her a call. Bend her ear for a while and let me finish what I'm trying to finish here. That was me thinking out loud. I could hear them off in the other room and he was on a tear. It sounded like a very caffeinated conversation and it sounded like she was talking him down off this or that cliff the likes of which he ends up on when he's had too much of the stuff. I figured that it was just more of the same since she said nothing to me when they were done talking. The Ev man got whatever it was off his chest that he wanted to get off his chest and all is now well with the world. For now, anyway.
Did I mention that June is Pride Month? What the fuck is Pride month, you ask? I gather it's the month that we're all supposed to celebrate all things gay. Who dreams up this shit? If the LGBTQ folks want to be gay and celebrate everything that being gay means to them then let them get a Facebook page and have their own hoo-haw. I won't be in attendance and I won't be shamed into celebrating something that I don't wish to celebrate. I guess that makes me a prune, or a prude, or whatever. We breeders need to stick together and stand up for what we believe in. We simply can't let the other side suck all of the oxygen out of the air which is what it feels like every year when Pride Month rolls around. I've had it up to here with these newfangled concepts like "diversity" and "marginalized communities." This frog is fighting back. That is to say, I'm jumping out of the pot of boiling water before it comes to a boil. Just sayin'.
That reminds me. Bumbling Biden's new Press Secretary is a self professed lesbian. I don't have anything against lesbians, per se, but having a lesbian stand at the podium in our nation's capitol each day giving her pressers on behalf of the President of the United States seems, well, oddly odd. Maybe it's Bumbling Joe's way of saying that he and his political party embrace diversity and it's something we need to get used to at least as long as he and his party are in office. I've read comments elsewhere that suggested that having this self professed lesbian at the podium represents some sort of societal degradation that we as Americans need to carefully consider lest we go down a path from which there is no return. It's just not Main Street USA if you know what I mean. I want more of Main Street USA and less of Main Street you-name-the-town when it comes to hiring town criers.
I do think that the LGBTQ folks country wide are having something of a come-to-Jesus moment in the wake of the Disney kerfuffle. They came across as a fringe group of nut jobs trying to impose their values and cultural mores on the kindergarteners and first graders of Florida. As employees of Disney, they implored Disney leadership to fight their fight and it was, for all intents and purposes, a battle that Disney continues to lose to this very day. The "Don't Say Gay" bill was passed with flying colors and we're not talking about the colors of the rainbow if you get my drift. Eighty percent of Floridians agreed with the bill that was signed by Governor DeSantis. Maybe these LGBTQ folks were part of some more radical group but that isn't what America saw or heard as the battle brewed on day in and day out. I think the biblical reference "You reap what you sew" seems appropriate here.
What is it with democrats wanting to take our guns? Who the hell trusts democrats in an environment where they have all the guns? Look at what they're doing to our country while we responsible gun owners do what responsible gun owners do. I'm not a gun owner but I might fancy having a nice firearm with which to protect my family in a pinch. The bigger the clip, the better. I think I want one of those canons that Clint Eastwood used in one or more of his movies back in the seventies. What was that? I think it was a 44 Magnum. I can hear him now as he stood over the piece of shit of a robber or whatever, "make my day, punk." "Do you feel lucky"? You need something that's going to get the job done. No? I asked the missus last night if she might like to go to a shooting range. We can rent a couple of pistols and have a little fun. She was having none of it. I think I knew the answer before I asked the question.
I mean, if someone is nutty enough to want to pull off whatever with a gun then there is probably not much anyone can do to stop him or her. If you raise the age to purchase a certain type of gun, then the criminal is going to find another way to get that gun. If you take certain types of weapons out of circulation, then the criminals are just going to get something else that will do the job. I agree that gang bangers, criminals, and the mentally ill ought not have access to guns. I might be ok with a limited red flag law thing which allows for the taking of firearms from people who, for whatever reason, have become unhinged and shouldn't have a weapon in their possession both for their protection and the protection of the community. But the democrats are not to be trusted when it comes to looking for ways to disarm legal gun owners the majority of whom will never commit a crime with a gun. It's a ruse to render their political enemies defenseless. It's the wet dream of every leftist.
The governor of South Dakota was on the Tucker Carlson show last night. She was talking about the fact that Bumbles Biden was threatening to withdraw funding for the feeding of school aged children in her state if she pressed on with her plans to keep biological males out of women's sports in her state. Maybe it had more to do with the use of restrooms. If there is a bigger turd in the proverbial punchbowl than Bumbles Biden, I'm unaware of who that might be. I mean, who the fuck does he think he is? What kind of tomfoolery is having males compete against women in any sport? Bumbles doesn't like what she's doing so he's taking food out of the mouths of babes? This is a real low point for Bumbles. Not that anybody thought that he wasn't capable of going this low if someone pushed back against his ridiculous policies as it relates to this issue. Her legislature will pass the bill and she'll sign it. That's how you rein in fools like Bumbles Biden. Good for her.
It's also somewhat true that these school shooting things provide the democrats with an issue going into the Mid Term elections come November. If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade in the next week or two, that will give them additional ammo to get their voters out to the pols. I think their efforts to whip up public sentiment against the republicans for something that a deranged shooter does on any given day is not going to work. Everyone knows where the blame for such things lies. And, the 300 million gun owners in our country get a vote too and most of them aren't buying what the democrats are selling. Those who are buying their bullshit have probably already turned their guns into the police in their towns or cities. It's sad to think that the democrats are on their knees daily praying for mass shootings so they continue to push for gun confiscation and, with any luck, save a seat or two in Congress in the Mid Term elections. That is, unfortunately, how they roll.
The Ev man was over for dinner last night. We ordered out for calamari fra diablo at the only place in town that offers the dish. It just seemed like the right kind of meal to have given the cool weather and something hot and mildly spicy sounded good to all of us. Ordering this meal has always been a catch-as-catch can with this particular restaurant. That is to say, we never know quite what to expect when we order it. We brought home one order last summer and found to our dismay that the squid had soured. Evan made the mistake of taking a taste and it was nasty. We could literally smell it so I'm not sure how we even let Evan get to the point where he even put it close to his lips. That was the last time we ordered it for a good while. There have been other times when the dish was too spicy. Last night's order was good in a lot of ways but deficient in the sense that we were having trouble finding any calamari in the dish. It was pissah. It just wasn't the same without those chewy little tentacles. I think we're done with them. Did I mention that it was not an inexpensive dish?
Someone posted a copy of a memo to Twitter that Elon Musk sent to his Tesla employees basically telling them to return to the office or look elsewhere for a job. I'm a little surprised that any employees anywhere are still working from home after leaving the office during the Covid-19 shutdowns. But, let that go. Anyway, who doesn't love Elon Musk taking the bull by the horns and laying down the law. Good for him. I wonder if the person responsible for posting the memo thought that it would deter Elon from going through with his plans to bring employees back to the office. Well, they would be wrong. If anything it sounds like he's doubling down. I've always despised these namby-pamby bosses who kowtow to their employees and who, at every turn, give in to their every whim. In no small way, we're talking about the pussification of the American male. Enough already. Is it any surprise that Elon says he's now voting Republican this Fall?
Nooks and Crannies
29/05/22 07:06
Bumbles Biden is on an Asian tour and we're not hearing much about anything about what he's saying or not saying day in and day out. It's almost like there's a media blackout to make sure that his usual garbled drivel doesn't make it back across the pond so we here in America can say what we've always said about Joe Biden. He's a fool. Yep, that's the demented old fuck that we all know as the guy whose minions stole the election from Trump in 2020. Hillary tried to do the same in 2016, as we're all learning now but we've suspected since day one, as it comes out in the trial of one of her henchmen, Michael Sussman.
One story I'm seeing in The New York Times this morning is about comments made by Joe Biden about our country's policy regarding the defense of Taiwan in the event of an attack by China. Our country's policy towards China and Taiwan has always been intentionally ambiguous (Strategic Ambiguity) since waging a full blown war off the coast of China against China was considered a fool's errand by any strategist worth their salt. But leave it to Bumbles Biden to take our country to the brink of war against a country like China because he is simply not capable of articulating the policy of his predecessors as it relates to Taiwan. His remarks, as the NYT puts it, were "unscripted." Got it.
Then again, Bumbles has made a lot of comments off the cuff which people just ignore because they know how late stage senility can take one off one's game. Were he not the President of our great nation, he'd blend in with the rest of the patients wandering around the ward with their johnnies open and with their ass cracks in full view. I don't know that anyone on his team has walked back or tried to clarify or clean up his comments as they typically do so that's a problem. It does seem like Biden is desperate to get our country into a full blown conflict so there's that. Whatever it takes, really, to take the many problems he's created in our country off the front pages and out of the headlines. God help us.
It's doubtful we'll see Hillary Clinton perp walked into the courtroom in this Sussman trial currently underway in Washington, D.C., but one can hope. The revelations thus far have simply validated everything everyone has ever known or suspected Hillary Clinton of doing as it relates to the Russia hoax that she and her people perpetrated against one Donald J. Trump. It was a ruse to steal the 2016 election and, when that didn't work, she doubled down on her hoax in order to disgrace and disable the fledgling Trump Administration. The media and the intelligence agencies played along like the sycophantic poodles that they are and, while it made for riveting headlines, none of it was true.
You'll have to look far and wide to read anything about the Sussman trial and that is, not surprisingly, by design. Hillary is allegedly looking to run again for president again although the more we see and hear about this so-called trial the less likely it is that she'll be out of her orange jump suit in time to hit the campaign trial before the 2024 election. There I go again with my wishful thinking. Elites like the Clinton's can bring our great republic to its knees and never spend a day behind bars for her skullduggery. That has to change. We don't know about Trump either as to whether or not he's planning to run in 2024 but, if he does, he'll be better positioned with one of his better known refrains when it comes to Hillary, All together now, "Lock her up"!
This is another one of those days when there are three or so primaries in various states and I'm on the edge of my seat wondering how they are all going to turn out. I have lots to keep me busy today so that's a good thing. A little raking, a little mowing, a little of this and a little of that and we can call it a day. I'm not looking to rush anything but I am happy to say that between now and the time they call some of these races later this evening I'll be busy as a bee and then some. I might even put up a bit of fencing to keep the critters out of our garden this summer. That would, no doubt, please the missus to no end.
I took a longer than expected bike ride yesterday. I drove up past the horse farm on Atlantic Avenue and that took me some half mile or so beyond my usual destination. I had no wind to contend with and the temperatures were comfortably in the sixties with little to no humidity. In other words, it couldn't have been a better day to extend my ride if for no other reason than to see what I was capable of and maybe test the waters so to speak for taking longer rides more regularly. If you take the same ride day in and day out, am I really pushing the envelope? Am I really getting the most out of the one exercise that I count on to keep myself in shape? The only way I'll ever know the answer to that question is if I challenge myself each and every day and in every conceivable way.
I don't know if I'm doing myself a favor or not by having the door open as I sit here morning in and morning out writing in this here journal. The silence of the early morning is punctuated minute in and minute out by the sounds of the local bird population. One minute it's the Pileated Woodpecker whacking away at some dead tree limb off in the distance. The next minute it's a Carolina Wren whistling Dixie on a bush that is within spitting distance of where I'm sitting. Who knew that a little bird the size of a Wren could make so much noise? Other bird noises are less easy to identify and many are hidden in the lushness of the lilac bushes that straddle our property line. Much of what I'm hearing is probably part and parcel of the larger fabric of what goes on in the world of birds during mating season. It is that time of the year after all.
I'm surprised when I think about it that birds in general seem to give their human counterparts short shrift. More so, I guess I would say, than the inordinate amount of time that we as humans spend observing and admiring them. They almost seem distrustful of us as a species although history might be on their side when the jury finally comes back. There have been countless songs about Blackbird pie over the years so take from that what you will. We humans and birds also seem to be of two minds on the sticky issue of what we humans refer to as "coexistence." And, to a species, they seem equally and uniquely skittish when it comes to interacting with we humans. I would hasten to add, not intolerant, just skittish. Truth of the matter is that they have more to fear from one another than they do from us. That's the God's honest truth.
I'm not happy this morning. Those two twats down in Georgia, Kemp and Rothensberger, won their primaries last night. That probably has something to do with the fact that Trump's endorsed candidates were not all that appealing but let that go. Is it my imagination or were the margins of the wins a little weird? Kemp got something like 70% of the vote. The goal was to keep him under 50% and force a runoff. Perdue, Kemp's opponent and Trump's guy, couldn't get but 22% of the vote. I don't know, it just seems a little too fishy to me. These are the same ass clowns that participated and maybe even engineered the steal in Georgia in 2020 that put Biden in the Oval Office. Are they up to their old tricks again? Inquiring minds want to know.
I wasn't too happy last night that the entire primary night business was preempted by the shooting at the elementary school in Texas. How selfish does that make me? Oh, just another shooting at an elementary school. How about all the young people killed over this past weekend in cities like Chicago and New York City? Where are the tears and the outrage for those victims? The democrats were out in force on every television station with the same talking points they always use when we have a shooting like this. What is their obsession with taking guns away from law abiding citizens? Did you hear Biden's comments? He went on and on, or so I was told, about deer wearing Kevlar vests on prime time television on the night that 20 children died in a mass school shooting. You can't make this stuff up.
I don't know why but the missus thought that it was kind of important to hear Biden speak in the aftermath of the school shooting. You know, do what a president does when this sort of thing happens. Something short and sweet that brings our people together in the wake of an unspeakable crime in one of our communities. It was a hard pass for me since I knew what to expect. Everything that comes out of Biden's mouth these days is just completely cringeworthy. I walked into the other room until he did his thing and then I returned to the bedroom where the missus was just aghast at what she had just watched on television. I tried to warn her. I'm not sure what she was expecting but suffice it to say that Biden's bullshit didn't do it for her. He really is a disgrace.
I don't think taking away all the guns is going to stop these types of things from happening. People will find a way to kill other people if they are so inclined. Mental health issues are seemingly at play here so someone knew something about what this killer was maybe up to or maybe capable of. I'm a little curious to about the fact that this happened in Texas where people carrying guns is not all that uncommon. Someone should have been armed in the school and ready to go at the drop of a hat. I like the idea of having armed security in schools and that would have gone a long way towards preventing the kind of bloodbath we saw in Texas yesterday. They kept replaying this one reel on the telly last night about a ten-year old girl who was missing. What the fuck does that mean? With any luck, she found a place to hide and she's since been found safe and sound. Duck and cover, baby!
One thing you weren't hearing a lot about last night was the ethnicity of the shooter. The media went crazy two weeks ago with the shooting at the supermarket in Buffalo when the shooter was white. It's all about white supremacy, they cackled hour in and hour out for days and days. As to the ethnicity of Mr Ramos and his rampage at the school yesterday, not a fucking word about his ethnicity. All you got was, "The investigation is ongoing." If the media can't opine on his nationality, and he was an American citizen as I understand it, then they pivot to gun control. Some of these mass murderers, like the black guy who mowed down people attending the parade in Waukesha Wisconsin, just disappeared from the news cycle the day after it happened. That's just how the American media rolls.
I got a good jump on cleaning our garage yesterday so I feel good about that. Getting the party started is always the most difficult part. Now that I've swept the garage floor of the dirt and leaves that have accumulated there over the past couple of months or more I'm ready to attack everything on the periphery. The things we tend to accumulate when we're not paying attention to such things can be quite overwhelming and they need to be culled every so often. You can only turn a blind eye to the unnecessary things in your life for so long. Ask any octogenarian if they have things that they think they need to get rid of and you'll likely get an earful. The thought of keeling over and leaving your mess for someone else to clean up can be quite a motivator. If that someone else happens to be your better half, all the more important that you get a move on.
The missus has been after me to put the fence up around the garden so I suppose I ought to add that to my to-do list. The garden isn't in yet but it will be by the time this weekend rolls around. I think I need an extra plant or two to reach full capacity in the garden so I'll have to think about what I want to add to the plants that we already have on hand. Today would be a good day to go looking for plants since the weekend is likely to be a horror show with hordes of last minute shoppers looking to find things to plant before the growing season moves on without them. Yes, we draw the line at Memorial Day hereabouts. If we don't have the plants in by then then it's likely a no-go for the garden for the season. We even have a watermelon plant going in this season. That's a first.
The missus bought a sun block lotion online last week and now she's decided that she doesn't like how it smells. I don't want to tell you how much it cost so we'll leave that alone. It's not important anyway since the missus contacted the company and complained about this and that until they agreed to reimburse her for the cost of the product. They didn't even request that she return the product but they did ask for the lot number on the bottle so they could do their own in-house inquiry. I think they refer to that as "due diligence" in the business. Thinking that the missus was overstating the smell issue, I thought I might like to give it a try. I didn't find it nearly as offensive as she made it out to be and I've decided that I'll use it instead. I even suggested to her that she contact the company to arrange for payment since we're using the product. Curiously enough, she seems singularly uninterested in following through on my suggestion.
This particular product has as its main ingredient, Titanium Dioxide. There is a fragrance to it and I would agree with the missus ever so slightly that the smell is just a little off putting. I would only ever apply this lotion to my face given how expensive it is. It's also a mineral based sun lotion which, I'm learning, is better that the over-the-counter chemical based lotions which get absorbed into your skin with each application. Given how much I bike and how often I've used these chemical based products on my face over the years, it has me wondering just how much damage I've done to my internal organs as a result of my using the wrong products on my skin. I've been a little too focused on SPF values when I should have been focused elsewhere. I like the way it feels going on too. It's not greasy like all the others. While I wouldn't personally spend this much for lotion, and I know that it was reimbursed for better or worse, I might be willing to spend a little more now that I'm better informed as to the dangers of this and that lotion currently on the market.
Someone posted a class picture online of the children killed in the shooting in Texas the other day. I think I was a little surprised at the fact that there wasn't a Caucasian face in the crowd. For all intents and purposes, that very same picture night have been taken in a school in Juarez or Mexico City. It's funny how we American's associate things with things. We associate blacks with inner cities, caucasians with the Middle West and along our respective eastern and western coastlines, and maybe a smattering of Mexican and South American faces with geographic locations along our southern border. Maybe the picture to which I refer is more illustrative of the Mexican and South American influence we're experiencing these days along our southern border thanks to the open border policies of Joey Biden and his crack team of socialists sitting in the White House. Who was it that once said, "if you don't have a border, you don't have a country?" Maybe that's the goal.
The story of how this so-called shooter and how he was able to do the things that he did behind closed doors continues to unfold. What do you mean that there was no school resource officer on the premises? Why not? How did the shooter get into the school? Why was there a door unlocked when it's standard practice to have all the doors of the school locked after the students are in their respective classrooms? How do you explain the fact that the shooter was active in the school for the better part of 40 minutes at a minimum while armed officers stood outside keeping parents from entering the school to save their children? They must have heard the gunshots. POP POP POP POP POP POP.
Was this a PsyOps operation? Is it possible that this was a government run warfare operation in order to force the politicians on both sides of the aisle to start the process of doing away with the 2nd amendment? The democrats have long been just fine when it comes to doing away with the 2nd amendment. Their wet dreams of a one-party government would be much easier were they able to disarm the population. Just ask the Australians how losing their right to bear arms has put them at the odds with an ever repressive governmental regime who, most recently, beat their citizens in the streets after taking away their rights to free speech during the Covid crackdowns. Certainly, seeing some 20-odd fourth graders killed in cold blood inside their classroom would push the politicians to coalesce around one or more laws to make sure that this sort of thing never happens again. Right? I guess you'll never know unless you put the wheels in motion to make it happen. Gotta start somewhere. Is that what we're talking about here?
We picked up some dogs and chicken for the barbie we're planing to have here at the house this Memorial Day weekend. I also grabbed a couple of chopped sueys for the Ev man should he show up. I paid $16 for a couple of marinated chicken breasts. If I had to guess, I'd say this was some six dollars more than I might have paid for the same product some six months ago. If you're paying more for some things then that means you're buying fewer or less of other items because budgets only stretch so far. We picked up a smattering of veggies and I'll probably make kebobs if the good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise. Had I noticed that the missus only put one zucchini and one summer squash in the basket, I would have had her get more. Who doesn't like left over grilled veggies? I've also got some nice organic red onions and tomatoes that I can add to the skewers so that's good.
I've been on a tear of sorts these last few days when it comes to cleaning, organizing, and throwing a thing or two out with the trash. I have to be careful since the missus has an eagle eye when it comes to me and my throwing things out that she would prefer that I not throw out. Adding to my woes is the fact that Mrs G is also getting rid of things and we've offered to assist her with the removal of said items. When I see those bags of this and that coming into our house rather than going directly to the recycling center it annoys me to no end. I've got my hands full staying ahead of the hoarding that the missus is responsible for so I certainly don't need Mrs G's stuff on top of it all. I'm making considerable progress in the few rooms that I have to square away so I feel good about that. It's all about the nooks and crannies now. It's not a joint effort by any stretch but hope springs eternal.
We're seeing a nice little counter trend rally in the financial markets these last few days. That has to feel good for the people who have seen their investments go into the toilet over these past few months. We're still in a down market so caution is in order when it comes to going full hog into a rally that likely has limited upside. I've seen counter trend rallies in these past couple of months that have lasted but a day. There has been but one multi-day rally and all that did was suck in the crowd only to bury them again with multiple and successive 90% downside days. It does make you wonder what the markets would be doing were the fed heads not out there talking smack about the markets and how all of these rate increases are going to end and we'll all be fat and happy again real soon. I'm looking for capitulation and that's never going to happen until you see the end of the kind of froth and speculation that we're still seeing in these markets.
I'm looking forward to listening to the War Room radio program this morning. Steve Bannon will spend some two hours talking with experts about the threat of China invading Taiwan. He seems to think that an invasion is imminent and he plans to talk about the things he's seeing that lead him to believe that it's just a matter of time now. China has long believed that Taiwan is a territory of China and has pushed back rhetorically on countries like the United States who have as their policy what's known as "strategic ambiguity." That's a nice way of saying that we're not sure what we're willing to do should China invade their closest neighbor, Taiwan. The implications both economically and militarily of engaging China should they invade Taiwan are topics that we Americans should all be concerned about. The fact that 90% of the world's semiconductor's chips are produced in Taiwan is a good place to start this conversation.
Mrs G asked that we pick up some tartar sauce for her in our travels. She mentioned that she was having fish and chips for dinner at her place last night so I hope she wasn't expecting us to drop the tartar sauce off at her unit. She didn't say as much so I'm guessing that she has some but will need more before sitting down to her next fish and chips meal. I scoped out several brands of tartar sauce at the stores we visited yesterday and I chose the brand that did not have as one of it's ingredients high fructose corn syrup. It's a hideous chemical and one that I assiduously avoid when I'm out and about so, I guess I would say, what's good for the goose is good for the gander? On the other hand, is it for me to say what Mrs G should and should not be having when it comes to this sort of thing? Would she care if she knew that I was making decisions on her behalf? Maybe I'll say nothing and we'll let the chips fall where they may. See what I did there?
In retrospect, Governor Abbot of Texas probably came out a little too soon to speak to the public about the shooting at the elementary school. As such, he gave an incorrect account of what transpired during the first hour or so when the shooter was inside the school doing what shooters do. There is something to be said for getting all the facts before speaking publicly. He may have felt that it was politically expedient to do what he did and given the enormity of the event it's easy to understand why he said what he did when he did. Nonetheless, giving people bad information only makes matters worse.
Governor Abbot subsequently confessed to having bad information and admitted to being "livid" about not being better informed. One question I have is, was Abbot deliberatly misled by the people who were informing him? The truth was destined to come out so why would someone purposely mislead him? Was it because the truth, once known, would be almost worse than the crime itself? Truth of the matter is that sheer incompetence on the part of the agencies on site that day contributed to the number of children that were killed that day. That's just a fact.
A couple of years ago I saw an Oriole hanging around our deck area for a couple of days. I'd never seen an Oriole hereabouts so wondered if this was an outlier of sorts in the scheme of things. Maybe global warming was pushing certain species in one direction or another based on the new patterns of prevailing wind patterns coming off the Atlantic. I'm making this stuff up as I go along, of course, since I think global warning is every bit the hoax that we deniers suspect that it is and always has been. Anyway, I've always wanted to attract more Orioles to our deck area but have not found the right feeders or whatever to get the job done. That all changed when I bought a feeder at a local nursery the other day. Now, I just need to find the right food to use in the feeder. The instructions say that I can use Smucker's jelly or jam but all I found on the supermarket shelves was jelly and jam that contained, yes, you guessed it, high fructose corn syrup. I want to attract the birds, not kill them. And, the sugar-free jams and jellies didn't look like they would work either. I'll sort this out in due time. Baby steps. Right?
One story I'm seeing in The New York Times this morning is about comments made by Joe Biden about our country's policy regarding the defense of Taiwan in the event of an attack by China. Our country's policy towards China and Taiwan has always been intentionally ambiguous (Strategic Ambiguity) since waging a full blown war off the coast of China against China was considered a fool's errand by any strategist worth their salt. But leave it to Bumbles Biden to take our country to the brink of war against a country like China because he is simply not capable of articulating the policy of his predecessors as it relates to Taiwan. His remarks, as the NYT puts it, were "unscripted." Got it.
Then again, Bumbles has made a lot of comments off the cuff which people just ignore because they know how late stage senility can take one off one's game. Were he not the President of our great nation, he'd blend in with the rest of the patients wandering around the ward with their johnnies open and with their ass cracks in full view. I don't know that anyone on his team has walked back or tried to clarify or clean up his comments as they typically do so that's a problem. It does seem like Biden is desperate to get our country into a full blown conflict so there's that. Whatever it takes, really, to take the many problems he's created in our country off the front pages and out of the headlines. God help us.
It's doubtful we'll see Hillary Clinton perp walked into the courtroom in this Sussman trial currently underway in Washington, D.C., but one can hope. The revelations thus far have simply validated everything everyone has ever known or suspected Hillary Clinton of doing as it relates to the Russia hoax that she and her people perpetrated against one Donald J. Trump. It was a ruse to steal the 2016 election and, when that didn't work, she doubled down on her hoax in order to disgrace and disable the fledgling Trump Administration. The media and the intelligence agencies played along like the sycophantic poodles that they are and, while it made for riveting headlines, none of it was true.
You'll have to look far and wide to read anything about the Sussman trial and that is, not surprisingly, by design. Hillary is allegedly looking to run again for president again although the more we see and hear about this so-called trial the less likely it is that she'll be out of her orange jump suit in time to hit the campaign trial before the 2024 election. There I go again with my wishful thinking. Elites like the Clinton's can bring our great republic to its knees and never spend a day behind bars for her skullduggery. That has to change. We don't know about Trump either as to whether or not he's planning to run in 2024 but, if he does, he'll be better positioned with one of his better known refrains when it comes to Hillary, All together now, "Lock her up"!
This is another one of those days when there are three or so primaries in various states and I'm on the edge of my seat wondering how they are all going to turn out. I have lots to keep me busy today so that's a good thing. A little raking, a little mowing, a little of this and a little of that and we can call it a day. I'm not looking to rush anything but I am happy to say that between now and the time they call some of these races later this evening I'll be busy as a bee and then some. I might even put up a bit of fencing to keep the critters out of our garden this summer. That would, no doubt, please the missus to no end.
I took a longer than expected bike ride yesterday. I drove up past the horse farm on Atlantic Avenue and that took me some half mile or so beyond my usual destination. I had no wind to contend with and the temperatures were comfortably in the sixties with little to no humidity. In other words, it couldn't have been a better day to extend my ride if for no other reason than to see what I was capable of and maybe test the waters so to speak for taking longer rides more regularly. If you take the same ride day in and day out, am I really pushing the envelope? Am I really getting the most out of the one exercise that I count on to keep myself in shape? The only way I'll ever know the answer to that question is if I challenge myself each and every day and in every conceivable way.
I don't know if I'm doing myself a favor or not by having the door open as I sit here morning in and morning out writing in this here journal. The silence of the early morning is punctuated minute in and minute out by the sounds of the local bird population. One minute it's the Pileated Woodpecker whacking away at some dead tree limb off in the distance. The next minute it's a Carolina Wren whistling Dixie on a bush that is within spitting distance of where I'm sitting. Who knew that a little bird the size of a Wren could make so much noise? Other bird noises are less easy to identify and many are hidden in the lushness of the lilac bushes that straddle our property line. Much of what I'm hearing is probably part and parcel of the larger fabric of what goes on in the world of birds during mating season. It is that time of the year after all.
I'm surprised when I think about it that birds in general seem to give their human counterparts short shrift. More so, I guess I would say, than the inordinate amount of time that we as humans spend observing and admiring them. They almost seem distrustful of us as a species although history might be on their side when the jury finally comes back. There have been countless songs about Blackbird pie over the years so take from that what you will. We humans and birds also seem to be of two minds on the sticky issue of what we humans refer to as "coexistence." And, to a species, they seem equally and uniquely skittish when it comes to interacting with we humans. I would hasten to add, not intolerant, just skittish. Truth of the matter is that they have more to fear from one another than they do from us. That's the God's honest truth.
I'm not happy this morning. Those two twats down in Georgia, Kemp and Rothensberger, won their primaries last night. That probably has something to do with the fact that Trump's endorsed candidates were not all that appealing but let that go. Is it my imagination or were the margins of the wins a little weird? Kemp got something like 70% of the vote. The goal was to keep him under 50% and force a runoff. Perdue, Kemp's opponent and Trump's guy, couldn't get but 22% of the vote. I don't know, it just seems a little too fishy to me. These are the same ass clowns that participated and maybe even engineered the steal in Georgia in 2020 that put Biden in the Oval Office. Are they up to their old tricks again? Inquiring minds want to know.
I wasn't too happy last night that the entire primary night business was preempted by the shooting at the elementary school in Texas. How selfish does that make me? Oh, just another shooting at an elementary school. How about all the young people killed over this past weekend in cities like Chicago and New York City? Where are the tears and the outrage for those victims? The democrats were out in force on every television station with the same talking points they always use when we have a shooting like this. What is their obsession with taking guns away from law abiding citizens? Did you hear Biden's comments? He went on and on, or so I was told, about deer wearing Kevlar vests on prime time television on the night that 20 children died in a mass school shooting. You can't make this stuff up.
I don't know why but the missus thought that it was kind of important to hear Biden speak in the aftermath of the school shooting. You know, do what a president does when this sort of thing happens. Something short and sweet that brings our people together in the wake of an unspeakable crime in one of our communities. It was a hard pass for me since I knew what to expect. Everything that comes out of Biden's mouth these days is just completely cringeworthy. I walked into the other room until he did his thing and then I returned to the bedroom where the missus was just aghast at what she had just watched on television. I tried to warn her. I'm not sure what she was expecting but suffice it to say that Biden's bullshit didn't do it for her. He really is a disgrace.
I don't think taking away all the guns is going to stop these types of things from happening. People will find a way to kill other people if they are so inclined. Mental health issues are seemingly at play here so someone knew something about what this killer was maybe up to or maybe capable of. I'm a little curious to about the fact that this happened in Texas where people carrying guns is not all that uncommon. Someone should have been armed in the school and ready to go at the drop of a hat. I like the idea of having armed security in schools and that would have gone a long way towards preventing the kind of bloodbath we saw in Texas yesterday. They kept replaying this one reel on the telly last night about a ten-year old girl who was missing. What the fuck does that mean? With any luck, she found a place to hide and she's since been found safe and sound. Duck and cover, baby!
One thing you weren't hearing a lot about last night was the ethnicity of the shooter. The media went crazy two weeks ago with the shooting at the supermarket in Buffalo when the shooter was white. It's all about white supremacy, they cackled hour in and hour out for days and days. As to the ethnicity of Mr Ramos and his rampage at the school yesterday, not a fucking word about his ethnicity. All you got was, "The investigation is ongoing." If the media can't opine on his nationality, and he was an American citizen as I understand it, then they pivot to gun control. Some of these mass murderers, like the black guy who mowed down people attending the parade in Waukesha Wisconsin, just disappeared from the news cycle the day after it happened. That's just how the American media rolls.
I got a good jump on cleaning our garage yesterday so I feel good about that. Getting the party started is always the most difficult part. Now that I've swept the garage floor of the dirt and leaves that have accumulated there over the past couple of months or more I'm ready to attack everything on the periphery. The things we tend to accumulate when we're not paying attention to such things can be quite overwhelming and they need to be culled every so often. You can only turn a blind eye to the unnecessary things in your life for so long. Ask any octogenarian if they have things that they think they need to get rid of and you'll likely get an earful. The thought of keeling over and leaving your mess for someone else to clean up can be quite a motivator. If that someone else happens to be your better half, all the more important that you get a move on.
The missus has been after me to put the fence up around the garden so I suppose I ought to add that to my to-do list. The garden isn't in yet but it will be by the time this weekend rolls around. I think I need an extra plant or two to reach full capacity in the garden so I'll have to think about what I want to add to the plants that we already have on hand. Today would be a good day to go looking for plants since the weekend is likely to be a horror show with hordes of last minute shoppers looking to find things to plant before the growing season moves on without them. Yes, we draw the line at Memorial Day hereabouts. If we don't have the plants in by then then it's likely a no-go for the garden for the season. We even have a watermelon plant going in this season. That's a first.
The missus bought a sun block lotion online last week and now she's decided that she doesn't like how it smells. I don't want to tell you how much it cost so we'll leave that alone. It's not important anyway since the missus contacted the company and complained about this and that until they agreed to reimburse her for the cost of the product. They didn't even request that she return the product but they did ask for the lot number on the bottle so they could do their own in-house inquiry. I think they refer to that as "due diligence" in the business. Thinking that the missus was overstating the smell issue, I thought I might like to give it a try. I didn't find it nearly as offensive as she made it out to be and I've decided that I'll use it instead. I even suggested to her that she contact the company to arrange for payment since we're using the product. Curiously enough, she seems singularly uninterested in following through on my suggestion.
This particular product has as its main ingredient, Titanium Dioxide. There is a fragrance to it and I would agree with the missus ever so slightly that the smell is just a little off putting. I would only ever apply this lotion to my face given how expensive it is. It's also a mineral based sun lotion which, I'm learning, is better that the over-the-counter chemical based lotions which get absorbed into your skin with each application. Given how much I bike and how often I've used these chemical based products on my face over the years, it has me wondering just how much damage I've done to my internal organs as a result of my using the wrong products on my skin. I've been a little too focused on SPF values when I should have been focused elsewhere. I like the way it feels going on too. It's not greasy like all the others. While I wouldn't personally spend this much for lotion, and I know that it was reimbursed for better or worse, I might be willing to spend a little more now that I'm better informed as to the dangers of this and that lotion currently on the market.
Someone posted a class picture online of the children killed in the shooting in Texas the other day. I think I was a little surprised at the fact that there wasn't a Caucasian face in the crowd. For all intents and purposes, that very same picture night have been taken in a school in Juarez or Mexico City. It's funny how we American's associate things with things. We associate blacks with inner cities, caucasians with the Middle West and along our respective eastern and western coastlines, and maybe a smattering of Mexican and South American faces with geographic locations along our southern border. Maybe the picture to which I refer is more illustrative of the Mexican and South American influence we're experiencing these days along our southern border thanks to the open border policies of Joey Biden and his crack team of socialists sitting in the White House. Who was it that once said, "if you don't have a border, you don't have a country?" Maybe that's the goal.
The story of how this so-called shooter and how he was able to do the things that he did behind closed doors continues to unfold. What do you mean that there was no school resource officer on the premises? Why not? How did the shooter get into the school? Why was there a door unlocked when it's standard practice to have all the doors of the school locked after the students are in their respective classrooms? How do you explain the fact that the shooter was active in the school for the better part of 40 minutes at a minimum while armed officers stood outside keeping parents from entering the school to save their children? They must have heard the gunshots. POP POP POP POP POP POP.
Was this a PsyOps operation? Is it possible that this was a government run warfare operation in order to force the politicians on both sides of the aisle to start the process of doing away with the 2nd amendment? The democrats have long been just fine when it comes to doing away with the 2nd amendment. Their wet dreams of a one-party government would be much easier were they able to disarm the population. Just ask the Australians how losing their right to bear arms has put them at the odds with an ever repressive governmental regime who, most recently, beat their citizens in the streets after taking away their rights to free speech during the Covid crackdowns. Certainly, seeing some 20-odd fourth graders killed in cold blood inside their classroom would push the politicians to coalesce around one or more laws to make sure that this sort of thing never happens again. Right? I guess you'll never know unless you put the wheels in motion to make it happen. Gotta start somewhere. Is that what we're talking about here?
We picked up some dogs and chicken for the barbie we're planing to have here at the house this Memorial Day weekend. I also grabbed a couple of chopped sueys for the Ev man should he show up. I paid $16 for a couple of marinated chicken breasts. If I had to guess, I'd say this was some six dollars more than I might have paid for the same product some six months ago. If you're paying more for some things then that means you're buying fewer or less of other items because budgets only stretch so far. We picked up a smattering of veggies and I'll probably make kebobs if the good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise. Had I noticed that the missus only put one zucchini and one summer squash in the basket, I would have had her get more. Who doesn't like left over grilled veggies? I've also got some nice organic red onions and tomatoes that I can add to the skewers so that's good.
I've been on a tear of sorts these last few days when it comes to cleaning, organizing, and throwing a thing or two out with the trash. I have to be careful since the missus has an eagle eye when it comes to me and my throwing things out that she would prefer that I not throw out. Adding to my woes is the fact that Mrs G is also getting rid of things and we've offered to assist her with the removal of said items. When I see those bags of this and that coming into our house rather than going directly to the recycling center it annoys me to no end. I've got my hands full staying ahead of the hoarding that the missus is responsible for so I certainly don't need Mrs G's stuff on top of it all. I'm making considerable progress in the few rooms that I have to square away so I feel good about that. It's all about the nooks and crannies now. It's not a joint effort by any stretch but hope springs eternal.
We're seeing a nice little counter trend rally in the financial markets these last few days. That has to feel good for the people who have seen their investments go into the toilet over these past few months. We're still in a down market so caution is in order when it comes to going full hog into a rally that likely has limited upside. I've seen counter trend rallies in these past couple of months that have lasted but a day. There has been but one multi-day rally and all that did was suck in the crowd only to bury them again with multiple and successive 90% downside days. It does make you wonder what the markets would be doing were the fed heads not out there talking smack about the markets and how all of these rate increases are going to end and we'll all be fat and happy again real soon. I'm looking for capitulation and that's never going to happen until you see the end of the kind of froth and speculation that we're still seeing in these markets.
I'm looking forward to listening to the War Room radio program this morning. Steve Bannon will spend some two hours talking with experts about the threat of China invading Taiwan. He seems to think that an invasion is imminent and he plans to talk about the things he's seeing that lead him to believe that it's just a matter of time now. China has long believed that Taiwan is a territory of China and has pushed back rhetorically on countries like the United States who have as their policy what's known as "strategic ambiguity." That's a nice way of saying that we're not sure what we're willing to do should China invade their closest neighbor, Taiwan. The implications both economically and militarily of engaging China should they invade Taiwan are topics that we Americans should all be concerned about. The fact that 90% of the world's semiconductor's chips are produced in Taiwan is a good place to start this conversation.
Mrs G asked that we pick up some tartar sauce for her in our travels. She mentioned that she was having fish and chips for dinner at her place last night so I hope she wasn't expecting us to drop the tartar sauce off at her unit. She didn't say as much so I'm guessing that she has some but will need more before sitting down to her next fish and chips meal. I scoped out several brands of tartar sauce at the stores we visited yesterday and I chose the brand that did not have as one of it's ingredients high fructose corn syrup. It's a hideous chemical and one that I assiduously avoid when I'm out and about so, I guess I would say, what's good for the goose is good for the gander? On the other hand, is it for me to say what Mrs G should and should not be having when it comes to this sort of thing? Would she care if she knew that I was making decisions on her behalf? Maybe I'll say nothing and we'll let the chips fall where they may. See what I did there?
In retrospect, Governor Abbot of Texas probably came out a little too soon to speak to the public about the shooting at the elementary school. As such, he gave an incorrect account of what transpired during the first hour or so when the shooter was inside the school doing what shooters do. There is something to be said for getting all the facts before speaking publicly. He may have felt that it was politically expedient to do what he did and given the enormity of the event it's easy to understand why he said what he did when he did. Nonetheless, giving people bad information only makes matters worse.
Governor Abbot subsequently confessed to having bad information and admitted to being "livid" about not being better informed. One question I have is, was Abbot deliberatly misled by the people who were informing him? The truth was destined to come out so why would someone purposely mislead him? Was it because the truth, once known, would be almost worse than the crime itself? Truth of the matter is that sheer incompetence on the part of the agencies on site that day contributed to the number of children that were killed that day. That's just a fact.
A couple of years ago I saw an Oriole hanging around our deck area for a couple of days. I'd never seen an Oriole hereabouts so wondered if this was an outlier of sorts in the scheme of things. Maybe global warming was pushing certain species in one direction or another based on the new patterns of prevailing wind patterns coming off the Atlantic. I'm making this stuff up as I go along, of course, since I think global warning is every bit the hoax that we deniers suspect that it is and always has been. Anyway, I've always wanted to attract more Orioles to our deck area but have not found the right feeders or whatever to get the job done. That all changed when I bought a feeder at a local nursery the other day. Now, I just need to find the right food to use in the feeder. The instructions say that I can use Smucker's jelly or jam but all I found on the supermarket shelves was jelly and jam that contained, yes, you guessed it, high fructose corn syrup. I want to attract the birds, not kill them. And, the sugar-free jams and jellies didn't look like they would work either. I'll sort this out in due time. Baby steps. Right?
Slammed
22/05/22 07:23
Let's get this party started! I don't know where we're going this week but I guess we'll find out. We've got Supreme Court announcements today, gubernatorial, congressional, and senatorial primaries in Pennsylvania and in the Carolina's on Tuesday, and who knows what else. The Ev man just texted me complaining about having ordered a drink at Aroma Joe's and, as he put it, she "screwed him over" with a sugary drink. I'm guessing that means they added sugar to the coffee that he ordered. He never has sugar in his coffee so that's probably what he was complaining about. I told him to "cut her some slack." I'm sure it was nothing personal.
Some loon went into a supermarket in Buffalo, New York over the weekend and killed a bunch of people. He was white and most of his victims were black so the media is playing the whole white supremacist thing to the hilt. They are dragging social media into their dystopian hysterics for their part in radicalizing this killer. Make no mistake about it, the social media part is all about indicting Elon Musk and his buyout of Twitter which is the left's go-to application for their army of nitwits and influencers. Now that Elon is in charge, and now that he's opening the doors to millions of more reasonable voices on the platform, it's time for the left to "level" the playing field once again by shutting down free speech since it doesn't conform to their idea of "free speech."
Who was it who once said, "Never let a crisis go to waste?" It really is just shameless how the democrats never miss a chance to politicize these types of events. It's all about whipping up sentiment in this or that community in order to create a constituency around a topic that is near and dear to their hearts like gun control, abortion, etc. Put more simply, without an energized citizenry willing to get out and vote in local or national elections, they lose political power which is the lifeblood of the democrat party. To the extent that these types of events help them achieve their goals, it pains me to say it but I think they welcome them with open arms. The ends justify the means.
This is one of those days where I'm chomping at the bit to get to the end of the day so I can see who will win this and that primary election. I don't really have any horses in any of the races so I'm just more curious than not about how they are going to turn out. If Trump's pick's win, that's fine. If they don't, that's fine too. I'm not in the camp that says that if his picks don't win he's toast come 2024. I am in the camp that says the more wins he has the better his chances are of winning in 2024. I do hope that Pennsylvania comes to their senses and votes in republican governors and senators in November although I'm not sure which candidate(s) would be best positioned to do that against the democrats.
If the Oz guy pulls this one out tonight in Pennsylvania, it will give us a little more insight into what it means to be endorsed by Trump. It will tell us that the J.D. Vance thing wasn't a lark since J.D. came from the back of the pack after being endorsed by Trump to the front of the pack and ultimately won the primary in Ohio. Oz is not currently at the back of the pack and, by all reports, he's running ahead ever so slightly of both McCormick and Cathy Barnett. Did I mention that the leading democrat in the Pennsylvania senatorial primary had a stroke a few days back? They say it won't dampen his prospects so we'll see if that holds true as the votes come in tonight. He'll still be in the hospital when all the votes are tallied at the end of the day.
I did such a nice job cleaning up all the deck furniture this Spring. That said, I might have been a little too hasty in putting it all together because the glass table top needs a good cleaning. I shouldn't have assembled everything until I got that done. That might be a good project for today since I'll want to busy myself with this or that task until I get to break out the popcorn later this evening to watch the votes come in. I've also got some staining to do so that's on the list as is cleaning the garage. I tend to drag my feet on the more demanding tasks but, as I've learned over time, that only makes it more difficult when all is said and done. That reminds me. I need to paint the Ev man's room. Well, the spare room that he calls home when he's home anyway.
It's looking like we're going to have a dandy day here on the coast weather-wise. It's totally sunny and the temperatures should get to the low seventies which is just ideal this time of year. Add low humidity to the mix, and we are off and running. I'll see if I can't get in a good bike ride and maybe a little nap too if the good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise. The nap should take a bit of the edge off of any anxiety I might have as a result of my wanting this election thing to come to pass. When you know yourself well enough to know what you're going to do from time to time based on this or that external event, it makes for more reliable outcomes. More reliable outcomes makes for fewer surprises.
The Ev man is doing better now that he's a week or more into his bout with Covid. It wasn't a big deal so that's a relief. He keeps taking the test every day with the hopes that the lines indicating a positive test on the testing strip will sooner or later fade away to nothing. They're not gone completely so we're all wondering if his is the one case where the lines never go away or maybe go away after an extended period of time. He's been out and about in the community after the five or so days recommended by the CDC although he's done a pretty good job of masking up in order to minimize any unnecessary contact/spread. He's been nothing if not responsible during his sickness so kudos to him. You done good, Ev man.
Here we are the morning after the election and the Oz and McCormick thing has yet to be settled. Madison Cawthorn got the boot in North Carolina and another of Trump's picks went down defeat in Indiana. I'm looking at the map of Pennsylvania and who won what counties and Oz doesn't seem to have a lot of strength in the areas that he'll need to win in November if he's going to take the senate seat in the race against the democrat, Fetterman. I'm referring to the more rural counties in Pennsylvania which ran up the votes in 2016 to give Trump the win. Maybe they have some affection for McCormick that I'm unaware of that put him over the top in those counties. If Oz does prevail, he has his work cut out for him. Barnett garnered some 23% of the vote which, if I'm not mistaken, is somewhat less than most people thought she might get.
Who does and who doesn't have bragging rights this morning? I wish I knew a little more about turnout in past senatorial races so I'd have a better idea as to whether or not one party or the other has the upper hand in terms of voter enthusiasm. This stroked out Fetterman guy who is a big Bernie Sanders lefty sure got a lot of votes for someone who spent election night in the hospital getting a pacemaker implanted in his chest. Just when I thought the progressives were down for the count, this guy pulls one out of the hat for his team. I guess that's a good thing if come November the middle-of-the-road citizenry decides that what the progressives like Fetterman are selling is just a bridge too far. I have to be careful here since the same might be said for Mastriano, the republican gubenatorial winner. He might be trumpier than Trump.
I feel pretty good about the fact that I got most of what I wanted to do yesterday done with time to spare. I pushed myself but the tasks that I had assigned to myself required a little pushing so that worked out well. I got the painting done that I wanted to do; I cleaned certain gutters; I washed the glass table top for the table on our patio; and I got my bike ride in. Did I mention that the missus and I went to Whole Foods in the evening where we bought a couple of lilac bushes? The joint was not that busy and I continue to think that if traffic doesn't pick up there I think we're going to see them close up shop. When I think of all the fresh food that goes to waste in that store because of the lack of patronage it's just a little distressing.
The republican gubernatorial winner in Pennsylvania last night, Mastriano, gave an interesting victory speech. He made a few what I would call off-colored remarks about Rachel Levine, the transexual, who now works in the Biden Administration. He's a bit of a laughingstock, I'll admit, so I got a bit of a chuckle out of Mastriano's comments. Levine is almost a caricature of himself running around our nation's capitol wearing a dress and eyeliner but making disparaging remarks about someone's sexual preferences or predilections these days seems, even for someone as trumpy as Mastriano, a bit of a reach. It was hard to tell how it went over at Mariano's headquarters so there's that. Maybe it was just Mastriano being Mastriano. And, yes, he's Trump-endorsed.
Mastriano made a few promises during his victory speech that sounded interesting. He said something about no more lockdowns. He said something about reinstating members of Pennsylvania's National Guard who had been fired because they refused to get the jab. He promised that only biological females will play female sports and bathrooms across the state will be utilized based on biology and not what users think they might feel like on any particular day of the week. Oh, and he said there will be no CRT in schools on his watch. He also said something about Pennsylvania becoming once again a major producer of energy that it once was under Trump before Biden stepped into the fray and fucked things up. Those are my words, not his. Sounds like a winning hand. No?
Just when you thought that the financial markets were oversold and you might get a bit of a countertrend or relief rally, it got slammed yesterday. The countertrend rally was what, three days? It did what countered rallies do. It sucked people back into the market and then killed them all over again with a 4 and 5 percent drop in the S&P and Nasdaq respectively. We're in a bear market, folks. Sit tight and let the market do what markets do in bear markets. It's a process and it's going to take time to play out. How long and how far down the market goes is anyone's guess. To all of you 401k watchers out there, stop it. This is no time to get all emotional about your portfolios. It just isn't.
The missus and I will try to get our new lilac plants in the ground today. Rain is in the forecast for this afternoon so that makes the missus very happy. She loves to get her plants in the ground in the Spring before the rain comes along and laments the fact that she's missed the opportunity when rain comes and goes and she never got to plant her plants. Does any of that make any sense? Our tomato plants will have to wait until after Memorial Day to go into the ground. As long as there is an outside chance that we might get frost overnight, the plants will go unplanted. If that means that I'm dragging them in and out of our garage every day and night, so be it. Just so you know, I bring them into the garage at night so they don't get eaten or otherwise destroyed during the overnight hours.
I messaged my brother from another mother yesterday about the precipitous drop in the stock market. I said something about it being a "brutal" day. He never responded. I've messaged him here and there throughout this rout and he's always responded one way or another. He sounded angry on one occasion and I thought his anger was directed at the clowns in charge in Washington, DC. In other words, Joey Biden was responsible for all of the doom and gloom he was seeing day in and day out in his portfolio. I'm not sure how to read his not responding to my message yesterday. If he's lost his sense of humor, that's not a good thing. Keep your chin up, bro! I'm here for you. Better days are ahead.
Maybe today will be a good day to get started cleaning out our garage. I've been putting it off because it's typically a big job. Big jobs take time and more than a little effort so I've wanted to wait until I got a bit of a head of steam up before starting the job. By "head of steam", I'm talking about the kind of momentum you get when you've checked off a few things on your to-do list and each of the tasks you get done is bigger and more satisfying than the previous task you checked off. The big enchilada, of course, is painting the Ev man's room. I'll get to that after I do the garage. It will be the cherry on top. The piece de resistance. The mother of all accomplishments. The biggest of big enchilada's.
I've been seeing more and more posts in my Twitter feed from people like Jeff Bezos and others of his ilk as of late. They are, to a person, going after Joe Biden for his policies on this, that, and the other thing. Most of their vitriol has to do with Biden's economic policies, or his failure to act on things like inflation, which is doing real harm to Bezos's businesses like Amazon, Whole Foods, etc. Bezos is amongst the wokest of the woke so it's notable that he's taking the gloves off when taking the gloves off against the left can attract the crazies like swarms of locusts right out of the Old Testament. And now, Elon Musk says that he'll be voting Republican in the fall. He says that the democrats have become "the party of division and hate." Me thinks we're just waiting for the fat lady to chime in here.
I'm beginning to think a little bit about this coming winter and what it's going to cost to heat our home if oil prices double or triple from where we are today. Even if prices don't go up another nickel, heating oil is now around $5 a gallon and that's nothing to sneeze at. Prices really just started to surge in the last couple of months this past winter so we never felt the full brunt of paying $5 a gallon during the coldest months of the year. Quite frankly, it was more painful watching the prices go up day after day than anything else since we had already filled up our oil tank when prices were in the $2 range. So, where do we go from here and what do we do if prices double or triple?
I suppose we could grin and bear it. Or, we could buy a cord or two of wood and put our wood stove to work instead of turning up the thermostat on those really chilly days and nights. It's been a few years since I've used our wood stove so there's that. There's a lot of work involved in feeding and keeping a wood stove running so there's that too. Our neighbor took down a tree in his yard recently and it looks like he's prepping to burn that wood so maybe we should be thinking about doing the same. The time to order the wood is now so I should look into it sooner rather than later. I think I paid about $250 a cord back in the day so that's probably my low water mark when it comes to pricing. I'm afraid to think about what the high water mark looks like. As a supplemental source of heat, I think one cord should do the trick.
What is this I'm hearing about Bumbling Joey Biden selling out our country's medical sovereignty to the World Health Organization (WHO)? Who the fuck does he think he is? Trump got us out of that god awful organization and when Joey got into office he got us right back into it. We're literally a couple of weeks away from this happening and it's just now coming into focus for the American people thanks to people like Tucker Carlson (FOX) and other media outlets. This has been on the radar of other outlets like Steve Bannon's War Room for a while so he's been doing the Lord's work in getting the news out. This treaty literally cedes our nation's medical rights to a global organization in the event of certain pandemic-like breakouts. And, you guessed it, they decided what does and what doesn't constitute a "pandemic."
I just don't see how this flies knowing what I know about our Constitution. And don't treaties need to be ratified by our Congress? I also don't see states and governors like DeSantis from Florida sitting around waiting for instructions from the WHO if and when a pandemic comes along in his state. And, I don't see the Supreme Court signing off on ceding any part of our sovereignty to an organization external to the United States. Well, at least not as long as the conservatives are in the majority, that is. If this smacks of Joey Biden getting in bed with the Chinese, then it tells us a lot about what we already suspected when it comes to the Biden's and the Communist Chinese Party (CCP.) Oh, and the World Health organization is seen as being a wholly owned subsidiary of the CCP so it's all very incestuous. This baby has to be killed in the crib.
What the fuck is Monkeypox? Is this the next "pandemic" to come down the pike? I've seen the pictures and they are not pretty. It looks a little like measles or smallpox but the pustules are bigger, uglier, and more plentiful. Mortality rates seem to be about one-in-ten or ten percent if my math is correct. Every day I'm reading a new account which involves cases in countries that heretofore had zero cases. How contagious is this Monkeypox thing? How is it transmitted? Do we have the proper drugs or therapies in place to combat large scale breakouts? I hear the Uk has stocked up on this or that drug in anticipation of their country being on the frontlines of the Monkeypox pandemic when, not if, it arrives on their shores. Do I need to ask the obvious question? Where is fucking Joey Biden?
Is it me or does it seem like Joey Biden and his minions don't have the interests of the American people in mind when he and his people are crafting whatever policies they seem to be crafting these days? It actually seems like they are doing what they're doing to harm or impair our country's progress and, worse yet, the dreams and aspirations of our nation's citizenry. How else do you explain the fact that our southern borders are completely open, the fact that we're subject to the dictates of despotic global oil barons when it comes to being able to heat our homes, the fact that he's allowed inflation to take hold in our country which is effectively impoverishing millions of god loving Americans, that he uses the media as his propaganda tool to push his leftist hate and division in order to consolidate political power? And to think that this demented ass clown ran for the presidency on bringing our people's together after four years of Trump.
I hate it when that happens. The financial markets were in for another shitty day yesterday (Friday) and in the last 30-45 minutes leading up to the four o'clock close the Central Banks stepped in and pumped up the market and the market closed almost even for the day. I think it ramped up the Dow some 400 points. The Central Banks simply didn't want John Q Public going into the weekend with a crappy day in the financial markets after suffering a crappy week overall. The main indices here in the US were all down some 3-4% for the week. The S&P actually tipped into bear market territory (-20%) before the ramp up into the close. Why don't they let the markets do what the markets want to do?
I'm all for markets bouncing but not when the Fed tips the scales to achieve a particular outcome. The Fed warned us that raising rates over whatever timeframe was going create some pain for investors. I figured that what I was seeing yesterday in the markets, until they tipped the scales into the close, was just more of the pain that the Fed had promised. The idea, as I understand it, is to lessen demand and thus bring down inflation. With inflation currently at 8.5%, and in many sectors of the economy even more than that, we all know how critical it is to get inflation under control. Quantitative tightening is supposed to start in a week or more and printing less money will help. Raising rates again will also help but it will not help anyone tied into a variable rate loan, etc. Layoffs, bankruptcies, and business closures can't be far behind.
Mrs G is settling in to her post-recovery period pretty well. She is a little upset about this and that schedule that doesn't seem to be coming together as promised and was lamenting just yesterday how she is spending an inordinate amount of time on the phone dealing with these issues. I didn't say so but I was thinking to myself as she was going on and on that it was probably giving her something to do with herself while she was in the process of getting back on her feet again. It's true that she's less mobile these days so that is leaving her, no doubt, feeling cooped up and isolated. The missus and I need to step up our game and get her out of the house to see the sights in and around town as much as possible. Too much introspection is never a good thing so let's do this. That's me talking to myself.
I don't honestly know what she can and can't do physically so it's hard to make plans of any kind. Is she up to taking her walker up and down the aisles of the local liquor store to look for her favorite wine? Is that something she might enjoy? Maybe she can get around using a cane and that would make matters easier for her. Or, maybe she would be perfectly content to sit in the front seat of the car and take in the sights as we drive here and there and God only knows where else. She said something recently about laying off the coffee nips so Walgreen's is probably not going to be the destination of choice as it was just six months ago. That reminds me. Are there things that she does that she might prefer we do for her? You know, shopping, cleaning, banking, going to the recycling center, dropping off dry cleaning, etc.? All things are possible.
Poor Elon Musk. No, really. The guy moves his Tesla headquarters from California to Texas to escape the craziness of everything you can imagine in California. The next thing you know he's making a bid to buy the social media giant, Twitter. Oh, and before I forget, he's tweeting up a storm on Twitter about everything from free speech to blasting Biden and his minions on their inability to get the job done. The next thing you know, he's out there tweeting about voting republican in the mid term elections. That was apparently the straw that broke the camel's back. The left lost their shit when that happened. It wasn't bad enough that Elon took over their social media platform and turned it into a respectable electronic town hall. He's now abandoning the left and that is something they cannot and will not tolerate. Who thinks that the stories we are now hearing about Elon and his sexual shenanigans aren't the product of a vengeful left? They're coming for you, Elon.
Let's keep an eye on the Georgia primary this coming Tuesday. We republicans need to unseat Kemp, at a minimum. But, if not, we need to keep him under fifty percent so Perdue can get him to a runoff. The thinking is that Perdue can beat Kemp in a one-on-one race. That, obviously, remains to be seen. I'm hearing that the votes coming in are up significantly and a lot of those votes are coming from first time voters. That suggests that a lot of those new voters are "MAGA." I'm expecting Herschel Walker to run away, pun intended, with the senatorial primary win. Whatever happens, we republicans need to beat that cow, Stacy Abrams, come November. While we're at it, we need to send pastor Warlock packing along with any number of other democrats who currently hold congressional seats in Georgia. It sounds like a heavy lift, and it surely is where Abrams is concerned, but the wind is at our backs thanks to bumbling Joe and his cast of cretins in Washington. America has had a bellyful.
The Ev man is in the house! Oh, and let's give a shout out to Carli in the Falls! She graduated yesterday from Skidmore College in Saratoga, New York. That's what we're talkin' bout, girl! The world is your oyster! Despite her stated desire to dabble in a career in forensics, me thinks her real love is working with animals. Anyway, she has plenty of time to sort all of that out. As for the Ev man, he's back in the house after a two week hiatus due to his having survived Covid-19. I wasn't ready for the fist bump he was offering when he came through the door a few minutes ago so I hope he doesn't take it personally. We'll have plenty of time for fist bumps. He looks and sounds good and he seems to be in excellent spirits. That might be the caffeine talking but so be it. All is good in Ev-man land. When he's good, we're good. It's that simple.
Some loon went into a supermarket in Buffalo, New York over the weekend and killed a bunch of people. He was white and most of his victims were black so the media is playing the whole white supremacist thing to the hilt. They are dragging social media into their dystopian hysterics for their part in radicalizing this killer. Make no mistake about it, the social media part is all about indicting Elon Musk and his buyout of Twitter which is the left's go-to application for their army of nitwits and influencers. Now that Elon is in charge, and now that he's opening the doors to millions of more reasonable voices on the platform, it's time for the left to "level" the playing field once again by shutting down free speech since it doesn't conform to their idea of "free speech."
Who was it who once said, "Never let a crisis go to waste?" It really is just shameless how the democrats never miss a chance to politicize these types of events. It's all about whipping up sentiment in this or that community in order to create a constituency around a topic that is near and dear to their hearts like gun control, abortion, etc. Put more simply, without an energized citizenry willing to get out and vote in local or national elections, they lose political power which is the lifeblood of the democrat party. To the extent that these types of events help them achieve their goals, it pains me to say it but I think they welcome them with open arms. The ends justify the means.
This is one of those days where I'm chomping at the bit to get to the end of the day so I can see who will win this and that primary election. I don't really have any horses in any of the races so I'm just more curious than not about how they are going to turn out. If Trump's pick's win, that's fine. If they don't, that's fine too. I'm not in the camp that says that if his picks don't win he's toast come 2024. I am in the camp that says the more wins he has the better his chances are of winning in 2024. I do hope that Pennsylvania comes to their senses and votes in republican governors and senators in November although I'm not sure which candidate(s) would be best positioned to do that against the democrats.
If the Oz guy pulls this one out tonight in Pennsylvania, it will give us a little more insight into what it means to be endorsed by Trump. It will tell us that the J.D. Vance thing wasn't a lark since J.D. came from the back of the pack after being endorsed by Trump to the front of the pack and ultimately won the primary in Ohio. Oz is not currently at the back of the pack and, by all reports, he's running ahead ever so slightly of both McCormick and Cathy Barnett. Did I mention that the leading democrat in the Pennsylvania senatorial primary had a stroke a few days back? They say it won't dampen his prospects so we'll see if that holds true as the votes come in tonight. He'll still be in the hospital when all the votes are tallied at the end of the day.
I did such a nice job cleaning up all the deck furniture this Spring. That said, I might have been a little too hasty in putting it all together because the glass table top needs a good cleaning. I shouldn't have assembled everything until I got that done. That might be a good project for today since I'll want to busy myself with this or that task until I get to break out the popcorn later this evening to watch the votes come in. I've also got some staining to do so that's on the list as is cleaning the garage. I tend to drag my feet on the more demanding tasks but, as I've learned over time, that only makes it more difficult when all is said and done. That reminds me. I need to paint the Ev man's room. Well, the spare room that he calls home when he's home anyway.
It's looking like we're going to have a dandy day here on the coast weather-wise. It's totally sunny and the temperatures should get to the low seventies which is just ideal this time of year. Add low humidity to the mix, and we are off and running. I'll see if I can't get in a good bike ride and maybe a little nap too if the good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise. The nap should take a bit of the edge off of any anxiety I might have as a result of my wanting this election thing to come to pass. When you know yourself well enough to know what you're going to do from time to time based on this or that external event, it makes for more reliable outcomes. More reliable outcomes makes for fewer surprises.
The Ev man is doing better now that he's a week or more into his bout with Covid. It wasn't a big deal so that's a relief. He keeps taking the test every day with the hopes that the lines indicating a positive test on the testing strip will sooner or later fade away to nothing. They're not gone completely so we're all wondering if his is the one case where the lines never go away or maybe go away after an extended period of time. He's been out and about in the community after the five or so days recommended by the CDC although he's done a pretty good job of masking up in order to minimize any unnecessary contact/spread. He's been nothing if not responsible during his sickness so kudos to him. You done good, Ev man.
Here we are the morning after the election and the Oz and McCormick thing has yet to be settled. Madison Cawthorn got the boot in North Carolina and another of Trump's picks went down defeat in Indiana. I'm looking at the map of Pennsylvania and who won what counties and Oz doesn't seem to have a lot of strength in the areas that he'll need to win in November if he's going to take the senate seat in the race against the democrat, Fetterman. I'm referring to the more rural counties in Pennsylvania which ran up the votes in 2016 to give Trump the win. Maybe they have some affection for McCormick that I'm unaware of that put him over the top in those counties. If Oz does prevail, he has his work cut out for him. Barnett garnered some 23% of the vote which, if I'm not mistaken, is somewhat less than most people thought she might get.
Who does and who doesn't have bragging rights this morning? I wish I knew a little more about turnout in past senatorial races so I'd have a better idea as to whether or not one party or the other has the upper hand in terms of voter enthusiasm. This stroked out Fetterman guy who is a big Bernie Sanders lefty sure got a lot of votes for someone who spent election night in the hospital getting a pacemaker implanted in his chest. Just when I thought the progressives were down for the count, this guy pulls one out of the hat for his team. I guess that's a good thing if come November the middle-of-the-road citizenry decides that what the progressives like Fetterman are selling is just a bridge too far. I have to be careful here since the same might be said for Mastriano, the republican gubenatorial winner. He might be trumpier than Trump.
I feel pretty good about the fact that I got most of what I wanted to do yesterday done with time to spare. I pushed myself but the tasks that I had assigned to myself required a little pushing so that worked out well. I got the painting done that I wanted to do; I cleaned certain gutters; I washed the glass table top for the table on our patio; and I got my bike ride in. Did I mention that the missus and I went to Whole Foods in the evening where we bought a couple of lilac bushes? The joint was not that busy and I continue to think that if traffic doesn't pick up there I think we're going to see them close up shop. When I think of all the fresh food that goes to waste in that store because of the lack of patronage it's just a little distressing.
The republican gubernatorial winner in Pennsylvania last night, Mastriano, gave an interesting victory speech. He made a few what I would call off-colored remarks about Rachel Levine, the transexual, who now works in the Biden Administration. He's a bit of a laughingstock, I'll admit, so I got a bit of a chuckle out of Mastriano's comments. Levine is almost a caricature of himself running around our nation's capitol wearing a dress and eyeliner but making disparaging remarks about someone's sexual preferences or predilections these days seems, even for someone as trumpy as Mastriano, a bit of a reach. It was hard to tell how it went over at Mariano's headquarters so there's that. Maybe it was just Mastriano being Mastriano. And, yes, he's Trump-endorsed.
Mastriano made a few promises during his victory speech that sounded interesting. He said something about no more lockdowns. He said something about reinstating members of Pennsylvania's National Guard who had been fired because they refused to get the jab. He promised that only biological females will play female sports and bathrooms across the state will be utilized based on biology and not what users think they might feel like on any particular day of the week. Oh, and he said there will be no CRT in schools on his watch. He also said something about Pennsylvania becoming once again a major producer of energy that it once was under Trump before Biden stepped into the fray and fucked things up. Those are my words, not his. Sounds like a winning hand. No?
Just when you thought that the financial markets were oversold and you might get a bit of a countertrend or relief rally, it got slammed yesterday. The countertrend rally was what, three days? It did what countered rallies do. It sucked people back into the market and then killed them all over again with a 4 and 5 percent drop in the S&P and Nasdaq respectively. We're in a bear market, folks. Sit tight and let the market do what markets do in bear markets. It's a process and it's going to take time to play out. How long and how far down the market goes is anyone's guess. To all of you 401k watchers out there, stop it. This is no time to get all emotional about your portfolios. It just isn't.
The missus and I will try to get our new lilac plants in the ground today. Rain is in the forecast for this afternoon so that makes the missus very happy. She loves to get her plants in the ground in the Spring before the rain comes along and laments the fact that she's missed the opportunity when rain comes and goes and she never got to plant her plants. Does any of that make any sense? Our tomato plants will have to wait until after Memorial Day to go into the ground. As long as there is an outside chance that we might get frost overnight, the plants will go unplanted. If that means that I'm dragging them in and out of our garage every day and night, so be it. Just so you know, I bring them into the garage at night so they don't get eaten or otherwise destroyed during the overnight hours.
I messaged my brother from another mother yesterday about the precipitous drop in the stock market. I said something about it being a "brutal" day. He never responded. I've messaged him here and there throughout this rout and he's always responded one way or another. He sounded angry on one occasion and I thought his anger was directed at the clowns in charge in Washington, DC. In other words, Joey Biden was responsible for all of the doom and gloom he was seeing day in and day out in his portfolio. I'm not sure how to read his not responding to my message yesterday. If he's lost his sense of humor, that's not a good thing. Keep your chin up, bro! I'm here for you. Better days are ahead.
Maybe today will be a good day to get started cleaning out our garage. I've been putting it off because it's typically a big job. Big jobs take time and more than a little effort so I've wanted to wait until I got a bit of a head of steam up before starting the job. By "head of steam", I'm talking about the kind of momentum you get when you've checked off a few things on your to-do list and each of the tasks you get done is bigger and more satisfying than the previous task you checked off. The big enchilada, of course, is painting the Ev man's room. I'll get to that after I do the garage. It will be the cherry on top. The piece de resistance. The mother of all accomplishments. The biggest of big enchilada's.
I've been seeing more and more posts in my Twitter feed from people like Jeff Bezos and others of his ilk as of late. They are, to a person, going after Joe Biden for his policies on this, that, and the other thing. Most of their vitriol has to do with Biden's economic policies, or his failure to act on things like inflation, which is doing real harm to Bezos's businesses like Amazon, Whole Foods, etc. Bezos is amongst the wokest of the woke so it's notable that he's taking the gloves off when taking the gloves off against the left can attract the crazies like swarms of locusts right out of the Old Testament. And now, Elon Musk says that he'll be voting Republican in the fall. He says that the democrats have become "the party of division and hate." Me thinks we're just waiting for the fat lady to chime in here.
I'm beginning to think a little bit about this coming winter and what it's going to cost to heat our home if oil prices double or triple from where we are today. Even if prices don't go up another nickel, heating oil is now around $5 a gallon and that's nothing to sneeze at. Prices really just started to surge in the last couple of months this past winter so we never felt the full brunt of paying $5 a gallon during the coldest months of the year. Quite frankly, it was more painful watching the prices go up day after day than anything else since we had already filled up our oil tank when prices were in the $2 range. So, where do we go from here and what do we do if prices double or triple?
I suppose we could grin and bear it. Or, we could buy a cord or two of wood and put our wood stove to work instead of turning up the thermostat on those really chilly days and nights. It's been a few years since I've used our wood stove so there's that. There's a lot of work involved in feeding and keeping a wood stove running so there's that too. Our neighbor took down a tree in his yard recently and it looks like he's prepping to burn that wood so maybe we should be thinking about doing the same. The time to order the wood is now so I should look into it sooner rather than later. I think I paid about $250 a cord back in the day so that's probably my low water mark when it comes to pricing. I'm afraid to think about what the high water mark looks like. As a supplemental source of heat, I think one cord should do the trick.
What is this I'm hearing about Bumbling Joey Biden selling out our country's medical sovereignty to the World Health Organization (WHO)? Who the fuck does he think he is? Trump got us out of that god awful organization and when Joey got into office he got us right back into it. We're literally a couple of weeks away from this happening and it's just now coming into focus for the American people thanks to people like Tucker Carlson (FOX) and other media outlets. This has been on the radar of other outlets like Steve Bannon's War Room for a while so he's been doing the Lord's work in getting the news out. This treaty literally cedes our nation's medical rights to a global organization in the event of certain pandemic-like breakouts. And, you guessed it, they decided what does and what doesn't constitute a "pandemic."
I just don't see how this flies knowing what I know about our Constitution. And don't treaties need to be ratified by our Congress? I also don't see states and governors like DeSantis from Florida sitting around waiting for instructions from the WHO if and when a pandemic comes along in his state. And, I don't see the Supreme Court signing off on ceding any part of our sovereignty to an organization external to the United States. Well, at least not as long as the conservatives are in the majority, that is. If this smacks of Joey Biden getting in bed with the Chinese, then it tells us a lot about what we already suspected when it comes to the Biden's and the Communist Chinese Party (CCP.) Oh, and the World Health organization is seen as being a wholly owned subsidiary of the CCP so it's all very incestuous. This baby has to be killed in the crib.
What the fuck is Monkeypox? Is this the next "pandemic" to come down the pike? I've seen the pictures and they are not pretty. It looks a little like measles or smallpox but the pustules are bigger, uglier, and more plentiful. Mortality rates seem to be about one-in-ten or ten percent if my math is correct. Every day I'm reading a new account which involves cases in countries that heretofore had zero cases. How contagious is this Monkeypox thing? How is it transmitted? Do we have the proper drugs or therapies in place to combat large scale breakouts? I hear the Uk has stocked up on this or that drug in anticipation of their country being on the frontlines of the Monkeypox pandemic when, not if, it arrives on their shores. Do I need to ask the obvious question? Where is fucking Joey Biden?
Is it me or does it seem like Joey Biden and his minions don't have the interests of the American people in mind when he and his people are crafting whatever policies they seem to be crafting these days? It actually seems like they are doing what they're doing to harm or impair our country's progress and, worse yet, the dreams and aspirations of our nation's citizenry. How else do you explain the fact that our southern borders are completely open, the fact that we're subject to the dictates of despotic global oil barons when it comes to being able to heat our homes, the fact that he's allowed inflation to take hold in our country which is effectively impoverishing millions of god loving Americans, that he uses the media as his propaganda tool to push his leftist hate and division in order to consolidate political power? And to think that this demented ass clown ran for the presidency on bringing our people's together after four years of Trump.
I hate it when that happens. The financial markets were in for another shitty day yesterday (Friday) and in the last 30-45 minutes leading up to the four o'clock close the Central Banks stepped in and pumped up the market and the market closed almost even for the day. I think it ramped up the Dow some 400 points. The Central Banks simply didn't want John Q Public going into the weekend with a crappy day in the financial markets after suffering a crappy week overall. The main indices here in the US were all down some 3-4% for the week. The S&P actually tipped into bear market territory (-20%) before the ramp up into the close. Why don't they let the markets do what the markets want to do?
I'm all for markets bouncing but not when the Fed tips the scales to achieve a particular outcome. The Fed warned us that raising rates over whatever timeframe was going create some pain for investors. I figured that what I was seeing yesterday in the markets, until they tipped the scales into the close, was just more of the pain that the Fed had promised. The idea, as I understand it, is to lessen demand and thus bring down inflation. With inflation currently at 8.5%, and in many sectors of the economy even more than that, we all know how critical it is to get inflation under control. Quantitative tightening is supposed to start in a week or more and printing less money will help. Raising rates again will also help but it will not help anyone tied into a variable rate loan, etc. Layoffs, bankruptcies, and business closures can't be far behind.
Mrs G is settling in to her post-recovery period pretty well. She is a little upset about this and that schedule that doesn't seem to be coming together as promised and was lamenting just yesterday how she is spending an inordinate amount of time on the phone dealing with these issues. I didn't say so but I was thinking to myself as she was going on and on that it was probably giving her something to do with herself while she was in the process of getting back on her feet again. It's true that she's less mobile these days so that is leaving her, no doubt, feeling cooped up and isolated. The missus and I need to step up our game and get her out of the house to see the sights in and around town as much as possible. Too much introspection is never a good thing so let's do this. That's me talking to myself.
I don't honestly know what she can and can't do physically so it's hard to make plans of any kind. Is she up to taking her walker up and down the aisles of the local liquor store to look for her favorite wine? Is that something she might enjoy? Maybe she can get around using a cane and that would make matters easier for her. Or, maybe she would be perfectly content to sit in the front seat of the car and take in the sights as we drive here and there and God only knows where else. She said something recently about laying off the coffee nips so Walgreen's is probably not going to be the destination of choice as it was just six months ago. That reminds me. Are there things that she does that she might prefer we do for her? You know, shopping, cleaning, banking, going to the recycling center, dropping off dry cleaning, etc.? All things are possible.
Poor Elon Musk. No, really. The guy moves his Tesla headquarters from California to Texas to escape the craziness of everything you can imagine in California. The next thing you know he's making a bid to buy the social media giant, Twitter. Oh, and before I forget, he's tweeting up a storm on Twitter about everything from free speech to blasting Biden and his minions on their inability to get the job done. The next thing you know, he's out there tweeting about voting republican in the mid term elections. That was apparently the straw that broke the camel's back. The left lost their shit when that happened. It wasn't bad enough that Elon took over their social media platform and turned it into a respectable electronic town hall. He's now abandoning the left and that is something they cannot and will not tolerate. Who thinks that the stories we are now hearing about Elon and his sexual shenanigans aren't the product of a vengeful left? They're coming for you, Elon.
Let's keep an eye on the Georgia primary this coming Tuesday. We republicans need to unseat Kemp, at a minimum. But, if not, we need to keep him under fifty percent so Perdue can get him to a runoff. The thinking is that Perdue can beat Kemp in a one-on-one race. That, obviously, remains to be seen. I'm hearing that the votes coming in are up significantly and a lot of those votes are coming from first time voters. That suggests that a lot of those new voters are "MAGA." I'm expecting Herschel Walker to run away, pun intended, with the senatorial primary win. Whatever happens, we republicans need to beat that cow, Stacy Abrams, come November. While we're at it, we need to send pastor Warlock packing along with any number of other democrats who currently hold congressional seats in Georgia. It sounds like a heavy lift, and it surely is where Abrams is concerned, but the wind is at our backs thanks to bumbling Joe and his cast of cretins in Washington. America has had a bellyful.
The Ev man is in the house! Oh, and let's give a shout out to Carli in the Falls! She graduated yesterday from Skidmore College in Saratoga, New York. That's what we're talkin' bout, girl! The world is your oyster! Despite her stated desire to dabble in a career in forensics, me thinks her real love is working with animals. Anyway, she has plenty of time to sort all of that out. As for the Ev man, he's back in the house after a two week hiatus due to his having survived Covid-19. I wasn't ready for the fist bump he was offering when he came through the door a few minutes ago so I hope he doesn't take it personally. We'll have plenty of time for fist bumps. He looks and sounds good and he seems to be in excellent spirits. That might be the caffeine talking but so be it. All is good in Ev-man land. When he's good, we're good. It's that simple.
Just Sayin'
15/05/22 07:09
It's a chilly one out there this morning. I checked the thermometer and it's 34 degrees at 6 in the morning here on the seacoast. Good thing I haven't put my tomato plants in the ground. I haven't even bought them yet so no worries there. I have to be careful not to wait until Memorial Day weekend to go looking for the plants that I want. They will be picked over and I'll no doubt end up with the runts off the litter with my luck. I think I'll drop by Home Depot or Lowes today just to have a look-see at the stock available. I might even snag a couple of plants if the snagging looks good. You know what I mean.
I noticed the other day that diesel gasoline is now something like $6 a gallon. I'm thinking that the folks running their rigs down the highway and the commercial enterprises operating their fleets of vehicles these days are spending big bucks on gas. I don't know what trucking budgeting looks like but this has to be a big problem when it comes to paying the bills and staying competitive. Is it possible that the end-game here is to put these owner-operator vehicles out of business? Does the fact that Bill Gates of Microsoft fame has been buying up farmland across our great country have anything to do with any of this? Just in case you were wondering why you're paying more for every product under the sun, now you know. It's likely to get worse before it gets better.
I woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night the other night when I came to the realization that I had been out to one of our favorite coffee joints earlier in the day and I left the place with coffee and scone in hand but I hadn't paid. This is the second time that something like this has happened and it was no less startling to me when it happened the second time around. Startling in the sense that I'm somehow mindlessly and subconsciously syncing up to the activity on my iPhone in the middle of the night without the usual user inputs that one engages with when checking one's transactions. Sure enough, I checked my iPhone and confirmed that I had indeed not paid for the purchases. Holy cow!
I'm now left with the very real prospect of returning to said establishment and fessing up to my "oversight" with the owner. It may be sufficient to simply say the obvious part out loud. It might well leaving her scratching her head as to how me or any customer could end up doing what I did. That is to say, making a purchase and end up walking out the door with those purchases in hand but never tendering payment. I don't know that I know her well enough to share the "waking up in the middle of the night" nonsense but I might well straddle the edges of that conversation if no other reason that to show that I had the best of intentions but I somehow fell short of the mark. For all I know, she also found out after the fact that I hadn't paid and is, even as I sit here this morning, formulating her own response.
She may decide that rather than accuse me of whatever you call walking out of a business with a scone and a coffee without paying, that she's better off not broaching the subject at all. It's better to let bygones be bygones and maybe she can take a lesson from the experience without alienating a customer who, while not a frequent customer, does come in on occasion and spends a little money and even leaves a tip on occasion. Guilty as charged, your honor. I'll have to beat her to the punch. Knowing what I know about small businesses and tight margins, I'll not have her bottom line suffering because a guy like me decided that saying nothing was better than saying something. There's something to be said for doing the right thing especially when no one is the wiser.
We had Mrs G out for a ride the day before Mother's Day. We took her down by the ocean to all of her favorite haunts where she had a chance to see things that she hadn't seen for a while. Some things had changed for the better and some for the worse. She loved looking out over the expanse of the ocean and remarked on the whitecaps which were numerous and willy nilly as far as the eye could see. Listening to her talk about the things that caught her attention told me, or maybe reminded me, of the things she used to love to do when she and her husband lived along the coast for some 25 years. Our goal was to travel the same roads she traveled, see the same things she likely saw, and do the same things she likely did back in the day. All she had to do was to sit back and enjoy the scenery. It was a ride for the ages.
Mrs G will be heading home today after a few weeks of rehabilitation in the wake of her accident. To say that she's looking forward to being home again is an understatement. To say that she's chomping at the bit to get back home might be a bridge too far. She's not quite up to snuff just yet but well enough certainly to get out of rehab and back to her own apartment where she can continue her recovery. I've always thought that the facility could have done a better job of preparing her mentally for resuming her life once out of rehab. As it is, she is a bit apprehensive about being up to the task of going it alone after weeks of hand holding and being waited on hand and foot. The perks of being in rehab will soon be in the rear view mirror but I'm certain Mrs G will be just fine. I don't think she knows the meaning of the word "failure."
Speaking of rehab, did I mention that the Ev man has Covid-19? And, no, he's not in rehab. It started out with a few unusual aches and pains but never progressed much beyond that. He never developed any respiratory related issues which is a good thing. He always sounded ok when we spoke to him on the phone but admitted to feeling a bit fatigued here and there and he was sleeping more than usual. He never lost his sense of taste or smell and his appetite was holding up reasonably well. The missus and I dropped off some groceries for him the other day and we'll probably do another drop later today so he can stay hunkered down until his self imposed quarantine period is over. This is playing out as I suspected it would. He never got the vaccination due to his being young and more than capable of fighting it off if and when he got the virus so here we are. He's on the mend and he'll have an ample store of antibodies for future reference. Long Covid aside, that's how you do it.
It was another rocky day in the financial markets yesterday. Everything, and I mean everything, was down. That's how it works. When they finally come for everything, every asset class under the sun is in play. I'm not sure that we're in the "coming for everything" mode just yet, but we seem to heading in that direction. The selling was relentless and there were but one or two moments during the sell-off when it looked like buyers were attempting to step in only to see the selling start up again in earnest. The NASDAQ was down over 4% and the S&P down over 3% for the day. That has the NASDAQ down some 28% on a YTD basis and the S&P down some 17.5%. I saw one tweet that went as follows: "Good morning to anyone with anything left in their 401k's." With interest rates rising, this could well be the beginning of the end for the housing market as well. Like I said, every asset class under the sun. Nothing will be exempt.
There are primaries in Nebraska and West Virginia today so that should be fun. We'll see if Trump's unbeaten streak of endorsements can continue. He's 55-0 thus far so let's see if his congressional and gubernatorial candidates can get over the finish line. Nebraska is a couple of time zones behind us here on the East Coast so I'm not sure if I'll be awake to see how that one turns out. Trump was in Nebraska within the last two weeks holding a rally for his candidates there so that can't hurt. Senator Joe Manchin and the Governor of West Virginia have endorsed the other republican in the race so we'll see who the real 800-lb gorilla in the race is when all is said and done. I'm not a betting man but my money is on Trump's candidate for what it's worth. Git er done!
I'm getting little tired of hearing about our country sending billions and billions of this and that to war-torn Ukraine. We've got a damn 30-something trillion dollar deficit to begin with so suffice it to say we can't afford to be sending money to anyone much less a country in which we have zero security interest in. You know those monies are ending up in the pockets of billionaires and other fat cats who couldn't care less about the long term prospects of Ukraine. Does Ukraine even have a sustainable infrastructure anymore after months of indiscriminate bombardments by Russia? Truth be told, this is looking more and more like a proxy war between the US and Russia with each passing day. All this while the Europeans sit back and let the US shoulder the brunt of the expense of the war on their continent. They're no fools. This is not their first rodeo and it won't be their last.
You have to ask yourselves, why would the United States and the Biden Administration have any interest in waging a war of any kind with Russia? Does Biden think that getting into a war with Russia will help his flagging approval ratings? Is there anyone you know, aside from these ass clowns in the Biden Administration, who want to run the risk of getting into a nuclear war with a country that has enough nuclear warheads to destroy our country several times over? Whatever the motivation, none of we mere mortals on the outside looking in have a clue as to where we're going with all of this. I'm assuming that the military industrial complex could not be happier. They've never met a war that they didn't love. With ten percent off the top for the big guy, and I'm not sure that hasn't changed with inflation, the Biden Crime Family is making hay while the sun shines. The Biden Crime Family has always made hay while the sun was shining. When the sun stops shining, they'll be in the bunker beneath the White House and we'll be none the wiser because we'll all be dead. Bastards.
The big news today on the economic front will be the monthly CPI number which is a measure of this and that basket of goods which tells us where inflation rates are heading. My Twitter feed is blowing up this morning ahead of the release of the CPI number with this and that prognostication and what it all means for the stock market. Is this the beginning of the end for the skyrocketing inflation that we've seen? A slowing of the rate might be just what the financial markets need to bounce back from an otherwise seriously oversold condition. Then, there are others who are not quite as optimistic. I don't have a horse in the race one way or another but I know people who do so I'll be hoping that this is where the markets bottom and start their slow drift northwards.
I heard something recently about the "destruction of the middle class" as it relates to everything that seems to be blowing up around us. In what universe is the destruction of the middle class here in America a good thing? Is it all about making us more and more dependent on government? If we can no longer afford to put gas in our cars or food on our tables because everything has become over-the-top expensive then that might well create the existential crisis they need to get this done. The Federal Reserve, known more affectionally as the "Fed", has always had our back as middle class investors. When times got tough we got another injection from the Fed of quantitative easing (QE) to grease the skids and soften the landing. The Fed now seems impotent to offer any relief to the markets in the way of additional QE because of the fear of further increasing inflation. Maybe there's something to this 'destruction of the middle class' thing.
One of my neighbors commented a few months ago that the fella who comes up from Florida every summer to spend the summer with her was worried about what he was seeing in the stock market. It was the classic example of what everyday Americans are faced with when you have nowhere to go but the stock market since it's the only game in town. If you have your money in a bank, you're getting close to zero interest. That's just not tenable for a retiree who relies on growth in his or her portfolio to pay the bills and feather their nest for their remaining days. I don't pretend to know what he was invested in but the average stock in the NASDAQ is now down some 50% or more. Did I mention that he drives a truck that burns diesel gas? The poor guy has to be feeling the crunch. If I told you that I've seen this very same fella recently and he's walking a little slower, holding his head a little less high, and hunching over a little more than I recall from past years, would you believe me?
Is it me or are we hearing about more and more cases of labor unions getting a foothold in well established businesses these days? Recent cases in the news include Starbuck's and Amazon. I have no use for unions and I believe all the stories I've heard over the years which portray them as parasitic enterprises which can suck the very lifeblood out of a business if left to their own devices. You know that unions are "owned" lock, stock, and barrel by the democrat party. Right? If what I'm hearing about Starbuck's and Amazon resisting these efforts to unionize their shops, I say good for them. Resist them with every fibre of your being and spare no expense in ousting them from your organization. Tear them out root and branch as they say. The employees who want to swear allegiance to the unions can go find employment elsewhere. The fortunes of any organization should rise or fall on the merits of their own teams and, should those teams not perform, then they deserve to fail. If push comes to shove, close the damn shop and open another around the corner. See how that works?
I filled up at the local petrol station in town yesterday and I paid $5.09 a gallon. It was the first time in my life that I've paid that much for a gallon of gas. This fucking Biden Administration has got to go. I was paying maybe $2 a gallon when The Donald was in office in 2020. And this morning, I'm reading articles where the Biden Administration is making it even more difficult for domestic companies to get oil out of the ground here in the United States. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. Add to it the shortage of baby formula that mothers and caretakers are having difficulty finding and we have ourselves a fucking catastrophe in the making, You can bet your sweet arse that the babies of illegal aliens coming across our southern border in the tens of thousands are not going without baby formula. Oh, no. Not on Biden's watch. That would be inhumane.
It gets worse. I was listening to this one fella tell the story about how he and his wife had been ordering baby formula from overseas due to the shortage of formula here in the states. Their last two orders had been confiscated at the border by agents working for the the US Agriculture Department. So, Biden is not only working to cut off the supply of baby formula here in our country, but he's now preventing our citizens from procurring supplies from other countries. Can that bastard be any more spiteful? When Trump was not commandeering domestic companies to manufacture supplies like masks when we were deep into the Covid bullshit, Biden used it as a cudgel to beat Trump like a rented mule. Where is Biden now that the mothers in our country are desperate to feed their children. He's nowhere to be fucking found.
Oh, and about that CPI (Inflation) number that I referred to a couple of paragraphs back. It came in hot but you would never know it reading certain articles or headlines in the newspapers and online. The liberal media was desperate to put a positive spin on a shitty result just to help their buddy, Joey Bumbles Biden, in the White House. Or, should I say, in OUR White House. When I say that it came in hot, I mean that it came in worse than expected. That's not what these liberal rags wanted the public at large to see. They needed to put lipstick on this pig and that is precisely what they did. I was so disgusted by the misleading headlines that I couldn't bring myself to read the articles themselves. The financial markets started off in the green but quickly turned beet red once the facts were out in the open. It was yet another shitty day in the markets. Buddy, can you spare a dime?
We've seen so many down days these last few weeks in the stock market that I think I can actually tell when the stock market is up or down by the amount of traffic on the roads. Maybe it's my imagination. That said, it does seem busier out and about when the stock market is up for the day and it seems less busy on the roads when the market is down for or during the day. I know it's a shaky hypothesis but it's one that seems to be true based on my observations. That's objective, right? It's not some wild-eyed theory of mine that I'm just putting down on paper for the heck of it. Well, there is that. In a roundabout way, its symptomatic of the wealth effect that you get when you have a surging stock market. When you start to cut into that wealth effect with endless days of red ink in the stock market, people start spending less, going out less, and it becomes a vicious cycle. If you're looking at something like consumer confidence, you're likely to not like the resulting trend line.
They have yet to find this person who leaked the draft of the Roe v Wade decision a few weeks back. The case is not actually Roe v Wade just so you know. Was it a conservative who wanted to blunt the effect of the decision once it comes out closer to the elections in November? Was it a lefty who wanted to rally their base early on to see if they couldn't get one or two justices to change their minds and vote against the decision when it was finally released? That aside, the lying and hyperbole from the left is beyond the pale. Who knew? Oh, the next thing the Court will be coming for is our rights to have interracial marriage! They're coming for our rights to have same-sex marriage! The blather, the lies, and the deceit by the left is just over the top. Whatever it takes to radicalize their base. Not that they aren't radical to begin with but you can never be too radical as a leftist. You know, I'm talking about the clowns with the Molotov cocktails and the pink hats. Yeah, them.
Every once in a while you hear someone talking about breaking up our country into states based on the politics of their citizenry. The liberals can all move to the blue states and the conservatives can all move to the red states. We already know which states are which although there are some states that switch back and forth from time to time. You have to admit, that would make for an interesting experiment. What would we do with people in the middle? You know, the independents. Would that further polarize our peoples or would that make for a more enduring democracy? Is it just human nature to have differences within populations of any species? Some people prefer chocolate ice cream and some people prefer vanilla ice cream. I don't know where I'm going with all of this. Maybe it would be a dreadful bore were I to be surrounded with people who always agree with me. I'm thinking I should be careful what I wish for. Maybe that light at the end of the tunnel coming in my direction is a locomotive. Feets don't fail me now!
The missus and I went shopping at Whole Foods yesterday. We didn't need anything in particular. It was something to do on a Thursday afternoon when we had nothing better to do. You figure if you look around long enough you'll find something that you didn't know you needed. The minute we pulled into their parking lot we were quite surprised at how few cars there were in the lot. Whole Foods is not an inexpensive place to shop so we wondered if the pissy stock market as of late had anything to do with the scarcity of shoppers. How else could you explain what we were seeing? It wasn't that much of a reach to see this place shuttering their doors if the economy/stock market worsens any more appreciably than it already has. This is part and parcel of the wealth effect that I've referred to here and there. The good news was that we had a better all around shopping experience thanks to the fact that there so few people in the store. You know how the missus hates crowds.
We picked up a caesar salad for the Ev man at Whole Foods. He's had Covid for the last week or so but he'll likely be looking to get out and about now that he's feeling better. We'll be prepared if he stops by. I'm not sure how I feel about his coming over so soon after having Covid. The missus says that you can test positive for a long time after contracting the virus even though you've survived the five day quarantine period recommended by the CDC. Are we tempting fate to have him come over so soon? Will his salad go bad between now and the time it takes him to stop by? I decided not to buy a latte while in Whole Foods since I could just as easily have one at home. Maybe that's my way of watching my pennies. I'm just as happy these days with a poor man's latte which is three quarters of a cup of cold brew and a splash of cold milk. I don't need any stinking' ice either. De-Lish!
My peeps back in the Falls celebrated my seester's birthday this past weekend. I couldn't make it so my brother from another mother was good enough to send me a few pictures. One picture in particular was quite nice. Everyone was smiling and it was nice to see the people in the picture all together in one place, on one day, and posing as they were for the picture. It was one of those pictures the likes of which once you see it you can't imagine it not framed and hanging on a wall for all of eternity. It was something that I immediately wanted for my seester since, after all, it was a picture of her and her children. Did I mention that? Maybe it's the gift that I was meant to give to my seester but could only do so after the fact since I was not otherwise in attendance. The Lord works in mysterious ways. Whatever. The missus liked the idea of the frame and all but we disagreed on how much to spend on getting it all done. "Can you put a price on what we're trying to do here", I queried incredulously. You can see where all of this is going. Let me spell it out. N-o-w-h-e-r-e.
The Pennsylvania primary is next Tuesday. On the republican side of the ledger, we have three candidates: Dr Oz, Cathy Barnett, and a guy named McCormick. Oz and McCormick have spent some 50 million between them thus far while Barnett is operating on a shoestring budget. Oddly enough, Barnett is polling even with her two opponents. The other odd thing about Barnett is that nobody knows much about her. She's been vague to say the least about her past experience and that has a lot of people thinking that she's a wolf in sheep's clothing or maybe a Trojan horse or worse. They say that she can't possible beat her democratic opponent in the general election so it would be a mistake for people to vote for her in the primary next Tuesday. Trump has endorsed Oz so maybe Oz gets the bid at the end of the day. We conservatives need that damn senate seat so let's not fuck this up, folks. We can't take back the senate in November without the seat. I'm not sure what the right answer is but I think Barnett could fuck it all up with a win. For better or worse, that's what I'm thinking this morning.
It does make you wonder if Biden and his cast of cretins occupying our White House are actually creating the problems that they now profess to want to fix. We're talking baby formula here. I'm learning that one of Biden's henchmen in one or more of his departments went in and closed down the company (Abbot) that makes most of the baby formula for our nation's children. I'm sure it was done using some flimsy pretext in order to shut down the factory and, in the process, create a crisis where a crisis heretofore did not exist. It would result in hordes of Americans moms looking to the Biden Administration for relief in what could only be described as an untenable situation. No one in the Biden Administration counted on pictures and stories getting out about the pallets of baby formula being delivered to our southern border to feed the infants of illegal aliens. Investigations are, no doubt, underway by Biden's Justice Department into who leaked what and when.
Joey was likely planning to take a victory lap in the Rose Garden while announcing that he was enacting the Defense Production Act in order to put our country's factories back to work producing the very infant formula that he and his people acted in concert to stop producing. He would surround himself with smiling moms and dads all on hand to sing Uncle Joey's praises for his courage and his commitment to our nation's families in their time of need. With any luck, this act of beneficence on the part of our fearless leader would unlikely be forgotten by the time the Midterm elections rolled around and that was the plan. If any of this were true, it would be music to the ears of moms and dads coast to coast. Unfortunately, the only words coming out of the White House are, and I quote, "Contact your physician if you can't find formula for your children." No Spanish translation will be forthcoming (nor is it necessary.)
I noticed the other day that diesel gasoline is now something like $6 a gallon. I'm thinking that the folks running their rigs down the highway and the commercial enterprises operating their fleets of vehicles these days are spending big bucks on gas. I don't know what trucking budgeting looks like but this has to be a big problem when it comes to paying the bills and staying competitive. Is it possible that the end-game here is to put these owner-operator vehicles out of business? Does the fact that Bill Gates of Microsoft fame has been buying up farmland across our great country have anything to do with any of this? Just in case you were wondering why you're paying more for every product under the sun, now you know. It's likely to get worse before it gets better.
I woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night the other night when I came to the realization that I had been out to one of our favorite coffee joints earlier in the day and I left the place with coffee and scone in hand but I hadn't paid. This is the second time that something like this has happened and it was no less startling to me when it happened the second time around. Startling in the sense that I'm somehow mindlessly and subconsciously syncing up to the activity on my iPhone in the middle of the night without the usual user inputs that one engages with when checking one's transactions. Sure enough, I checked my iPhone and confirmed that I had indeed not paid for the purchases. Holy cow!
I'm now left with the very real prospect of returning to said establishment and fessing up to my "oversight" with the owner. It may be sufficient to simply say the obvious part out loud. It might well leaving her scratching her head as to how me or any customer could end up doing what I did. That is to say, making a purchase and end up walking out the door with those purchases in hand but never tendering payment. I don't know that I know her well enough to share the "waking up in the middle of the night" nonsense but I might well straddle the edges of that conversation if no other reason that to show that I had the best of intentions but I somehow fell short of the mark. For all I know, she also found out after the fact that I hadn't paid and is, even as I sit here this morning, formulating her own response.
She may decide that rather than accuse me of whatever you call walking out of a business with a scone and a coffee without paying, that she's better off not broaching the subject at all. It's better to let bygones be bygones and maybe she can take a lesson from the experience without alienating a customer who, while not a frequent customer, does come in on occasion and spends a little money and even leaves a tip on occasion. Guilty as charged, your honor. I'll have to beat her to the punch. Knowing what I know about small businesses and tight margins, I'll not have her bottom line suffering because a guy like me decided that saying nothing was better than saying something. There's something to be said for doing the right thing especially when no one is the wiser.
We had Mrs G out for a ride the day before Mother's Day. We took her down by the ocean to all of her favorite haunts where she had a chance to see things that she hadn't seen for a while. Some things had changed for the better and some for the worse. She loved looking out over the expanse of the ocean and remarked on the whitecaps which were numerous and willy nilly as far as the eye could see. Listening to her talk about the things that caught her attention told me, or maybe reminded me, of the things she used to love to do when she and her husband lived along the coast for some 25 years. Our goal was to travel the same roads she traveled, see the same things she likely saw, and do the same things she likely did back in the day. All she had to do was to sit back and enjoy the scenery. It was a ride for the ages.
Mrs G will be heading home today after a few weeks of rehabilitation in the wake of her accident. To say that she's looking forward to being home again is an understatement. To say that she's chomping at the bit to get back home might be a bridge too far. She's not quite up to snuff just yet but well enough certainly to get out of rehab and back to her own apartment where she can continue her recovery. I've always thought that the facility could have done a better job of preparing her mentally for resuming her life once out of rehab. As it is, she is a bit apprehensive about being up to the task of going it alone after weeks of hand holding and being waited on hand and foot. The perks of being in rehab will soon be in the rear view mirror but I'm certain Mrs G will be just fine. I don't think she knows the meaning of the word "failure."
Speaking of rehab, did I mention that the Ev man has Covid-19? And, no, he's not in rehab. It started out with a few unusual aches and pains but never progressed much beyond that. He never developed any respiratory related issues which is a good thing. He always sounded ok when we spoke to him on the phone but admitted to feeling a bit fatigued here and there and he was sleeping more than usual. He never lost his sense of taste or smell and his appetite was holding up reasonably well. The missus and I dropped off some groceries for him the other day and we'll probably do another drop later today so he can stay hunkered down until his self imposed quarantine period is over. This is playing out as I suspected it would. He never got the vaccination due to his being young and more than capable of fighting it off if and when he got the virus so here we are. He's on the mend and he'll have an ample store of antibodies for future reference. Long Covid aside, that's how you do it.
It was another rocky day in the financial markets yesterday. Everything, and I mean everything, was down. That's how it works. When they finally come for everything, every asset class under the sun is in play. I'm not sure that we're in the "coming for everything" mode just yet, but we seem to heading in that direction. The selling was relentless and there were but one or two moments during the sell-off when it looked like buyers were attempting to step in only to see the selling start up again in earnest. The NASDAQ was down over 4% and the S&P down over 3% for the day. That has the NASDAQ down some 28% on a YTD basis and the S&P down some 17.5%. I saw one tweet that went as follows: "Good morning to anyone with anything left in their 401k's." With interest rates rising, this could well be the beginning of the end for the housing market as well. Like I said, every asset class under the sun. Nothing will be exempt.
There are primaries in Nebraska and West Virginia today so that should be fun. We'll see if Trump's unbeaten streak of endorsements can continue. He's 55-0 thus far so let's see if his congressional and gubernatorial candidates can get over the finish line. Nebraska is a couple of time zones behind us here on the East Coast so I'm not sure if I'll be awake to see how that one turns out. Trump was in Nebraska within the last two weeks holding a rally for his candidates there so that can't hurt. Senator Joe Manchin and the Governor of West Virginia have endorsed the other republican in the race so we'll see who the real 800-lb gorilla in the race is when all is said and done. I'm not a betting man but my money is on Trump's candidate for what it's worth. Git er done!
I'm getting little tired of hearing about our country sending billions and billions of this and that to war-torn Ukraine. We've got a damn 30-something trillion dollar deficit to begin with so suffice it to say we can't afford to be sending money to anyone much less a country in which we have zero security interest in. You know those monies are ending up in the pockets of billionaires and other fat cats who couldn't care less about the long term prospects of Ukraine. Does Ukraine even have a sustainable infrastructure anymore after months of indiscriminate bombardments by Russia? Truth be told, this is looking more and more like a proxy war between the US and Russia with each passing day. All this while the Europeans sit back and let the US shoulder the brunt of the expense of the war on their continent. They're no fools. This is not their first rodeo and it won't be their last.
You have to ask yourselves, why would the United States and the Biden Administration have any interest in waging a war of any kind with Russia? Does Biden think that getting into a war with Russia will help his flagging approval ratings? Is there anyone you know, aside from these ass clowns in the Biden Administration, who want to run the risk of getting into a nuclear war with a country that has enough nuclear warheads to destroy our country several times over? Whatever the motivation, none of we mere mortals on the outside looking in have a clue as to where we're going with all of this. I'm assuming that the military industrial complex could not be happier. They've never met a war that they didn't love. With ten percent off the top for the big guy, and I'm not sure that hasn't changed with inflation, the Biden Crime Family is making hay while the sun shines. The Biden Crime Family has always made hay while the sun was shining. When the sun stops shining, they'll be in the bunker beneath the White House and we'll be none the wiser because we'll all be dead. Bastards.
The big news today on the economic front will be the monthly CPI number which is a measure of this and that basket of goods which tells us where inflation rates are heading. My Twitter feed is blowing up this morning ahead of the release of the CPI number with this and that prognostication and what it all means for the stock market. Is this the beginning of the end for the skyrocketing inflation that we've seen? A slowing of the rate might be just what the financial markets need to bounce back from an otherwise seriously oversold condition. Then, there are others who are not quite as optimistic. I don't have a horse in the race one way or another but I know people who do so I'll be hoping that this is where the markets bottom and start their slow drift northwards.
I heard something recently about the "destruction of the middle class" as it relates to everything that seems to be blowing up around us. In what universe is the destruction of the middle class here in America a good thing? Is it all about making us more and more dependent on government? If we can no longer afford to put gas in our cars or food on our tables because everything has become over-the-top expensive then that might well create the existential crisis they need to get this done. The Federal Reserve, known more affectionally as the "Fed", has always had our back as middle class investors. When times got tough we got another injection from the Fed of quantitative easing (QE) to grease the skids and soften the landing. The Fed now seems impotent to offer any relief to the markets in the way of additional QE because of the fear of further increasing inflation. Maybe there's something to this 'destruction of the middle class' thing.
One of my neighbors commented a few months ago that the fella who comes up from Florida every summer to spend the summer with her was worried about what he was seeing in the stock market. It was the classic example of what everyday Americans are faced with when you have nowhere to go but the stock market since it's the only game in town. If you have your money in a bank, you're getting close to zero interest. That's just not tenable for a retiree who relies on growth in his or her portfolio to pay the bills and feather their nest for their remaining days. I don't pretend to know what he was invested in but the average stock in the NASDAQ is now down some 50% or more. Did I mention that he drives a truck that burns diesel gas? The poor guy has to be feeling the crunch. If I told you that I've seen this very same fella recently and he's walking a little slower, holding his head a little less high, and hunching over a little more than I recall from past years, would you believe me?
Is it me or are we hearing about more and more cases of labor unions getting a foothold in well established businesses these days? Recent cases in the news include Starbuck's and Amazon. I have no use for unions and I believe all the stories I've heard over the years which portray them as parasitic enterprises which can suck the very lifeblood out of a business if left to their own devices. You know that unions are "owned" lock, stock, and barrel by the democrat party. Right? If what I'm hearing about Starbuck's and Amazon resisting these efforts to unionize their shops, I say good for them. Resist them with every fibre of your being and spare no expense in ousting them from your organization. Tear them out root and branch as they say. The employees who want to swear allegiance to the unions can go find employment elsewhere. The fortunes of any organization should rise or fall on the merits of their own teams and, should those teams not perform, then they deserve to fail. If push comes to shove, close the damn shop and open another around the corner. See how that works?
I filled up at the local petrol station in town yesterday and I paid $5.09 a gallon. It was the first time in my life that I've paid that much for a gallon of gas. This fucking Biden Administration has got to go. I was paying maybe $2 a gallon when The Donald was in office in 2020. And this morning, I'm reading articles where the Biden Administration is making it even more difficult for domestic companies to get oil out of the ground here in the United States. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. Add to it the shortage of baby formula that mothers and caretakers are having difficulty finding and we have ourselves a fucking catastrophe in the making, You can bet your sweet arse that the babies of illegal aliens coming across our southern border in the tens of thousands are not going without baby formula. Oh, no. Not on Biden's watch. That would be inhumane.
It gets worse. I was listening to this one fella tell the story about how he and his wife had been ordering baby formula from overseas due to the shortage of formula here in the states. Their last two orders had been confiscated at the border by agents working for the the US Agriculture Department. So, Biden is not only working to cut off the supply of baby formula here in our country, but he's now preventing our citizens from procurring supplies from other countries. Can that bastard be any more spiteful? When Trump was not commandeering domestic companies to manufacture supplies like masks when we were deep into the Covid bullshit, Biden used it as a cudgel to beat Trump like a rented mule. Where is Biden now that the mothers in our country are desperate to feed their children. He's nowhere to be fucking found.
Oh, and about that CPI (Inflation) number that I referred to a couple of paragraphs back. It came in hot but you would never know it reading certain articles or headlines in the newspapers and online. The liberal media was desperate to put a positive spin on a shitty result just to help their buddy, Joey Bumbles Biden, in the White House. Or, should I say, in OUR White House. When I say that it came in hot, I mean that it came in worse than expected. That's not what these liberal rags wanted the public at large to see. They needed to put lipstick on this pig and that is precisely what they did. I was so disgusted by the misleading headlines that I couldn't bring myself to read the articles themselves. The financial markets started off in the green but quickly turned beet red once the facts were out in the open. It was yet another shitty day in the markets. Buddy, can you spare a dime?
We've seen so many down days these last few weeks in the stock market that I think I can actually tell when the stock market is up or down by the amount of traffic on the roads. Maybe it's my imagination. That said, it does seem busier out and about when the stock market is up for the day and it seems less busy on the roads when the market is down for or during the day. I know it's a shaky hypothesis but it's one that seems to be true based on my observations. That's objective, right? It's not some wild-eyed theory of mine that I'm just putting down on paper for the heck of it. Well, there is that. In a roundabout way, its symptomatic of the wealth effect that you get when you have a surging stock market. When you start to cut into that wealth effect with endless days of red ink in the stock market, people start spending less, going out less, and it becomes a vicious cycle. If you're looking at something like consumer confidence, you're likely to not like the resulting trend line.
They have yet to find this person who leaked the draft of the Roe v Wade decision a few weeks back. The case is not actually Roe v Wade just so you know. Was it a conservative who wanted to blunt the effect of the decision once it comes out closer to the elections in November? Was it a lefty who wanted to rally their base early on to see if they couldn't get one or two justices to change their minds and vote against the decision when it was finally released? That aside, the lying and hyperbole from the left is beyond the pale. Who knew? Oh, the next thing the Court will be coming for is our rights to have interracial marriage! They're coming for our rights to have same-sex marriage! The blather, the lies, and the deceit by the left is just over the top. Whatever it takes to radicalize their base. Not that they aren't radical to begin with but you can never be too radical as a leftist. You know, I'm talking about the clowns with the Molotov cocktails and the pink hats. Yeah, them.
Every once in a while you hear someone talking about breaking up our country into states based on the politics of their citizenry. The liberals can all move to the blue states and the conservatives can all move to the red states. We already know which states are which although there are some states that switch back and forth from time to time. You have to admit, that would make for an interesting experiment. What would we do with people in the middle? You know, the independents. Would that further polarize our peoples or would that make for a more enduring democracy? Is it just human nature to have differences within populations of any species? Some people prefer chocolate ice cream and some people prefer vanilla ice cream. I don't know where I'm going with all of this. Maybe it would be a dreadful bore were I to be surrounded with people who always agree with me. I'm thinking I should be careful what I wish for. Maybe that light at the end of the tunnel coming in my direction is a locomotive. Feets don't fail me now!
The missus and I went shopping at Whole Foods yesterday. We didn't need anything in particular. It was something to do on a Thursday afternoon when we had nothing better to do. You figure if you look around long enough you'll find something that you didn't know you needed. The minute we pulled into their parking lot we were quite surprised at how few cars there were in the lot. Whole Foods is not an inexpensive place to shop so we wondered if the pissy stock market as of late had anything to do with the scarcity of shoppers. How else could you explain what we were seeing? It wasn't that much of a reach to see this place shuttering their doors if the economy/stock market worsens any more appreciably than it already has. This is part and parcel of the wealth effect that I've referred to here and there. The good news was that we had a better all around shopping experience thanks to the fact that there so few people in the store. You know how the missus hates crowds.
We picked up a caesar salad for the Ev man at Whole Foods. He's had Covid for the last week or so but he'll likely be looking to get out and about now that he's feeling better. We'll be prepared if he stops by. I'm not sure how I feel about his coming over so soon after having Covid. The missus says that you can test positive for a long time after contracting the virus even though you've survived the five day quarantine period recommended by the CDC. Are we tempting fate to have him come over so soon? Will his salad go bad between now and the time it takes him to stop by? I decided not to buy a latte while in Whole Foods since I could just as easily have one at home. Maybe that's my way of watching my pennies. I'm just as happy these days with a poor man's latte which is three quarters of a cup of cold brew and a splash of cold milk. I don't need any stinking' ice either. De-Lish!
My peeps back in the Falls celebrated my seester's birthday this past weekend. I couldn't make it so my brother from another mother was good enough to send me a few pictures. One picture in particular was quite nice. Everyone was smiling and it was nice to see the people in the picture all together in one place, on one day, and posing as they were for the picture. It was one of those pictures the likes of which once you see it you can't imagine it not framed and hanging on a wall for all of eternity. It was something that I immediately wanted for my seester since, after all, it was a picture of her and her children. Did I mention that? Maybe it's the gift that I was meant to give to my seester but could only do so after the fact since I was not otherwise in attendance. The Lord works in mysterious ways. Whatever. The missus liked the idea of the frame and all but we disagreed on how much to spend on getting it all done. "Can you put a price on what we're trying to do here", I queried incredulously. You can see where all of this is going. Let me spell it out. N-o-w-h-e-r-e.
The Pennsylvania primary is next Tuesday. On the republican side of the ledger, we have three candidates: Dr Oz, Cathy Barnett, and a guy named McCormick. Oz and McCormick have spent some 50 million between them thus far while Barnett is operating on a shoestring budget. Oddly enough, Barnett is polling even with her two opponents. The other odd thing about Barnett is that nobody knows much about her. She's been vague to say the least about her past experience and that has a lot of people thinking that she's a wolf in sheep's clothing or maybe a Trojan horse or worse. They say that she can't possible beat her democratic opponent in the general election so it would be a mistake for people to vote for her in the primary next Tuesday. Trump has endorsed Oz so maybe Oz gets the bid at the end of the day. We conservatives need that damn senate seat so let's not fuck this up, folks. We can't take back the senate in November without the seat. I'm not sure what the right answer is but I think Barnett could fuck it all up with a win. For better or worse, that's what I'm thinking this morning.
It does make you wonder if Biden and his cast of cretins occupying our White House are actually creating the problems that they now profess to want to fix. We're talking baby formula here. I'm learning that one of Biden's henchmen in one or more of his departments went in and closed down the company (Abbot) that makes most of the baby formula for our nation's children. I'm sure it was done using some flimsy pretext in order to shut down the factory and, in the process, create a crisis where a crisis heretofore did not exist. It would result in hordes of Americans moms looking to the Biden Administration for relief in what could only be described as an untenable situation. No one in the Biden Administration counted on pictures and stories getting out about the pallets of baby formula being delivered to our southern border to feed the infants of illegal aliens. Investigations are, no doubt, underway by Biden's Justice Department into who leaked what and when.
Joey was likely planning to take a victory lap in the Rose Garden while announcing that he was enacting the Defense Production Act in order to put our country's factories back to work producing the very infant formula that he and his people acted in concert to stop producing. He would surround himself with smiling moms and dads all on hand to sing Uncle Joey's praises for his courage and his commitment to our nation's families in their time of need. With any luck, this act of beneficence on the part of our fearless leader would unlikely be forgotten by the time the Midterm elections rolled around and that was the plan. If any of this were true, it would be music to the ears of moms and dads coast to coast. Unfortunately, the only words coming out of the White House are, and I quote, "Contact your physician if you can't find formula for your children." No Spanish translation will be forthcoming (nor is it necessary.)
MAGA-nificent
08/05/22 06:33
Global warming may be a hoax by the flat earthers but I'm not taking any chances. I'm putting my hummingbird feeders out earlier than usual this Spring. They usually show up around May 5th or so but I'm beating them to the punch by putting my feeders out on May 2nd. I know it's not much earlier but it's earlier by a day or two so we'll leave it at that. I'm mindful of the fact that the longer the feeders sit out there the more coagulated the sugar concoction becomes and that doesn't make for a welcoming experience when my little friends finally show up. I can't and won't have them going without their sucrose after such a long and arduous trek northward to my backyard and environs. That just won't cut the mustard.
I spent a couple of hours with he Ev man yesterday working on his apartment. I do what I can when I can. He'll tell his people that I lent a hand or maybe he won't. I'm not sure they'll believe him if he tells them that he did it all by his lonesome. He can spruce up a place with the best of them but he has to be in just the right place to pull it all together. More often than not, he's not in that place. That isn't to say that he doesn't know he's not in that place so that's where I come in. I have a particular knack for restoring order from chaos and if I can be there to lead by example it's all the better. Watch and learn.
The missus will be waking up to a nice hot spinach, broccoli, and mushroom quiche right out of the oven this morning. I scraped together a few ingredients that I didn't know I had and I was off the to races. I like a good smattering of shredded cheese in my quiche but I had none so used feta cheese instead. I sautéed mushrooms in a little garlic and oil and they'll plump up the quiche nicely if everything goes as expected. I don't make my quiche with a crust but I've not heard any complaints so crust-less it is. I think we have some nice whole wheat bread which I'm wanting to toast up and serve with a little butter and jam. Damn!
I think Mrs G is ready to get the hell out of rehab and back home. She said as much when we spoke on the phone last evening. Can you blame her? I think she thinks that she's made enough progress that she's ready and willing to take the next step in the process. That has to mean that she's feeling stronger and more capable when it comes to getting back to living her life on her terms. She even said something about being picked up in our car and not taking the van that is otherwise equipped to transport patients in rehab from point A to point B. She's wanting to get the show on the road so to speak and she's just a little miffed that no one in her facility seems to share her sense of urgency. Let's do this, bitch-ez!
I have to go pick up a roto-tiller today to do a little roto-tilling here and there around our house. I have a garden, if you can call it that, that has been neglected for the better part of a year that will need turning over so the tiller is just what the doctor ordered. I'll put some grass seed down in another area that I intend to till and it will be nice to see that area restored as it were to its original condition. That's the part of our lawn where I had a wood pile rotting for the better part of a year or two so the soil should be in very good shape. This will be one of those 4-hour rental schticks from Home Depot that I've been doing this year if you include the chainsaw that I rented within the last four weeks.
I have to laugh. I heard some talking head yesterday talking about the fact that Kamala Harris, the worst possible Vice President in the history of our country, took exception to the fact that people in Biden's circle failed to stand up when she entered a room. They stand up when Biden enters the room so why should it be any different when she enters a room. Right? What a fucking clown show we have for a President and Vice President. You can't make this stuff up. I mean, who the fuck does she think she is? If you ask me, neither one of these asshats deserves the niceties that goes along with being a President and Vice President. They are a couple of grifters who managed to steal an election and that will be their legacy enduring or otherwise. They know it and so do we.
Harris has to be frustrated by the fact that Bumbling and Demented Joey Biden still hasn't stepped down from his official duties as President of the United States. She probably can't understand how it is that he is still on his feet and carrying on with the duties that fall in his wheelhouse on any given day in our nation's capitol. He could barely get out a complete sentence as a candidate without relying on cue cards or teleprompters so she figured he was probably good to go for maybe a few months and then it would be all hers. She would be the very first woman president. She could literally taste it. It was a Faustian bargain that is looking less and less like a bargain with each passing day.
It looks like the leftists are at it again. Somebody with access to Supreme Court rulings snatched a draft copy of the Roe v Wade ruling and released it to the rabid liberal media outlet, Politico. At first blush, it looks like the Supremes are going to overturn Roe in a 5-4 ruling. Maybe it's 6-3, not sure. Aside from the fact that this kind of skullduggery is not at all usual or even expected in our venerable Supreme Court, it has triggered the left in a way that was completely predictable. Maybe that was the plan all along, Fire up the troops ahead of the Midterm elections and see if that doesn't change the trajectory of what everyone expects will be a republican tsunami in November.
What you won't hear from the liberal nut jobs running around our nation's capitol day in and day out with their little pink hats on is that abortion will be sent back to the individual States if it's struck down at the federal level. There will now be relentless calls from the Bernie Sander's and his ilk in Congress to pack the Supreme Court to put a stop to this travesty of justice. The left will now launch a multi-front assault to whip up their constituencies into the kind of frenzy that only comes around once in a hundred years. Who was it that coined the phrase, "Never let a crisis go to waste?" This is their moment. This is precisely what the leaker of the ruling had in mind. Something tells me that he or she did not act alone. This was a conspiracy.
I've got my eye on the Ohio primary race today. I was a little slow in coming around to liking J.D. Vance but come around I did and I'm now firmly in his camp for better or worse. I think I've mentioned this previously so this should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been reading this here blog. Not that anyone does, but that's a subject for a different day. I'm looking at it as a test of Trump's status as a king maker. I'll not think any less of Trump were his candidates to lose their races but if they do win it could tell us a little something about Trump's ability to continue to influence outcomes in races that will more than likely put our party (conservatives) in the winner's circle from now through 2024. Steve Bannon thinks we'll be able to keep the democrats out of power for the next one hundred years. Something in between would suit me just fine.
It will be interesting to see what kind of reaction we get out of the Supreme Court as a result of this leak. Will John Roberts step up to the podium and say anything about this business? I don't know how you smooth something like this over. It's in the media's hands now and they are going to do the bidding of their masters, the liberal political establishment. I think I'll just tune it all out for the next day or two and let the chips fall where they may. I wonder about the timing. Will this issue become less dominant with each passing month? Is there enough time between now and the election in November to slow down this so-called locomotive? What could possibly take it off the front pages of the rags that pass for newspapers in our great country? Newspapers? Who the fuck reads newspapers any more? It's all about social media. Musk to the rescue?
I think I'm on to something here. The left was maybe counting on having Twitter as their go-to social media application when the Roe v Wade ruling came down. They were counting on Big Tech to create the kind of tidal wave of anti-republican momentum around this issue that would keep the democrats in power for another two years and maybe more. That would certainly explain the gnashing of teeth and the pearl clutching on the left as a result of Musk buying Twitter as this now throws their plans into a cocked hat. What I worry about is that Musk's purchase of Twitter won't be finalized until October. That leaves a lot of time for the deep state leftist operatives working in the shadows at Twitter to do their dirty work. These bastards have gamed it all out. This is what they do. This is who they are.
My hummingbird feeders have been up for a day or two now and just yesterday the missus and I were standing in the back room when one of the little buggers came around to our feeder on the deck. Talk about perfect timing. It's always very exciting to see them come back around for another year and I'm happy to report that we were more than ready for them this time. I want the feeders up and available to them after their long journey north. Have a little nectar after your long trip, won't you? The missus informs me that she saw a hummingbird outside our bedroom window this morning. I'm assuming that these are two separate and distinct hummingbirds. They're quite territorial so it would surprise me to know that they are one and the same. I'm guessing they are not.
Fast forward 24 hours and primary elections in Ohio and Indiana are over. The fat lady, as it were, has sung. J.D. Vance won the bid to be Ohio's republican senate candidate and will face a democrat hack by the name of Ryan in the Fall. Ohio is a deep red state so I'm guessing Ohio will be sending J.D. Vance to the US senate in November to replace Rob Portman. There were an assortment of 21 other races in Ohio and Indiana all with Trump endorsed candidates who won their races handily. In other words, it was MAGA-nificent night for Trump and it pretty much sums up everything we knew about his role in the Republican Party as kingmaker and future candidate for president in 2024. 22-0. Just wow!
The good folks at the rehab joint where Mrs G is currently hanging out while she continues her recovery took her over to her apartment yesterday for the first time since she left there on a stretcher some weeks ago. They were onsite to assess any and all of her physical needs prior to her returning to her unit next week. If things needed to be raised or lowered, they made plans to get those things done before her return. I asked Mrs G last night when we spoke to her on the phone how it felt to be back home again. Without remembering her exact words, suffice it to say she was both relieved and excited at the prospects of getting back home and on with her life. If she had any trepidation whatsoever about being up to the task physically, I wasn't hearing any of it. The one question I should have asked but forgot to ask is, what can we do to help?
Today is the day when J. Powell informs the country as to just how much he's going to raise interest rates. Which J. Powell will we see at the podium? Will he be the hawkish and seldom seen J. Powell wanting to raise interest rates an unheard of 75 basis points? Or, will we see the more dovish J. Powell coming in at 50 basis points? What kind of guidance will he signal? I guess we'll see just how interested he is in taming inflation after ignoring any and all opportunities he had heretofore when it would have made more sense to raise rates. How will the financial markets react to his messaging? He's supposed to be dampening demand so I'm hoping for messaging that sends the markets lower instead of higher. Let's take a little more steam out of the markets, shall we? No one likes to see irrational exuberance in the markets when inflation is coming in hot at 8.6%.
I don't know how you watch your television shows but I like to save a season's worth of shows and then binge the hell out of them. Depending on the network, some shows are posted all at once and at other times they are posted weekly. I mean, waiting a week to see another episode of a show that you really like can be painful. There is also a certain rhythm and flow to story lines that typically don't factor in the element of time. In other words, you're supposed to be on the edge of your seat from beginning to end. Commercials for cleaning products and hemorrhoid creams don't help whatsoever so I prefer my shows to be commercial free. One way, and maybe the only way, to keep story lines intact is to collect the episodes and play them back-to-back after you've saved them all to your collection.
The missus will tempt me now and then to watch a show before we have all the episodes. She is also the kind of person who likes to know how a book is going to end before she starts reading a book so there's that. She suggested the other day that we take a peek at the new show on Showtime, "The Man Who Fell To Earth." I don't know why but I agreed. Maybe it's because I'm old enough to remember the movie from the seventies when David Bowie played the lead. The premise of the show has stuck with me all these years so a remake had some allure to be sure. Let's just say that I was completely gobsmacked when I watched the first episode. It was astonishingly good. I liked it so much that I wanted to watch the episode again. Once thing is for certain. I'll be watching this when it comes out every week. Forget the binging. Drastic times call for drastic measures. I think this one is right up there with one of my other favorite shows by Apple entitled "Severance."
If the creek don't rise and the good Lord's willin', I'll fold a little of that manure I picked up the other day into the soil in our garden. I bought two bags of the stuff so no sense in not using it all. It can't make our crop of vegetables any worse, can it? I'm wanting my tomatoes plump and juicy so this manure stuff should make all of that and more possible. I'll likely regret not learning how to can veggies but that horse has left the barn so no sense in chasing it down at this point. We've never had excess anything given the size of our garden but these things cross your mind when the prospects of a bumper crop loom large. The first step, at any rate, is to get the manure folded into the soil. I can do that. All in a good day's work.
I tuned in to the debate last night in Pennsylvania where the top contenders for the republicans to replace the republican incumbent, Pat Toomey, took to the stage. I don't really know any of the candidates, Dr. Oz included, so I thought I might like to have look at them in real time. Did I mention that the missus thinks that Dr. Oz is a nut? I'm not sure that I know what to look for in senatorial candidates so I want to say that up front. I expected the usual ebb and flow that one sees in any debate and I wasn't disappointed. There wasn't much in the way of fireworks either and that may have been due to the control exerted over the debate by the moderator. She should have encouraged or allowed them to go after each other free form instead of tying their hands behind their backs by shutting them down or maybe not giving them time enough to respond to charges leveled by their fellow debaters.
There are really only two of the five (Oz and McCormick) in the race who have any chance of becoming the next senator of Pennsylvania. I didn't see much difference between the two of them on the debate stage and the post-debate polls agreed with me since the polls had the two of them but a percentage point apart. Trump is supporting Oz since he thinks Oz has a better chance of beating the democrat candidate whose name escapes me at the moment. I think I expected more from Oz since he has a long history and presence in the media as a host of any number of nationally based shows. He just wasn't that impressive. Does he even have the necessary gravitas to be the next senator from Pennsylvania? The fact that 40% of republican voters in Pennsylvania are undecided at this point should tell us a little something. No?
I wouldn't say that Oz wasn't articulate but I would say that his responses were a little bit on the light side considering what he was asking of the people of Pennsylvania. The good news for Oz was that his opponent wasn't that much more articulate. Maybe "articulate" isn't the right word. You'd like to think that someone running for senator would have a good grasp of the facts when it comes to global affairs. It isn't enough for McCormick to accuse Oz of being a shill for the country of Turkey just because Oz served in the Turkish military or because he has a dual citizenship. The residents of Pennsylvania care about this why? And Oz accusing McCormick of mishandling pension funds of Pennsylvania's seniors was an equally poor attempt to move the needle in his direction. If nothing changes in the next few weeks leading up the primary, I'm guessing the Trump endorsement will make the difference when the final votes are cast. Oz in a landslide?
I made the mistake of telling Mrs G about my experience as a fourth grader when I nearly passed out while on a field visit to a local veterinarian's office. To this day I can't recall what that specific smell was although it was probably some ammonia based concoction that they use to keep things sterile in an otherwise typically un-sterile environment. I just remember being taken outside to get some fresh air while my classmates did whatever they did inside the office. Anyway, I think Mrs G now thinks that I am less open to spending time in medical facilities and that loosely translates to my not wanting to lend a hand or assist if and when she is going in and out of these types of places. She said something last night about going it alone today at the doctor's office because she knew I wasn't a fan based on what I told her about my visit to the veterinarian's office. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. I'll need to convey that to her asap.
Where the hell did that come from? I found a tick on my chest last night as I lay in bed. The little bugger was burrowed in pretty good and he or she was starting to look a little engorged as best I could tell from what little I could see of it given my angle of vision. I asked the missus to get the bottle of alcohol, a piece of cotton gauze, and the little tick scooper that we keep on hand for such emergencies. "Gag the little fucker with the alcohol and I'll see if I can't grab his head and body with the little scooper," I pleaded.
It took a bit of tugging and plucking but I finally extracted what was left of the little bugger seemingly piece by piece from my torso. Neither of us could confirm when all was said and done that it was a tick even with the magnifying glass that we had on hand. We'll need to put a call in the doctor's office this morning for a dose or two of doxycycline. That should do the trick. And yes, my little darlings, I'll do a better job next time of checking my body for ticks when I come in from doing yard work. Promises promises.
What am I hearing about this far-left group calling themselves "Ruth Sent Me"? They apparently published the addresses of the Supreme Court justices in an attempt to intimidate and even threaten them because of their apparent support for killing the Roe v Wade decision in the crib. The reference to "Ruth" is Ruth Ginsburg who, despite being a proponent for abortion and abortion related freedoms, did not think that the Roe decision was a well reasoned decision. So, they may want to rethink their group's name. Maybe it tells us something about just how stupid and deranged they are. Why is this not an overt threat to the Court and why has the FBI not been dispatched to both protect the Justices and their families and find and jail the people responsible for publishing the addresses? Get on the fucking stick! I don't care what Joe Biden says.
Joey's mouthpiece, Jen Psaki, says that the people most likely responsible for the publishing of the addresses did so because they are "mad" and they have a right to express their feelings. In other words, the Biden Administration both supports and encourages violence as a tool to be used by their supporters in fighting back against the patriots in the MAGA movement. It was Trump's three justices who made overturning this Roe decision possible so it's game-on for the leftists. I agree with the prevailing sentiment that says the Court should just go ahead and release the ruling now and let the chips fall where they may. It was a draft memo that had been leaked but the Court tipped their hand on how they were going to rule so let's just get it out there. The longer they wait, the longer the violence and the threats will continue in their putrid attempts to have one or more Justices change their minds. If anything, this should stiffen their spines. Who knows, maybe there is still time to get John Roberts on board with the decision to overturn Roe.
The missus and I took Mrs G to see her doctor yesterday morning. I was a little concerned that we hadn't given ourselves enough time to deal with the logistics of getting Mrs G in and out of her facility and in and out of our car in time to get to her doctor's office on time. Little did I know that Mrs G was more than up to the task and, if I do say so myself, the progress that she's made even since the last time we saw her is quite remarkable. She's still using a walker to get about but the shuffling is gone and her gait is almost back to where it was before her accident. We made it to the doctor's office well ahead of schedule and that made for a more relaxed time once we arrived at the hospital. You know how nerve racking the checking in and out process can be when you're behind schedule. Well, there was none of that. She got a clean bill of health from her doctor and he even said something about her seemingly remarkable recovery compared to some others who fared less well after their surgery. It was a good morning.
I was a little concerned that she might end up back at her facility after the lunch hour and I wasn't sure what that meant other than her going without lunch. I suggested that we pick up a sub and maybe a nice iced coffee and maybe even a jelly donut so she wouldn't end up back at her facility empty handed and hungry. We're talking about a small iced coffee half caffeinated and half non-caffeinated with creme and a straw if you please. Oh, and for the sub, we thought she might like to have a ham sub from Jersey Mike's (Mike's way!) but opted instead for a half Moe's since the noon hour loomed large and Jersey Mike's was probably over-the-top busy. That was just a guess but probably a good guess knowing what we know about Jersey Mike's and how busy they've been every time we ended up there around the lunch hour. The missus and I treated ourselves to a couple of chocolate crullers at Dunkin'. Guilty pleasures all but what the hey.
What a weird week it's been in the financial markets. If you have a 401K, I hope you're not watching it too closely. It will give you heartburn. If you're looking forward to retirement and you're counting on your 401k as the mother of all nest eggs, do not look at your balances. I'm not sure when you can start paying attention again but bottoming processes in the market take some time so just sit back and let it play out. I suppose you could yank your shekels out the market but that can be dicey. When would you get back in? What if the market surges and you're on the sidelines feeling all comfy and cozy about being out of the market? Is there anything worse than being out of the market while the market is going up. How about being in the market while the market is going down? Day after day you see nothing but red ink and CNN comes on at 8 at night with a special called, "Markets in Turmoil." Anyway, the market (NASDAQ) was up 4 percent on Wednesday and down 5 percent on Thursday of this week. Talk about a fucking roller coaster.
They tried to keep Marjorie Greene Taylor off the ballot in Georgia but they failed spectacularly. They, and I'm referring to the democrat party, alleged that her so-called participation in the event in our nation's capitol on January 6th made her ineligible to be on the ballot. The judge ruled today that they failed in their attempt to keep her off the ballot. That's my girl! Kicking butt and taking names. The fact that it even got into a courtroom is a joke in itself. I'd like to see her beat her opponent like a rented mule come November. She will, hopefully, be re-elected in November with the tsunami of a red wave that will likely give the boot to upwards of 40 percent of sitting democrats in Congress. The pearl clutching will be glorious.
One last thing. I wish I had a nickel for every article written these days in the liberal rags in our nation about corporate boards and the lack of so-called diversity of their members. More specifically, the leftists writing these articles more often than not piss and moan about the whiteness of boards. First of all, it's none of their fucking business who company's do and don't have sitting on their boards. Second of all, if it just so happens that the best qualified people applying for seats on the board are white then you work with what you have. Thirdly, what the hell does skin color have to do with making one qualified or not qualified to sit on a company's board? The same goes true for one's nationality. If you have your choice between a Somalian with an 8th grade education and someone from the Midwest with a degree from Harvard, you tell the Somalian to screw. Life experience is good but having a record of accomplishment and success is better. It just is.
I spent a couple of hours with he Ev man yesterday working on his apartment. I do what I can when I can. He'll tell his people that I lent a hand or maybe he won't. I'm not sure they'll believe him if he tells them that he did it all by his lonesome. He can spruce up a place with the best of them but he has to be in just the right place to pull it all together. More often than not, he's not in that place. That isn't to say that he doesn't know he's not in that place so that's where I come in. I have a particular knack for restoring order from chaos and if I can be there to lead by example it's all the better. Watch and learn.
The missus will be waking up to a nice hot spinach, broccoli, and mushroom quiche right out of the oven this morning. I scraped together a few ingredients that I didn't know I had and I was off the to races. I like a good smattering of shredded cheese in my quiche but I had none so used feta cheese instead. I sautéed mushrooms in a little garlic and oil and they'll plump up the quiche nicely if everything goes as expected. I don't make my quiche with a crust but I've not heard any complaints so crust-less it is. I think we have some nice whole wheat bread which I'm wanting to toast up and serve with a little butter and jam. Damn!
I think Mrs G is ready to get the hell out of rehab and back home. She said as much when we spoke on the phone last evening. Can you blame her? I think she thinks that she's made enough progress that she's ready and willing to take the next step in the process. That has to mean that she's feeling stronger and more capable when it comes to getting back to living her life on her terms. She even said something about being picked up in our car and not taking the van that is otherwise equipped to transport patients in rehab from point A to point B. She's wanting to get the show on the road so to speak and she's just a little miffed that no one in her facility seems to share her sense of urgency. Let's do this, bitch-ez!
I have to go pick up a roto-tiller today to do a little roto-tilling here and there around our house. I have a garden, if you can call it that, that has been neglected for the better part of a year that will need turning over so the tiller is just what the doctor ordered. I'll put some grass seed down in another area that I intend to till and it will be nice to see that area restored as it were to its original condition. That's the part of our lawn where I had a wood pile rotting for the better part of a year or two so the soil should be in very good shape. This will be one of those 4-hour rental schticks from Home Depot that I've been doing this year if you include the chainsaw that I rented within the last four weeks.
I have to laugh. I heard some talking head yesterday talking about the fact that Kamala Harris, the worst possible Vice President in the history of our country, took exception to the fact that people in Biden's circle failed to stand up when she entered a room. They stand up when Biden enters the room so why should it be any different when she enters a room. Right? What a fucking clown show we have for a President and Vice President. You can't make this stuff up. I mean, who the fuck does she think she is? If you ask me, neither one of these asshats deserves the niceties that goes along with being a President and Vice President. They are a couple of grifters who managed to steal an election and that will be their legacy enduring or otherwise. They know it and so do we.
Harris has to be frustrated by the fact that Bumbling and Demented Joey Biden still hasn't stepped down from his official duties as President of the United States. She probably can't understand how it is that he is still on his feet and carrying on with the duties that fall in his wheelhouse on any given day in our nation's capitol. He could barely get out a complete sentence as a candidate without relying on cue cards or teleprompters so she figured he was probably good to go for maybe a few months and then it would be all hers. She would be the very first woman president. She could literally taste it. It was a Faustian bargain that is looking less and less like a bargain with each passing day.
It looks like the leftists are at it again. Somebody with access to Supreme Court rulings snatched a draft copy of the Roe v Wade ruling and released it to the rabid liberal media outlet, Politico. At first blush, it looks like the Supremes are going to overturn Roe in a 5-4 ruling. Maybe it's 6-3, not sure. Aside from the fact that this kind of skullduggery is not at all usual or even expected in our venerable Supreme Court, it has triggered the left in a way that was completely predictable. Maybe that was the plan all along, Fire up the troops ahead of the Midterm elections and see if that doesn't change the trajectory of what everyone expects will be a republican tsunami in November.
What you won't hear from the liberal nut jobs running around our nation's capitol day in and day out with their little pink hats on is that abortion will be sent back to the individual States if it's struck down at the federal level. There will now be relentless calls from the Bernie Sander's and his ilk in Congress to pack the Supreme Court to put a stop to this travesty of justice. The left will now launch a multi-front assault to whip up their constituencies into the kind of frenzy that only comes around once in a hundred years. Who was it that coined the phrase, "Never let a crisis go to waste?" This is their moment. This is precisely what the leaker of the ruling had in mind. Something tells me that he or she did not act alone. This was a conspiracy.
I've got my eye on the Ohio primary race today. I was a little slow in coming around to liking J.D. Vance but come around I did and I'm now firmly in his camp for better or worse. I think I've mentioned this previously so this should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been reading this here blog. Not that anyone does, but that's a subject for a different day. I'm looking at it as a test of Trump's status as a king maker. I'll not think any less of Trump were his candidates to lose their races but if they do win it could tell us a little something about Trump's ability to continue to influence outcomes in races that will more than likely put our party (conservatives) in the winner's circle from now through 2024. Steve Bannon thinks we'll be able to keep the democrats out of power for the next one hundred years. Something in between would suit me just fine.
It will be interesting to see what kind of reaction we get out of the Supreme Court as a result of this leak. Will John Roberts step up to the podium and say anything about this business? I don't know how you smooth something like this over. It's in the media's hands now and they are going to do the bidding of their masters, the liberal political establishment. I think I'll just tune it all out for the next day or two and let the chips fall where they may. I wonder about the timing. Will this issue become less dominant with each passing month? Is there enough time between now and the election in November to slow down this so-called locomotive? What could possibly take it off the front pages of the rags that pass for newspapers in our great country? Newspapers? Who the fuck reads newspapers any more? It's all about social media. Musk to the rescue?
I think I'm on to something here. The left was maybe counting on having Twitter as their go-to social media application when the Roe v Wade ruling came down. They were counting on Big Tech to create the kind of tidal wave of anti-republican momentum around this issue that would keep the democrats in power for another two years and maybe more. That would certainly explain the gnashing of teeth and the pearl clutching on the left as a result of Musk buying Twitter as this now throws their plans into a cocked hat. What I worry about is that Musk's purchase of Twitter won't be finalized until October. That leaves a lot of time for the deep state leftist operatives working in the shadows at Twitter to do their dirty work. These bastards have gamed it all out. This is what they do. This is who they are.
My hummingbird feeders have been up for a day or two now and just yesterday the missus and I were standing in the back room when one of the little buggers came around to our feeder on the deck. Talk about perfect timing. It's always very exciting to see them come back around for another year and I'm happy to report that we were more than ready for them this time. I want the feeders up and available to them after their long journey north. Have a little nectar after your long trip, won't you? The missus informs me that she saw a hummingbird outside our bedroom window this morning. I'm assuming that these are two separate and distinct hummingbirds. They're quite territorial so it would surprise me to know that they are one and the same. I'm guessing they are not.
Fast forward 24 hours and primary elections in Ohio and Indiana are over. The fat lady, as it were, has sung. J.D. Vance won the bid to be Ohio's republican senate candidate and will face a democrat hack by the name of Ryan in the Fall. Ohio is a deep red state so I'm guessing Ohio will be sending J.D. Vance to the US senate in November to replace Rob Portman. There were an assortment of 21 other races in Ohio and Indiana all with Trump endorsed candidates who won their races handily. In other words, it was MAGA-nificent night for Trump and it pretty much sums up everything we knew about his role in the Republican Party as kingmaker and future candidate for president in 2024. 22-0. Just wow!
The good folks at the rehab joint where Mrs G is currently hanging out while she continues her recovery took her over to her apartment yesterday for the first time since she left there on a stretcher some weeks ago. They were onsite to assess any and all of her physical needs prior to her returning to her unit next week. If things needed to be raised or lowered, they made plans to get those things done before her return. I asked Mrs G last night when we spoke to her on the phone how it felt to be back home again. Without remembering her exact words, suffice it to say she was both relieved and excited at the prospects of getting back home and on with her life. If she had any trepidation whatsoever about being up to the task physically, I wasn't hearing any of it. The one question I should have asked but forgot to ask is, what can we do to help?
Today is the day when J. Powell informs the country as to just how much he's going to raise interest rates. Which J. Powell will we see at the podium? Will he be the hawkish and seldom seen J. Powell wanting to raise interest rates an unheard of 75 basis points? Or, will we see the more dovish J. Powell coming in at 50 basis points? What kind of guidance will he signal? I guess we'll see just how interested he is in taming inflation after ignoring any and all opportunities he had heretofore when it would have made more sense to raise rates. How will the financial markets react to his messaging? He's supposed to be dampening demand so I'm hoping for messaging that sends the markets lower instead of higher. Let's take a little more steam out of the markets, shall we? No one likes to see irrational exuberance in the markets when inflation is coming in hot at 8.6%.
I don't know how you watch your television shows but I like to save a season's worth of shows and then binge the hell out of them. Depending on the network, some shows are posted all at once and at other times they are posted weekly. I mean, waiting a week to see another episode of a show that you really like can be painful. There is also a certain rhythm and flow to story lines that typically don't factor in the element of time. In other words, you're supposed to be on the edge of your seat from beginning to end. Commercials for cleaning products and hemorrhoid creams don't help whatsoever so I prefer my shows to be commercial free. One way, and maybe the only way, to keep story lines intact is to collect the episodes and play them back-to-back after you've saved them all to your collection.
The missus will tempt me now and then to watch a show before we have all the episodes. She is also the kind of person who likes to know how a book is going to end before she starts reading a book so there's that. She suggested the other day that we take a peek at the new show on Showtime, "The Man Who Fell To Earth." I don't know why but I agreed. Maybe it's because I'm old enough to remember the movie from the seventies when David Bowie played the lead. The premise of the show has stuck with me all these years so a remake had some allure to be sure. Let's just say that I was completely gobsmacked when I watched the first episode. It was astonishingly good. I liked it so much that I wanted to watch the episode again. Once thing is for certain. I'll be watching this when it comes out every week. Forget the binging. Drastic times call for drastic measures. I think this one is right up there with one of my other favorite shows by Apple entitled "Severance."
If the creek don't rise and the good Lord's willin', I'll fold a little of that manure I picked up the other day into the soil in our garden. I bought two bags of the stuff so no sense in not using it all. It can't make our crop of vegetables any worse, can it? I'm wanting my tomatoes plump and juicy so this manure stuff should make all of that and more possible. I'll likely regret not learning how to can veggies but that horse has left the barn so no sense in chasing it down at this point. We've never had excess anything given the size of our garden but these things cross your mind when the prospects of a bumper crop loom large. The first step, at any rate, is to get the manure folded into the soil. I can do that. All in a good day's work.
I tuned in to the debate last night in Pennsylvania where the top contenders for the republicans to replace the republican incumbent, Pat Toomey, took to the stage. I don't really know any of the candidates, Dr. Oz included, so I thought I might like to have look at them in real time. Did I mention that the missus thinks that Dr. Oz is a nut? I'm not sure that I know what to look for in senatorial candidates so I want to say that up front. I expected the usual ebb and flow that one sees in any debate and I wasn't disappointed. There wasn't much in the way of fireworks either and that may have been due to the control exerted over the debate by the moderator. She should have encouraged or allowed them to go after each other free form instead of tying their hands behind their backs by shutting them down or maybe not giving them time enough to respond to charges leveled by their fellow debaters.
There are really only two of the five (Oz and McCormick) in the race who have any chance of becoming the next senator of Pennsylvania. I didn't see much difference between the two of them on the debate stage and the post-debate polls agreed with me since the polls had the two of them but a percentage point apart. Trump is supporting Oz since he thinks Oz has a better chance of beating the democrat candidate whose name escapes me at the moment. I think I expected more from Oz since he has a long history and presence in the media as a host of any number of nationally based shows. He just wasn't that impressive. Does he even have the necessary gravitas to be the next senator from Pennsylvania? The fact that 40% of republican voters in Pennsylvania are undecided at this point should tell us a little something. No?
I wouldn't say that Oz wasn't articulate but I would say that his responses were a little bit on the light side considering what he was asking of the people of Pennsylvania. The good news for Oz was that his opponent wasn't that much more articulate. Maybe "articulate" isn't the right word. You'd like to think that someone running for senator would have a good grasp of the facts when it comes to global affairs. It isn't enough for McCormick to accuse Oz of being a shill for the country of Turkey just because Oz served in the Turkish military or because he has a dual citizenship. The residents of Pennsylvania care about this why? And Oz accusing McCormick of mishandling pension funds of Pennsylvania's seniors was an equally poor attempt to move the needle in his direction. If nothing changes in the next few weeks leading up the primary, I'm guessing the Trump endorsement will make the difference when the final votes are cast. Oz in a landslide?
I made the mistake of telling Mrs G about my experience as a fourth grader when I nearly passed out while on a field visit to a local veterinarian's office. To this day I can't recall what that specific smell was although it was probably some ammonia based concoction that they use to keep things sterile in an otherwise typically un-sterile environment. I just remember being taken outside to get some fresh air while my classmates did whatever they did inside the office. Anyway, I think Mrs G now thinks that I am less open to spending time in medical facilities and that loosely translates to my not wanting to lend a hand or assist if and when she is going in and out of these types of places. She said something last night about going it alone today at the doctor's office because she knew I wasn't a fan based on what I told her about my visit to the veterinarian's office. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. I'll need to convey that to her asap.
Where the hell did that come from? I found a tick on my chest last night as I lay in bed. The little bugger was burrowed in pretty good and he or she was starting to look a little engorged as best I could tell from what little I could see of it given my angle of vision. I asked the missus to get the bottle of alcohol, a piece of cotton gauze, and the little tick scooper that we keep on hand for such emergencies. "Gag the little fucker with the alcohol and I'll see if I can't grab his head and body with the little scooper," I pleaded.
It took a bit of tugging and plucking but I finally extracted what was left of the little bugger seemingly piece by piece from my torso. Neither of us could confirm when all was said and done that it was a tick even with the magnifying glass that we had on hand. We'll need to put a call in the doctor's office this morning for a dose or two of doxycycline. That should do the trick. And yes, my little darlings, I'll do a better job next time of checking my body for ticks when I come in from doing yard work. Promises promises.
What am I hearing about this far-left group calling themselves "Ruth Sent Me"? They apparently published the addresses of the Supreme Court justices in an attempt to intimidate and even threaten them because of their apparent support for killing the Roe v Wade decision in the crib. The reference to "Ruth" is Ruth Ginsburg who, despite being a proponent for abortion and abortion related freedoms, did not think that the Roe decision was a well reasoned decision. So, they may want to rethink their group's name. Maybe it tells us something about just how stupid and deranged they are. Why is this not an overt threat to the Court and why has the FBI not been dispatched to both protect the Justices and their families and find and jail the people responsible for publishing the addresses? Get on the fucking stick! I don't care what Joe Biden says.
Joey's mouthpiece, Jen Psaki, says that the people most likely responsible for the publishing of the addresses did so because they are "mad" and they have a right to express their feelings. In other words, the Biden Administration both supports and encourages violence as a tool to be used by their supporters in fighting back against the patriots in the MAGA movement. It was Trump's three justices who made overturning this Roe decision possible so it's game-on for the leftists. I agree with the prevailing sentiment that says the Court should just go ahead and release the ruling now and let the chips fall where they may. It was a draft memo that had been leaked but the Court tipped their hand on how they were going to rule so let's just get it out there. The longer they wait, the longer the violence and the threats will continue in their putrid attempts to have one or more Justices change their minds. If anything, this should stiffen their spines. Who knows, maybe there is still time to get John Roberts on board with the decision to overturn Roe.
The missus and I took Mrs G to see her doctor yesterday morning. I was a little concerned that we hadn't given ourselves enough time to deal with the logistics of getting Mrs G in and out of her facility and in and out of our car in time to get to her doctor's office on time. Little did I know that Mrs G was more than up to the task and, if I do say so myself, the progress that she's made even since the last time we saw her is quite remarkable. She's still using a walker to get about but the shuffling is gone and her gait is almost back to where it was before her accident. We made it to the doctor's office well ahead of schedule and that made for a more relaxed time once we arrived at the hospital. You know how nerve racking the checking in and out process can be when you're behind schedule. Well, there was none of that. She got a clean bill of health from her doctor and he even said something about her seemingly remarkable recovery compared to some others who fared less well after their surgery. It was a good morning.
I was a little concerned that she might end up back at her facility after the lunch hour and I wasn't sure what that meant other than her going without lunch. I suggested that we pick up a sub and maybe a nice iced coffee and maybe even a jelly donut so she wouldn't end up back at her facility empty handed and hungry. We're talking about a small iced coffee half caffeinated and half non-caffeinated with creme and a straw if you please. Oh, and for the sub, we thought she might like to have a ham sub from Jersey Mike's (Mike's way!) but opted instead for a half Moe's since the noon hour loomed large and Jersey Mike's was probably over-the-top busy. That was just a guess but probably a good guess knowing what we know about Jersey Mike's and how busy they've been every time we ended up there around the lunch hour. The missus and I treated ourselves to a couple of chocolate crullers at Dunkin'. Guilty pleasures all but what the hey.
What a weird week it's been in the financial markets. If you have a 401K, I hope you're not watching it too closely. It will give you heartburn. If you're looking forward to retirement and you're counting on your 401k as the mother of all nest eggs, do not look at your balances. I'm not sure when you can start paying attention again but bottoming processes in the market take some time so just sit back and let it play out. I suppose you could yank your shekels out the market but that can be dicey. When would you get back in? What if the market surges and you're on the sidelines feeling all comfy and cozy about being out of the market? Is there anything worse than being out of the market while the market is going up. How about being in the market while the market is going down? Day after day you see nothing but red ink and CNN comes on at 8 at night with a special called, "Markets in Turmoil." Anyway, the market (NASDAQ) was up 4 percent on Wednesday and down 5 percent on Thursday of this week. Talk about a fucking roller coaster.
They tried to keep Marjorie Greene Taylor off the ballot in Georgia but they failed spectacularly. They, and I'm referring to the democrat party, alleged that her so-called participation in the event in our nation's capitol on January 6th made her ineligible to be on the ballot. The judge ruled today that they failed in their attempt to keep her off the ballot. That's my girl! Kicking butt and taking names. The fact that it even got into a courtroom is a joke in itself. I'd like to see her beat her opponent like a rented mule come November. She will, hopefully, be re-elected in November with the tsunami of a red wave that will likely give the boot to upwards of 40 percent of sitting democrats in Congress. The pearl clutching will be glorious.
One last thing. I wish I had a nickel for every article written these days in the liberal rags in our nation about corporate boards and the lack of so-called diversity of their members. More specifically, the leftists writing these articles more often than not piss and moan about the whiteness of boards. First of all, it's none of their fucking business who company's do and don't have sitting on their boards. Second of all, if it just so happens that the best qualified people applying for seats on the board are white then you work with what you have. Thirdly, what the hell does skin color have to do with making one qualified or not qualified to sit on a company's board? The same goes true for one's nationality. If you have your choice between a Somalian with an 8th grade education and someone from the Midwest with a degree from Harvard, you tell the Somalian to screw. Life experience is good but having a record of accomplishment and success is better. It just is.
Bloodbath
01/05/22 06:59
I had planned to lend a hand to Mrs G this coming week when she visits her doctor in Portsmouth. The best course of action would be to use a wheelchair to move her from point A to point B since she's not yet strong enough to get about on her own. She's certainly capable of using a walker but that may not do the trick considering the effort required to go back and forth during his particular visit. I'm not sure how my plans are going over at the rehab joint since they seem to be having second thoughts about what liability, if any, they might have in the event that things don't going according to plan.
They've not inquired as to my experience with such things but I'm guessing they might well be assuming the worst for arguments sake. I guess I would ask the question, how experienced do you need to be to push a wheelchair? Does Mrs G need to pay a king's ransom to have an aide of sorts to do something that I am perfectly capable of doing myself? What are they afraid of exactly? Where does their responsibility start and end when it comes to ensuring patient safety? Is the patient not entitled to make his or her own decisions when and where it comes to activities outside the facility?
I'm not fretful in the least about the task at hand. It seems like an easy enough thing to do and, while I admit to never having done it before, I have to ask the question, how difficult can it be? There isn't a medical facility built within the last 10 years that isn't now wheelchair accessible so that helps. My missus has no compunction whatsoever about my volunteering for the job and it's her mum so that has to count for something. You might be asking, how does Mrs G feel about it? I think she's in with both feet if I'm reading her correctly. In fact, the two of us are looking forward to the outing. Let's do this!
I half expected to hear from the Ev man by now. It's a bit after 7am and I've not seen a text or anything else from him. He and I were planing to do a little food shopping this morning. If he's changed his mind I suppose I'll know soon enough but since I've heard nothing I'll continue to assume that we're going to go to the store as planned. We'll go up and down the aisles and we'll put the things in the cart as we go. The Ev man has never been one to use lists like everyone else so it will be all about curb appeal. We'll avoid the things that he usually avoids and we'll check the ingredients here and there on foodstuffs that look good to him but may contain this or that ingredient which he needs to assiduously avoid.
We make something of an effort to go to the store during off-peak hours so as to get in and get out in good time. The fewer distractions the better is what I say. He's not ever voiced this particular requirement but I like to think that I know him well enough to know what works for him and what doesn't. He surprises me sometimes when I lose sight of him inside the store and he's off somewhere dilly dallying in an aisle looking at God only knows what. I worry sometimes that his choices are too this or too that and that going out on a limb on occasion wouldn't be the end of the world should he be so disposed. Buying a box of Raisin Bran when I know he avoids surgery foods like the plague is but one example that comes to mind. I don't think I've ever seen him buy a loaf of bread but I know he eats bread. We're not talking life in the fast lane here.
I don't like not hearing from the Ev man when he's promised me that he'd be getting in touch with me when we've planned to do something. My mind can go to a very dark place in a hurry when this sort of thing happens. Maybe he's sleeping in this morning. Maybe he's out and about looking for a place to buy a coffee for himself. Maybe he's lost track of time or maybe's he's forgotten about our plans. Is it possible that he's waiting for me to contact him? I never say "no" when he asks me to go shopping so it's unlikely he's read any reticence into my responses. Maybe he's gone shopping without me just to show me that he can. He's never shown any interest in impressing me one way or another so "showing me he can" may be a reach even for me. Like I said, dark places.
Never mind. Fast forward twenty-four hours and all is well with he Ev man. He surfaced as expected if not just a little later than expected. We went shopping and he did a great job of getting all the things he had in mind to buy and more. He seemed more invested as usual in going aisle to aisle and his cart was filling up faster and faster with things that he thought he might like or might just like to have on hand for that rainy day we all love to plan for. I threw out a suggestion or two along the way and I pushed the cart so he didn't have to. He didn't need me to tell him what to buy. He was kicking butt and taking names all by himself. I was just happy to be along for whatever support he thought I had to offer.
Were there things in his cart that were perhaps too sugary or too salty? The answer to that question is unequivocally "yes." I could only hope that he was consuming these things in a measured sort of way. You know, a few things at a time. Don't polish off the whole bag in one sitting for chrissakes. Take your time. Think about what you're putting into your body. He avoided other things that he knew only too well were not good for him and that was good. He read ingredient listings and hesitated every so slightly when looking at beverages with unnatural colorings. I said nothing but secretly cringed when he placed a six-pack of grape colored Zero's in his cart. Well, at least they were sugar free.
I have to laugh. I had my privileges on Twitter suspended for a 12-hour period the other day for comments I tweeted about the Queen of England. I think I said something to the effect that they ought to boot the old hag to the curb and free up some space at Buckingham Palace in order to provide a more substantial accommodation for the homeless. I figured that my comments would pass muster by the leftists moderating content at Twitter headquarters if only because I was nice enough to say something about a marginalized community across the pond in need of a roof over their heads. Had I not thrown something in about the homeless I might well have been terminated so maybe I should consider myself lucky.
And, since when is the Queen of England not fair game when it comes to leveling criticism? Someone at Twitter was clearly enamored of the old bag and was having none of my irreverant gibberish. It was probably some tranny at Twitter who fancied dressing up as the Queen for his closest friends after hours. The good news is that now that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter lock, stock, and barrel, I can say whatever I damn please about the Queen without worrying about reprisals. I sincerely hope that all of this free speech I now have at my disposal doesn't drag me further into the toilet bowl that Twitter can be on any given day. I will be a good boy I will be a good boy I will be a good boy.
One tweet I looked at this morning kind of put everything into context for me. The tweet was as follows: " Boys have a penis. Girls have a vagina." I know it sounds crazy but the loons at Twitter responsible for moderating content would have previously labeled a comment like this as hate speech. This is the world we live in, folks. Now that someone has reposted the tweet I'm guessing they are testing the waters now that we have a new sheriff in town. Sheriff Musk. I like the sound of that. God damn, freedom of speech feels good. I almost forgot what it felt like. I'm still not sure I'm going to be happy until Trump comes back to Twitter. He says he's not going to but I'm not sure he'll be able to stay away knowing how many supporters he's now likely to have on the new and revised Twitter platform. It's party time at Twitter Central! Par-Tay!
Trump says that he will not be going back on Twitter after Musk's purchase. I guess he thinks that staying on his platform, Truth Social, is the hill that he prefers to die on. In other words, I'm thinking that he's all in on Truth Social and to go on Twitter at this point would be to abandon everyone on his platform who made the leap from Twitter to Truth Social just to be able to hear from him. I tried many times to join Truth Social but without success. That told me all I needed to know about the platform itself. It was just another Twitter knockoff and a shitstorm of an application. They can stick it where the sun don't shine Trump or no Trump.
The financial markets got roiled again yesterday. The NASDAQ was down some 3.5% and the S&P off by close to 3%. I think that the NASDAQ is now down 20% or so on a YTD basis. Man, tech is taking a beating. I think the S&P is now down 12.4% YTD. It qualifies as carnage and there are a lot of high flying stocks that have lost a ton of value over the last several months. More, incidentally, than the overall indices might suggest. Netflix, for example, was close to a $700 stock just six months ago. It closed at $198 yesterday. My financial guy on the radio said something about our being in a "bear" market yesterday. I think he's talking about lower lows and lower highs when it comes to price. Jumping into the market at this point would be akin to catching a falling knife so investors beware.
You know you're in a bear market when a company like Tesla whose stock got trashed after coming out with outstanding numbers (earnings and guidance) yesterday. I thought I heard someone say something about the market striking back at Elon Musk (owns Tesla) for having the audacity to buy Twitter. The deep state is going to spank that mother fucker (Musk) until the cows come home for taking THEIR application private and denying them a platform to otherwise continue to spew their propaganda. Who the hell does he think he is anyway? They are all of a sudden concerned about limitations on free speech when they were silent when Trump and other conservatives were being banned from the platform. Fuck them and the Trojan horse they rode in on. Long live Musk! No, really.
I finally got rid of all the wood in my rotting woodpile. I'd been looking at that wood pile for years and I just watched as it became more and more of an eyesore. I protected it in the winters by throwing a tarp over the pile just in case I might have to try and burn a log or two in case of an emergency. No one ever said anything to me about it but I have to believe they thought as I did that its usefulness was more on the wane with each passing season than not. The day would come when I would have to use a shovel to remove the debris that was once a nicely stacked quarter cord of wood and I wasn't about to wait for that day to arrive. I took my last trunk load to the local recycling center yesterday and, in the words of I'm not sure who, that's all she wrote.
On my way back from the recycling center yesterday I stopped into a recently opened luncheon joint to buy a lobster roll for the missus for lunch. I thought it would be a nice surprise for her and I wasn't wrong. The only question I had was, just how much of a lobster roll would I get for $28. What would it look like? Would it be plumped up with celery and whatever else to give the impression that you were getting more for your money? Would the roll be fresh? I caught sight of a bag of rolls on the shelf in the store and thought that if those were the rolls they were intending to use for my order then I would be in high cotton. As it turned out, the rolls were indeed one in the same, the roll was actually buttered and toasted, and there were no fillers in the lobster salad. So far, so good.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that the store was more than just a lobster shack. They offered a full menu of lunch items and many of the salads were on display and available for take-out. I bought some chowder as well that the missus enjoyed maybe even more than the lobster roll although it contained less seafood than some other chowder that we buy locally. We live on the seacoast, dammit. Put some damn seafood in that chowder for chrissakes. At $28 a lobster roll, we'll not be frequenting the place all that much but we did want to give it a try and we were not disappointed. I didn't order two rolls since paying $56 for a lunch for two seemed excessive but I told the missus that if there were any left over she might want to save a bite for me. Don't make me grovel.
I'm beginning to wonder if temperatures will ever get out of the fifties here on the coast. On the other hand, I'm not wanting to rush the hot weather since it makes for a more difficult bike ride when I'm out and about. I was riding the other day and the temperatures were in the fifties and there was an ever so slight mist in the air. It was just enough to have me wiping my sun glasses off here and there to make sure that I wasn't running into anything or anybody as I was going pell mell down Ocean Boulevard. Well, pell mell might be an exaggeration but you get my drift. Oddly enough, I couldn't have asked for better weather to ride in. Maybe it was the moisture in the air. I dunno.
Today is one of those days where I know what it is that I want to do but I don't know that I have what it takes to do it. I want to go out and rent a machine to turn over the soil hereabouts so we can have a proper garden this year with tomatoes and maybe a little something else. It's not a huge ask but it will require that I get off my ass and get out the door and down to Home Depot. I'm not sure what it is about this ask that seems so daunting but it all seems so uphill if you know what I mean. I feel like I have a window of opportunity that I don't want to let slip by and today is probably the best day to make that all happen. If I can envision what it looks like when all is said and done, that should help. Right?
The missus and I had some blueberry pie and ice cream last night. It was good but it has to stop. We can't be eating that shite. I made the mistake of ordering a spinach and cheese quiche from a local store the other day. I thought, what the heck, let's see how their pre-packaged quiche compares to what I make from time to time. Again, it was shite. It was simply inedible. I don't usually throw away food but this sucker went into the trash faster than you could say Jack Spratt. I can't recall but I think I spat out what little quiche went into my mouth. I won't make that mistake again. The cheddar cheese slices have been good but they're simply not the same without crackers and I avoid crackers since they're just too easy to eat. Now that I think it, apples might go along very nicely with a slice or two of cheddar cheese. If only apples were in season.
What is it with these fucking politicians and their need to memorialize everything under the sun. Madeline Albright passed away recently and the whole of our nation's capitol and her resident politicians were in attendance for her funeral. Maybe they called it a celebration of life, I'm not sure. She was a hack politician for chrissakes. When it the last time you saw them celebrating the lives of the constituents they serve? The answer is short and sweet. Fucking "never" is the right answer. Actually, I think she was a Secretary of State under a democrat president whose name escapes me. So, she wasn't actually elected but she served every American in her role as Secretary so I suppose I was partly right in referring to her a servant of the American public. Enough with the lionizing of elected officials. Put her in the ground and call it a day. Call it a fucking day if it makes you feel any better.
I keep hearing about food shortages but I'm seeing no evidence of it in my travels here on the coast. I keep hearing about supply chain issues and things like chip shortages but see no evidence of it. You would think I might see an absence of certain products popping up here and there since I do all the food shopping in our household. To make matters worse, I'm seeing stories in the news about food processing centers here in the United States blowing up or going out of business or some such. To make matters even worse, I read a story the other day about Bill Gates, the Microsoft guy, buying up farmland across our fruited plains like a man on a mission. What the bejesus is that all about? He who controls our food supply controls everything? If there's a plan afoot by the elites to turn our country into a banana republic, maybe it's as plain as the nose on our collective faces. We just need to open our eyes. Right?
Is anyone else concerned about Biden's newly formed Disinformation Governance Board within the Homeland Security Department? Maybe this should tell us just how much Biden and his leftists fear free speech and the turnover of their favorite propaganda machine, Twitter, to Elon Musk. Who decides exactly what free speech is? What does it look like? What does it sound like? Is it, by any chance, the opposite of what the leftists running our government want you to believe on any given day? How many bullets are they intending to use to set the record straight when a truth-teller strays too far from the "truth"? It's no secret that the Homeland Security Department within our government is the largest purchaser of bullets, firearms, etc. What is that all about?
I'd like to see every candidate running for public office this fall take a stand on doing away with this so-called Ministry of Truth. I'm not certain as to what kind of blocking and tackling we'll need to employ to dismantle this department but dragging the lot of them out of their ergonomically designed chairs and throwing them into the streets would be a good start. We have no gulags here in America so we can't put them into camps as much as we might like to. I want to be careful so as not to start sounding like one of them with all this blocking and tackling nonsense. Fact of the matter is, I think Congress needs to step up here and rip this department out of the Homeland Security organization root and branch. This is not Orwell's America as much as Biden's leftists might like you think it is. As long as we have the wherewithal to resist, resist we shall. We are Americans!
I think these democrat leftists in Congress need to be careful what they ask for. There's a rumor on the street that they'd like Elon Musk to come and testify as to what his plans are when it comes to his purchase of Twitter. I can hear them now. How much protection will Musk afford our marginalized communities in terms of protecting them from hateful rhetoric and potential threats? What will he do to stop the White Supremacists and Trump supporters from terrorizing members of the LGBTQ communities? Funny thing is, they never much cared about free speech in the Twitter-sphere when Twitter gladly banned and shadow banned conservatives and Trump supporters. They were quite happy to see the President of the United States (Trump) banned while allowing despots like the Mullahs in Iran free rein to spew their hatred when it comes to Jews and the destruction of the Jewish State.
Make Elon's testimony a Pay-for-View event and I'm in with both feet. I might even pay a premium to watch it live. The fact that Musk is not a free speech absolutist should give us a bit of a glimpse into what we might expect to hear from him in hearings on the subject. There is no doubt in my mind that that he would put the appropriate guard rails in place to make sure that things don't get too out of hand while ensuring that every voice is heard. I would imagine that the conservatives in Congress, now feeling better about the openness of the platform under Musk, would push back on any efforts by the democrats to place controls on Twitter. I think this is probably testimony that the democrats in Congress wouldn't want the public to hear so it's probably going behind closed doors if it happens at all. Maybe threats from the democrats to hold such hearings is but one of many threats we'll hear as Musk rolls out his new and improved version of Twitter. This is who they are.
Do you recall my aforementioned comments about the financial markets getting roiled? It was a mere handful of paragraphs ago in this week's blog posting. Well, they were roiled again yesterday and it was even worse this time around. The NASDAQ took a 4 plus percent hit and the S&P took a 3 plus percent hit with the NASDAQ ending the week at 12,334 and the S&P ending up at 4,131. Amazon (AMZN) was down some 400 points! Clearly, the individual stocks that have been holding up the indices are starting to come in. Word on the street is that we still have a ways to go. Housing prices are out of whack so they might get taken out as well. No asset classes will be exempt. It's a bloodbath! And now, the Fed is going to announce that they are going to raise interest rates 50 basis points while we're heading into a recession? Who does that?
I like the idea that this whole bear and bull thing in the markets is a process. The guy I like to listen to when it comes to the markets was telling everyone toward the end of last year that the indices were hitting an all time high while there were a massive number of new lows in individual stocks each and every day. There was a stereotypical topping process taking place right in front of our eyes yet all most people saw was a surging stock market day in and day out thanks to the big dogs like Apple and others who were holding up the indices. I was telling my brother from another mother that he should be thankful that his 401k, assuming he has one, is now buying up equities at bargain basement prices each and every week. They could get even cheaper if this thing really turns to shit.
That whole wheelchair thing that I was referring to earlier in this here blog ended up just fine. Mrs G managed just fine and the missus and I were there to assist as promised. The hardest part for me was the waiting while Mrs G was in with her physician. I couldn't understand why it took the better part of an hour but it did so that was that. The missus went in with her mom to see the doctor and when I asked her this morning if she was glad that she did that, she replied, "I suppose." Mrs G took to her walker instead of her wheelchair when she went in to see the doctor and I wondered if she wasn't trying to put on a good face. She was kinda saying, "I took their best punch and I'm still standing!" That's the kind of woman that she is. Nothing but grit and glory! You go, girl!
They've not inquired as to my experience with such things but I'm guessing they might well be assuming the worst for arguments sake. I guess I would ask the question, how experienced do you need to be to push a wheelchair? Does Mrs G need to pay a king's ransom to have an aide of sorts to do something that I am perfectly capable of doing myself? What are they afraid of exactly? Where does their responsibility start and end when it comes to ensuring patient safety? Is the patient not entitled to make his or her own decisions when and where it comes to activities outside the facility?
I'm not fretful in the least about the task at hand. It seems like an easy enough thing to do and, while I admit to never having done it before, I have to ask the question, how difficult can it be? There isn't a medical facility built within the last 10 years that isn't now wheelchair accessible so that helps. My missus has no compunction whatsoever about my volunteering for the job and it's her mum so that has to count for something. You might be asking, how does Mrs G feel about it? I think she's in with both feet if I'm reading her correctly. In fact, the two of us are looking forward to the outing. Let's do this!
I half expected to hear from the Ev man by now. It's a bit after 7am and I've not seen a text or anything else from him. He and I were planing to do a little food shopping this morning. If he's changed his mind I suppose I'll know soon enough but since I've heard nothing I'll continue to assume that we're going to go to the store as planned. We'll go up and down the aisles and we'll put the things in the cart as we go. The Ev man has never been one to use lists like everyone else so it will be all about curb appeal. We'll avoid the things that he usually avoids and we'll check the ingredients here and there on foodstuffs that look good to him but may contain this or that ingredient which he needs to assiduously avoid.
We make something of an effort to go to the store during off-peak hours so as to get in and get out in good time. The fewer distractions the better is what I say. He's not ever voiced this particular requirement but I like to think that I know him well enough to know what works for him and what doesn't. He surprises me sometimes when I lose sight of him inside the store and he's off somewhere dilly dallying in an aisle looking at God only knows what. I worry sometimes that his choices are too this or too that and that going out on a limb on occasion wouldn't be the end of the world should he be so disposed. Buying a box of Raisin Bran when I know he avoids surgery foods like the plague is but one example that comes to mind. I don't think I've ever seen him buy a loaf of bread but I know he eats bread. We're not talking life in the fast lane here.
I don't like not hearing from the Ev man when he's promised me that he'd be getting in touch with me when we've planned to do something. My mind can go to a very dark place in a hurry when this sort of thing happens. Maybe he's sleeping in this morning. Maybe he's out and about looking for a place to buy a coffee for himself. Maybe he's lost track of time or maybe's he's forgotten about our plans. Is it possible that he's waiting for me to contact him? I never say "no" when he asks me to go shopping so it's unlikely he's read any reticence into my responses. Maybe he's gone shopping without me just to show me that he can. He's never shown any interest in impressing me one way or another so "showing me he can" may be a reach even for me. Like I said, dark places.
Never mind. Fast forward twenty-four hours and all is well with he Ev man. He surfaced as expected if not just a little later than expected. We went shopping and he did a great job of getting all the things he had in mind to buy and more. He seemed more invested as usual in going aisle to aisle and his cart was filling up faster and faster with things that he thought he might like or might just like to have on hand for that rainy day we all love to plan for. I threw out a suggestion or two along the way and I pushed the cart so he didn't have to. He didn't need me to tell him what to buy. He was kicking butt and taking names all by himself. I was just happy to be along for whatever support he thought I had to offer.
Were there things in his cart that were perhaps too sugary or too salty? The answer to that question is unequivocally "yes." I could only hope that he was consuming these things in a measured sort of way. You know, a few things at a time. Don't polish off the whole bag in one sitting for chrissakes. Take your time. Think about what you're putting into your body. He avoided other things that he knew only too well were not good for him and that was good. He read ingredient listings and hesitated every so slightly when looking at beverages with unnatural colorings. I said nothing but secretly cringed when he placed a six-pack of grape colored Zero's in his cart. Well, at least they were sugar free.
I have to laugh. I had my privileges on Twitter suspended for a 12-hour period the other day for comments I tweeted about the Queen of England. I think I said something to the effect that they ought to boot the old hag to the curb and free up some space at Buckingham Palace in order to provide a more substantial accommodation for the homeless. I figured that my comments would pass muster by the leftists moderating content at Twitter headquarters if only because I was nice enough to say something about a marginalized community across the pond in need of a roof over their heads. Had I not thrown something in about the homeless I might well have been terminated so maybe I should consider myself lucky.
And, since when is the Queen of England not fair game when it comes to leveling criticism? Someone at Twitter was clearly enamored of the old bag and was having none of my irreverant gibberish. It was probably some tranny at Twitter who fancied dressing up as the Queen for his closest friends after hours. The good news is that now that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter lock, stock, and barrel, I can say whatever I damn please about the Queen without worrying about reprisals. I sincerely hope that all of this free speech I now have at my disposal doesn't drag me further into the toilet bowl that Twitter can be on any given day. I will be a good boy I will be a good boy I will be a good boy.
One tweet I looked at this morning kind of put everything into context for me. The tweet was as follows: " Boys have a penis. Girls have a vagina." I know it sounds crazy but the loons at Twitter responsible for moderating content would have previously labeled a comment like this as hate speech. This is the world we live in, folks. Now that someone has reposted the tweet I'm guessing they are testing the waters now that we have a new sheriff in town. Sheriff Musk. I like the sound of that. God damn, freedom of speech feels good. I almost forgot what it felt like. I'm still not sure I'm going to be happy until Trump comes back to Twitter. He says he's not going to but I'm not sure he'll be able to stay away knowing how many supporters he's now likely to have on the new and revised Twitter platform. It's party time at Twitter Central! Par-Tay!
Trump says that he will not be going back on Twitter after Musk's purchase. I guess he thinks that staying on his platform, Truth Social, is the hill that he prefers to die on. In other words, I'm thinking that he's all in on Truth Social and to go on Twitter at this point would be to abandon everyone on his platform who made the leap from Twitter to Truth Social just to be able to hear from him. I tried many times to join Truth Social but without success. That told me all I needed to know about the platform itself. It was just another Twitter knockoff and a shitstorm of an application. They can stick it where the sun don't shine Trump or no Trump.
The financial markets got roiled again yesterday. The NASDAQ was down some 3.5% and the S&P off by close to 3%. I think that the NASDAQ is now down 20% or so on a YTD basis. Man, tech is taking a beating. I think the S&P is now down 12.4% YTD. It qualifies as carnage and there are a lot of high flying stocks that have lost a ton of value over the last several months. More, incidentally, than the overall indices might suggest. Netflix, for example, was close to a $700 stock just six months ago. It closed at $198 yesterday. My financial guy on the radio said something about our being in a "bear" market yesterday. I think he's talking about lower lows and lower highs when it comes to price. Jumping into the market at this point would be akin to catching a falling knife so investors beware.
You know you're in a bear market when a company like Tesla whose stock got trashed after coming out with outstanding numbers (earnings and guidance) yesterday. I thought I heard someone say something about the market striking back at Elon Musk (owns Tesla) for having the audacity to buy Twitter. The deep state is going to spank that mother fucker (Musk) until the cows come home for taking THEIR application private and denying them a platform to otherwise continue to spew their propaganda. Who the hell does he think he is anyway? They are all of a sudden concerned about limitations on free speech when they were silent when Trump and other conservatives were being banned from the platform. Fuck them and the Trojan horse they rode in on. Long live Musk! No, really.
I finally got rid of all the wood in my rotting woodpile. I'd been looking at that wood pile for years and I just watched as it became more and more of an eyesore. I protected it in the winters by throwing a tarp over the pile just in case I might have to try and burn a log or two in case of an emergency. No one ever said anything to me about it but I have to believe they thought as I did that its usefulness was more on the wane with each passing season than not. The day would come when I would have to use a shovel to remove the debris that was once a nicely stacked quarter cord of wood and I wasn't about to wait for that day to arrive. I took my last trunk load to the local recycling center yesterday and, in the words of I'm not sure who, that's all she wrote.
On my way back from the recycling center yesterday I stopped into a recently opened luncheon joint to buy a lobster roll for the missus for lunch. I thought it would be a nice surprise for her and I wasn't wrong. The only question I had was, just how much of a lobster roll would I get for $28. What would it look like? Would it be plumped up with celery and whatever else to give the impression that you were getting more for your money? Would the roll be fresh? I caught sight of a bag of rolls on the shelf in the store and thought that if those were the rolls they were intending to use for my order then I would be in high cotton. As it turned out, the rolls were indeed one in the same, the roll was actually buttered and toasted, and there were no fillers in the lobster salad. So far, so good.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that the store was more than just a lobster shack. They offered a full menu of lunch items and many of the salads were on display and available for take-out. I bought some chowder as well that the missus enjoyed maybe even more than the lobster roll although it contained less seafood than some other chowder that we buy locally. We live on the seacoast, dammit. Put some damn seafood in that chowder for chrissakes. At $28 a lobster roll, we'll not be frequenting the place all that much but we did want to give it a try and we were not disappointed. I didn't order two rolls since paying $56 for a lunch for two seemed excessive but I told the missus that if there were any left over she might want to save a bite for me. Don't make me grovel.
I'm beginning to wonder if temperatures will ever get out of the fifties here on the coast. On the other hand, I'm not wanting to rush the hot weather since it makes for a more difficult bike ride when I'm out and about. I was riding the other day and the temperatures were in the fifties and there was an ever so slight mist in the air. It was just enough to have me wiping my sun glasses off here and there to make sure that I wasn't running into anything or anybody as I was going pell mell down Ocean Boulevard. Well, pell mell might be an exaggeration but you get my drift. Oddly enough, I couldn't have asked for better weather to ride in. Maybe it was the moisture in the air. I dunno.
Today is one of those days where I know what it is that I want to do but I don't know that I have what it takes to do it. I want to go out and rent a machine to turn over the soil hereabouts so we can have a proper garden this year with tomatoes and maybe a little something else. It's not a huge ask but it will require that I get off my ass and get out the door and down to Home Depot. I'm not sure what it is about this ask that seems so daunting but it all seems so uphill if you know what I mean. I feel like I have a window of opportunity that I don't want to let slip by and today is probably the best day to make that all happen. If I can envision what it looks like when all is said and done, that should help. Right?
The missus and I had some blueberry pie and ice cream last night. It was good but it has to stop. We can't be eating that shite. I made the mistake of ordering a spinach and cheese quiche from a local store the other day. I thought, what the heck, let's see how their pre-packaged quiche compares to what I make from time to time. Again, it was shite. It was simply inedible. I don't usually throw away food but this sucker went into the trash faster than you could say Jack Spratt. I can't recall but I think I spat out what little quiche went into my mouth. I won't make that mistake again. The cheddar cheese slices have been good but they're simply not the same without crackers and I avoid crackers since they're just too easy to eat. Now that I think it, apples might go along very nicely with a slice or two of cheddar cheese. If only apples were in season.
What is it with these fucking politicians and their need to memorialize everything under the sun. Madeline Albright passed away recently and the whole of our nation's capitol and her resident politicians were in attendance for her funeral. Maybe they called it a celebration of life, I'm not sure. She was a hack politician for chrissakes. When it the last time you saw them celebrating the lives of the constituents they serve? The answer is short and sweet. Fucking "never" is the right answer. Actually, I think she was a Secretary of State under a democrat president whose name escapes me. So, she wasn't actually elected but she served every American in her role as Secretary so I suppose I was partly right in referring to her a servant of the American public. Enough with the lionizing of elected officials. Put her in the ground and call it a day. Call it a fucking day if it makes you feel any better.
I keep hearing about food shortages but I'm seeing no evidence of it in my travels here on the coast. I keep hearing about supply chain issues and things like chip shortages but see no evidence of it. You would think I might see an absence of certain products popping up here and there since I do all the food shopping in our household. To make matters worse, I'm seeing stories in the news about food processing centers here in the United States blowing up or going out of business or some such. To make matters even worse, I read a story the other day about Bill Gates, the Microsoft guy, buying up farmland across our fruited plains like a man on a mission. What the bejesus is that all about? He who controls our food supply controls everything? If there's a plan afoot by the elites to turn our country into a banana republic, maybe it's as plain as the nose on our collective faces. We just need to open our eyes. Right?
Is anyone else concerned about Biden's newly formed Disinformation Governance Board within the Homeland Security Department? Maybe this should tell us just how much Biden and his leftists fear free speech and the turnover of their favorite propaganda machine, Twitter, to Elon Musk. Who decides exactly what free speech is? What does it look like? What does it sound like? Is it, by any chance, the opposite of what the leftists running our government want you to believe on any given day? How many bullets are they intending to use to set the record straight when a truth-teller strays too far from the "truth"? It's no secret that the Homeland Security Department within our government is the largest purchaser of bullets, firearms, etc. What is that all about?
I'd like to see every candidate running for public office this fall take a stand on doing away with this so-called Ministry of Truth. I'm not certain as to what kind of blocking and tackling we'll need to employ to dismantle this department but dragging the lot of them out of their ergonomically designed chairs and throwing them into the streets would be a good start. We have no gulags here in America so we can't put them into camps as much as we might like to. I want to be careful so as not to start sounding like one of them with all this blocking and tackling nonsense. Fact of the matter is, I think Congress needs to step up here and rip this department out of the Homeland Security organization root and branch. This is not Orwell's America as much as Biden's leftists might like you think it is. As long as we have the wherewithal to resist, resist we shall. We are Americans!
I think these democrat leftists in Congress need to be careful what they ask for. There's a rumor on the street that they'd like Elon Musk to come and testify as to what his plans are when it comes to his purchase of Twitter. I can hear them now. How much protection will Musk afford our marginalized communities in terms of protecting them from hateful rhetoric and potential threats? What will he do to stop the White Supremacists and Trump supporters from terrorizing members of the LGBTQ communities? Funny thing is, they never much cared about free speech in the Twitter-sphere when Twitter gladly banned and shadow banned conservatives and Trump supporters. They were quite happy to see the President of the United States (Trump) banned while allowing despots like the Mullahs in Iran free rein to spew their hatred when it comes to Jews and the destruction of the Jewish State.
Make Elon's testimony a Pay-for-View event and I'm in with both feet. I might even pay a premium to watch it live. The fact that Musk is not a free speech absolutist should give us a bit of a glimpse into what we might expect to hear from him in hearings on the subject. There is no doubt in my mind that that he would put the appropriate guard rails in place to make sure that things don't get too out of hand while ensuring that every voice is heard. I would imagine that the conservatives in Congress, now feeling better about the openness of the platform under Musk, would push back on any efforts by the democrats to place controls on Twitter. I think this is probably testimony that the democrats in Congress wouldn't want the public to hear so it's probably going behind closed doors if it happens at all. Maybe threats from the democrats to hold such hearings is but one of many threats we'll hear as Musk rolls out his new and improved version of Twitter. This is who they are.
Do you recall my aforementioned comments about the financial markets getting roiled? It was a mere handful of paragraphs ago in this week's blog posting. Well, they were roiled again yesterday and it was even worse this time around. The NASDAQ took a 4 plus percent hit and the S&P took a 3 plus percent hit with the NASDAQ ending the week at 12,334 and the S&P ending up at 4,131. Amazon (AMZN) was down some 400 points! Clearly, the individual stocks that have been holding up the indices are starting to come in. Word on the street is that we still have a ways to go. Housing prices are out of whack so they might get taken out as well. No asset classes will be exempt. It's a bloodbath! And now, the Fed is going to announce that they are going to raise interest rates 50 basis points while we're heading into a recession? Who does that?
I like the idea that this whole bear and bull thing in the markets is a process. The guy I like to listen to when it comes to the markets was telling everyone toward the end of last year that the indices were hitting an all time high while there were a massive number of new lows in individual stocks each and every day. There was a stereotypical topping process taking place right in front of our eyes yet all most people saw was a surging stock market day in and day out thanks to the big dogs like Apple and others who were holding up the indices. I was telling my brother from another mother that he should be thankful that his 401k, assuming he has one, is now buying up equities at bargain basement prices each and every week. They could get even cheaper if this thing really turns to shit.
That whole wheelchair thing that I was referring to earlier in this here blog ended up just fine. Mrs G managed just fine and the missus and I were there to assist as promised. The hardest part for me was the waiting while Mrs G was in with her physician. I couldn't understand why it took the better part of an hour but it did so that was that. The missus went in with her mom to see the doctor and when I asked her this morning if she was glad that she did that, she replied, "I suppose." Mrs G took to her walker instead of her wheelchair when she went in to see the doctor and I wondered if she wasn't trying to put on a good face. She was kinda saying, "I took their best punch and I'm still standing!" That's the kind of woman that she is. Nothing but grit and glory! You go, girl!
Checking In
24/04/22 07:01
I suppose I should start to give a little thought to getting our garden up and running this Spring. It wouldn't take much. We did nothing last year and that suited me just fine. Not having things to water was a bit of a relief. That said, I did miss having some nice tomatoes as we went deep into the summer months. There's always a tradeoff when you make choices and growing tomatoes or not growing tomatoes kind of makes the point. The good news is that I think I missed having tomatoes last year just enough so that growing some this season will more than make up for not growing them last year.
We have neighbors with a horse farm of sorts who sell fertilizer every year from a makeshift roadside stand on their property. It's homegrown poop is what it is. With the prices of fertilizer worldwide going through the roof because of the war in Ukraine, I was just a little curious as to how much extra our neighbors might be charging for their product. Before the war, or last year as it were, they charged $5 a bag. I noticed in driving by yesterday that the prices were the same but the bags were smaller. That's how they do it. That's how everyone does it.
Maybe it was my imagination but the last time I used a bag or two of their manure in my garden I ended up with a terrific bumper crop of very tasty tomatoes. We eat a lot of salads hereabouts and the missus loves a nice tomato or two on her salads. She'll not buy store-bought tomatoes. Can you blame her? I don't think we had a single salad over the course of the winter with any tomatoes organic or otherwise. We tried them when they looked good here and there but the taste fell short each and every time. After a while you just stop doing what you're doing and wait for a better opportunity. That opportunity is now. Well, within the next few weeks anyway. I'll pick up a bag of fertilizer today. We'll have the plants in the ground by the end of May.
I have a little painting to do here and there around the house. I'm waiting for a favorable stretch of weather without rain in the forecast and with temperatures staying in the mid to upper forties so let's just say it could be any day now. I have the stain I need and the appropriate brushes and buckets so I'm ready to get started. It's not a big job so it shouldn't take all that long. As usual, I'll take a before and after picture for the missus so she can better appreciate the effort and end result. Who doesn't like to wow their missus? She's been talking a lot about blinds for our new window but I'm happy with a sturdy curtain rod and some heavy weight curtains to keep the cold at bay during the winter months.
I took some video yesterday of Mrs G getting up and about at the rehab joint. It was the first time I've seen her on her feet since she went in for surgery some weeks ago. She was moving along a pretty good clip which more than surprised me. Well, a pretty good clip anyway for someone who I've not seen walking in maybe a month's time. The missus tells me that she thinks her mom should probably be pushing herself a little harder but that isn't what I saw when I saw her up and about yesterday. I wouldn't say that she's tripping the light fantastic but it's pretty darn close. I'm glad I got it on video.
Maybe not surprisingly, Mrs G was very interested in seeing the video that I took. She said something about straightening up a little more so she's not hunched over when she walks. Good for her. She knows what she needs to do to get up and running again. Could the video be a tool to help her with her rehabilitation? It certainly looked and sounded that way after both taking the video and having her watch it after the fact. I asked Mrs G if she minded that we send out the video to Debbie-Rah-Rah and she agreed. It was heartening for Ms. Rah-Rah to see her mom back on her feet and kicking butt. Well, it might be a while before she's kicking butt but you get my drift.
I'm waking up to a Nor'easter this morning. I'm a little reluctant to get started in this here journal knowing full well that I could lose everything if a good gust comes along and we lose electricity for even a second or two. I'll try to do a save after every paragraph and that should do the trick. Had I known that this storm was coming down the pike I might have gone a little longer on my bike ride yesterday. If this storm passes through and things dry out a bit I might be back in the saddle sometime after the noon hour. That's wishful thinking on my part. All the same, it's good to have goals.
I've had a good mind to buy a couple of bike tires recently and I had it on my list of things to do this week. I had swapped off the original tires that came with the bike because I thought I might like to have a slimmed down version of tires which would give me an easier ride. I think the jury is still out on whether or not I gained anything from the swap but the tires, or at least the rear tire, is nearly threadbare now so I needed to replace that tire before I get a flat while out on a ride. It just so happened that I had the original tire hanging on a hook in the garage. Why not just throw it on and forget about having to buy a new tire. Right? File that under "The Lord works in mysterious ways."
I was surprised that the missus didn't check in with her mum yesterday. She sent no texts, she made no phone calls, and she sent no e-mails. I even reminded her a couple of times. At some point just before nine last night, I think she decided that it was just too late to call. I could see Mrs G in my mind's eye as clear as day sitting and lying around wondering why nobody called, why nobody stopped by, and why nobody cared enough to take a minute or two out of their busy day to say hey. That isn't to say that someone didn't but nobody from our household did and that's on us. Well, on the missus anyway. I did what I could. It wasn't enough.
A Trump appointed Federal judge lifted the CDC's nationwide mandate yesterday as it relates to the requirement on wearing masks on public transportation. The CDC had extended it for some two weeks after the initial period expired and the Biden Administration happily signed off on it. I'm not a big fan of federal judges rendering decisions that impact the entire country but in this case it's a good thing and not a bad thing. The judge said the CDC had no such power to make these kinds of decisions and any like decisions would have to come from Congress. The left was in a tizzy, of course, and the right was running around giving high fives to everyone in sight. The Biden Administration has yet to file an appeal as I sit here some 24 hours after the ruling came down.
I've done a pretty good job over time keeping my thistle feeder filled and cleaned for the benefit of our resident finches. I ran out of thistle recently and had none to refill the feeder so it went unfilled for a good week or so. It never ran out completely but I was ever mindful of the fact that my finches would be looking for alternative sources of food were I to let it go unfilled much longer. I finally got around to refilling it yesterday and not a moment too soon is what I guess I would say seeing as I am that the Nor'easter is upon us in spades this morning. The finches are happily feeding at the feeder once again and they couldn't care less about the storm. You done good, Johnny.
Joey Bumbles Biden is coming to town this week for some reason or other. He's just such a fucking disgrace that you have to wonder why they let him out in public at all. I saw some video yesterday of Biden at an outing where he was chatting in his senile way to a line of well wishers about Afghanistan or something. He was going off on a tangent as dementia patients will often do on occasion and along comes the Easter Bunny (Secret Service?) to usher Biden off and away before he spilled national secrets or worse. This is the buffoon that will be making his way to my State this week. Will the Easter Bunny be joining him?
I'm thinking of making a sign to take down to where the President is holding his event. There are so many things, so many disasters, that this president is responsible for that I hardly know where to begin when it comes to my sign. Would I ever get close enough to Biden so that he could see my sign? Would he care? Would he have the Secret Service come and take my sign so as not to embarrass he and the First Lady on their first trip to New Hampshire? Would my sign be one of many in a sea of signs sending what we might hope to be just the right message to this senile old fuck? Does he even know how despised he is? I think I want my sign to read as follows: Stolen elections have catastrophic consequences."
I have a leftover wood pile from back in the day when we used our wood stove if only occasionally. It's been sitting there for years. I always knew that I wouldn't be burning the wood but didn't do anything with it in the event I changed my mind. It's good to have an alternative source of heat just in case. Right? I don't know how long wood stays good until it is no longer suitable to burn but, by pretty much any measure, this particular wood pile has seen its best days come and go. It's more of an eyesore than anything else these days so I decided that I would take a trunk load or two to the local recycling center every week until it was all gone. I'm getting there slowly but surely.
I could have paid someone to come and take the entire wood pile. I was trying to envision how exactly that might look. Would they dispatch two or three men to remove the woodpile log by log? Would they have a machine that might just come in and pick it all up in one or two fell swoops? How much would they charge to do a job like this? More often than not I'm looking for something to do these days so taking this job on had some appeal. Enough appeal so that doing it myself even if it took a few weeks was preferable to paying someone to come and do the job. Think of the sense of satisfaction that awaits me when all is said and done. I think I made the right decision. Almost there.
What the heck is happening with Netflix stock? I don't own any but I noticed some Twitter feeds blowing up after hours last night when Netflix stock took a nosedive. I think it lost something like 25% in the aftermarket. Their stock has gone from $700 something to $300 something in the space of five months. I thought this stock was a darling of sorts. That goes to show you how much I know about the company and their stock. If I understand it, it sounds like they had reported a loss of subscribers in one or more previous quarters. That's all it takes for a high flyer like Netflix to start trading like a penny stock? Talk about fickle.
Speaking of turkeys, did I mention that we have a family of turkeys living in our neighborhood? They're around pretty much all the time so there's that. I can't walk out my front door without seeing them here and there around our yard. I don't know that they're around because we have a bird feeder in one or more trees in and around our yard but that is where I find them more often than not. They don't bother me one way or another but I do find that they take some getting used to. We've gone from having zero turkeys around to having maybe a dozen or so around on any given day. I hope what they say about turkey's eating ticks is at least somewhat true.
Will there come a day when I find them to be a nuisance? I guess anything is possible. From all appearances, the males rule the roost so to speak. The male turkeys are quite obvious from the way they strut around with their tail feathers fanned while following the females. It reminds me of those male performance enhancement drug ads that I hear on the radio: If you have an erection for more than four hours you should consult your physician. I don't know the specific parts of the male anatomy but the coloration of the breast and neck area of the male turkeys become almost effervescent with red and blue hues when they're in close proximity to the females. The females, for the most part, seem oblivious to the charms of their male counterparts effervescent or otherwise.
The missus keeps asking me if I can find a clip of the video where Bumbles Biden is giving a speech at a lectern and he turns around after finishing his speech with his hand extended as though he expects to be shaking hands with someone. There was only one problem. There was no one there. Once Biden realizes that no one is there after standing with his hand extended for at least 5 seconds, he turns with his back to the audience and seems to wander aimlessly for a painful few seconds more before heading off to the sidelines. She wants to share the clip with her friend who is a die hard democrat. I'm not sure why she wants to do that exactly, but her friend is such a stalwart democrat and Biden supporter that he might well dismiss her good and honorable intentions as some kind of right wing conspiracy. Nothing could be further from the truth. She doesn't have a QAnon bone in her body.
It's too funny. Demented Joey Biden confided in his pal, Barack the goat herder, that he intends to take on Trump when he is up for re-election in 2024. It is the first announcement of its kind coming from Biden. It also comes as something of a surprise to those in his party who are lining up to run their own campaigns assuming that Joey's name won't be on the ballot. You would also think that such a pronouncement would get a certain amount of attention by the media and elsewhere that goes along with a party's candidate throwing his hat in the ring for re-election. It's so ludicrous to think that he is even going to be stable enough to run much less win in 2024 that this announcement of his has gotten zero traction in the media. The media can put a spin on a lot of things but this re-election thing is a bridge too far.
Depending on which television station you're tuned into during the day or during the evening, you are going to get two opposing views of Bumbles Biden. FOX puts these so-called blunders and so-called whatever's of Biden's on a loop whereas the CNN's of the world never show them at all. It tells you everything you need to know about the power of the media and their ability to weave or leave unwoven stories about political candidates and their shortcomings. CNN and their leftist sisters and brothers in the media have no intention of showing anything that detracts from the narrative that they have worked so hard to cultivate when it comes to Joey Bumbles Biden. Besides, he is the president of the United States and he deserves no less is what they would tell you.
On one hand, you can see where it makes sense to not show just how weak and fragile Biden is on one or more of our national and global networks. We have enemies around the world and having a president with the kinds of deficits that we see with Biden would be to invite trouble. Case in point: The invasion of Ukraine by Russia. I'm assuming that what I see on our domestic airwaves from the likes of CNN is what CNN is selling around the globe. I could be wrong about that. The same is probably true of FOX coverage although I don't know that FOX has the kind of a reach internationally that CNN has. At the end of the day, all politics is local. How you view it and what you end up believing depends on what you choose to watch.
I've got to hand it to Governor DeSantis in Florida. He took on Disney and their woke culture and he beat them at their own game. It's good to see these woke corporate fucks take one on the chin for a change. Disney pushed back against legislation that they loved to refer to as the "Don't say gay" bill. It was nothing of the kind but they decided to bow to their LGBTQ employees and push back against everything that the legislation was trying to accomplish anyway. Just so we're clear, it was legislation to make sure that Florida's first and second graders weren't exposed to any discussion of sex and gender issues in the classroom. The good news is, the Florida legislature voted yesterday to remove a special status that Disney has long enjoyed going back to the sixties. The executives at Disney must be scratching their heads this morning wondering why they ever took up this fight.
The Florida legislature also voted on a gerrymandering plan yesterday by DeSantis which ended up giving Florida 3 or 4 additional republican congressional seats at the expense of a couple of black militant congress people. Good for them. You should have seen the black legislators taking to the floor with all their pissing and moaning about losing the seats to the republicans. I think the end result was that Florida republicans will now have a 20-4 advantage in republican districts. This is how you do it, republicans. If you're listening, pay attention to what DeSantis is doing in Florida. And, believe you me, if the democrats had the same opportunity, they would be doing precisely what the republicans have done. All they have left now is to file their little lawsuits to see if the courts will weigh in on their behalf. It's probably too late to change anything even if they win a reprieve.
I saw this video yesterday of three cops collaring a ten-year old black kid for pinching a bag of potato chips. I'm not sure where it all happened but that was hardly the issue. You could hear a couple of adults in the background yelling at the police for nabbing the kid for what they perceived to be a minor transgression as transgressions go. It didn't look to me like they were manhandling him but he ended up in the back of the patrol car and where it went from there I'm not sure. You would think it was George Floyd all over again. You know, with the knee on the back of the neck and all the rest. It was nothing of the sort, of course, although it might have seemed a bit heavy handed for stealing or attempting to steal bag of chips. Would a ten-year old white kid have been handled the same way? Maybe, and maybe not. Let's see what kind of sentence he receives and we can revisit this issue. Spoiler alert: There will be no sentence.
The missus works on occasion with a person in another state. They do much of their work long distance. Every so often, the missus will make the trip and work with her person face to face. She'll get calls every so often when she's working from home where her person is having computer trouble with this or that and she's hard pressed to help him because she can't see what he's seeing and he doesn't do a very good job of describing the problem he's having. Maybe he's moved or renamed a document and he can no longer locate it. Maybe he's trying to open a document but the document will no longer cooperate. Maybe he can open the document but he can't change any of the text. You see where I'm going with all of this. Working long distance can be difficult.
Back in the day I used to work with an application called Timbuktu. It allowed me to locally access and control a computer in another location. I'm thinking that this is precisely what the missus needs to help expedite the requests of her "client" when he calls on her to lend a hand. I've been looking around for an application like Timbuktu and have found a lot of like-applications but now I worry about the missus's ability to go to her clients home, install the application, and work through the issues required to make it all work. I'm thinking I'll see if I can't have my brother-from-another-mother demo this little puppy, once I decide which one to use, and the missus can look over my shoulder while we're going through the motions. Let me run this by the missus and I'll see what she thinks. It could be the bees knees.
It was another tough day in the financial markets yesterday. It looks they are starting to come for the big boys. I'm talking about the Amazons, the Googles, the Tesla's, the Apples, etc. When the NASDAQ has a 500 point swing from the highs of the day to the lows of the day you know something is up. April is supposed to be a good month for the markets but it has been quite the opposite. It's almost as though the fed heads are wanting to suppress demand with the language that they're using. I suppose that's one way of reeling in inflation rates. With mortgage rates now above 5%, you have to feel for folks whose monthly payments are spiking due to the increase in rates. Prices at the pump aren't easing at all and that is taking a huge bite out of anyone who has any discretionary income left. Would things be any better if we had a president with approval ratings in something besides the thirties?
I watched a little bit of Marjorie Taylor Greene on the witness stand in Georgia yesterday. She's on trial for allegedly violating the 14th amendment to the Constitution that supposedly says something about insurrectionists not being able to run for political office. It's a stretch to say that she was even involved in the January 6th so-called insurrection in our nation's capitol since she was one of many congressmen who were in the building but tucked away while the riot was underway in another part of the building. Some loathsome democrat unearthed this strategy of theirs to prevent republican congressmen from running for re-election for their involvement in the "insurrection" but it's not going to work. The good people of Georgia will decided Ms. Green's fate and that is the way it should be. Full stop.
Did it irritate the hell out of me to watch this scumbag of an attorney working for the democrats try to get under her skin? You bet your ass it did. He went through tweet after tweet of Marjorie being Marjorie and some of it wasn't the least bit flattering. She stood by her convictions about the 2020 election being stolen and she didn't back away from any of her caustic remarks about Nancy Pelosi who is the current Speaker of the House in Congress. It just so happens that most God loving Americans with any sense of history find Nancy Pelosi to be about as despicable a human being as they come and referring to her as a "traitor" to our American ideals is not a stretch by any measure. I didn't get a chance to watch it all but what I did see hardly warranted what the democrats are trying to do to her and, to a lesser extent, the constituents she represents in the great state of Georgia. God love her!
We have neighbors with a horse farm of sorts who sell fertilizer every year from a makeshift roadside stand on their property. It's homegrown poop is what it is. With the prices of fertilizer worldwide going through the roof because of the war in Ukraine, I was just a little curious as to how much extra our neighbors might be charging for their product. Before the war, or last year as it were, they charged $5 a bag. I noticed in driving by yesterday that the prices were the same but the bags were smaller. That's how they do it. That's how everyone does it.
Maybe it was my imagination but the last time I used a bag or two of their manure in my garden I ended up with a terrific bumper crop of very tasty tomatoes. We eat a lot of salads hereabouts and the missus loves a nice tomato or two on her salads. She'll not buy store-bought tomatoes. Can you blame her? I don't think we had a single salad over the course of the winter with any tomatoes organic or otherwise. We tried them when they looked good here and there but the taste fell short each and every time. After a while you just stop doing what you're doing and wait for a better opportunity. That opportunity is now. Well, within the next few weeks anyway. I'll pick up a bag of fertilizer today. We'll have the plants in the ground by the end of May.
I have a little painting to do here and there around the house. I'm waiting for a favorable stretch of weather without rain in the forecast and with temperatures staying in the mid to upper forties so let's just say it could be any day now. I have the stain I need and the appropriate brushes and buckets so I'm ready to get started. It's not a big job so it shouldn't take all that long. As usual, I'll take a before and after picture for the missus so she can better appreciate the effort and end result. Who doesn't like to wow their missus? She's been talking a lot about blinds for our new window but I'm happy with a sturdy curtain rod and some heavy weight curtains to keep the cold at bay during the winter months.
I took some video yesterday of Mrs G getting up and about at the rehab joint. It was the first time I've seen her on her feet since she went in for surgery some weeks ago. She was moving along a pretty good clip which more than surprised me. Well, a pretty good clip anyway for someone who I've not seen walking in maybe a month's time. The missus tells me that she thinks her mom should probably be pushing herself a little harder but that isn't what I saw when I saw her up and about yesterday. I wouldn't say that she's tripping the light fantastic but it's pretty darn close. I'm glad I got it on video.
Maybe not surprisingly, Mrs G was very interested in seeing the video that I took. She said something about straightening up a little more so she's not hunched over when she walks. Good for her. She knows what she needs to do to get up and running again. Could the video be a tool to help her with her rehabilitation? It certainly looked and sounded that way after both taking the video and having her watch it after the fact. I asked Mrs G if she minded that we send out the video to Debbie-Rah-Rah and she agreed. It was heartening for Ms. Rah-Rah to see her mom back on her feet and kicking butt. Well, it might be a while before she's kicking butt but you get my drift.
I'm waking up to a Nor'easter this morning. I'm a little reluctant to get started in this here journal knowing full well that I could lose everything if a good gust comes along and we lose electricity for even a second or two. I'll try to do a save after every paragraph and that should do the trick. Had I known that this storm was coming down the pike I might have gone a little longer on my bike ride yesterday. If this storm passes through and things dry out a bit I might be back in the saddle sometime after the noon hour. That's wishful thinking on my part. All the same, it's good to have goals.
I've had a good mind to buy a couple of bike tires recently and I had it on my list of things to do this week. I had swapped off the original tires that came with the bike because I thought I might like to have a slimmed down version of tires which would give me an easier ride. I think the jury is still out on whether or not I gained anything from the swap but the tires, or at least the rear tire, is nearly threadbare now so I needed to replace that tire before I get a flat while out on a ride. It just so happened that I had the original tire hanging on a hook in the garage. Why not just throw it on and forget about having to buy a new tire. Right? File that under "The Lord works in mysterious ways."
I was surprised that the missus didn't check in with her mum yesterday. She sent no texts, she made no phone calls, and she sent no e-mails. I even reminded her a couple of times. At some point just before nine last night, I think she decided that it was just too late to call. I could see Mrs G in my mind's eye as clear as day sitting and lying around wondering why nobody called, why nobody stopped by, and why nobody cared enough to take a minute or two out of their busy day to say hey. That isn't to say that someone didn't but nobody from our household did and that's on us. Well, on the missus anyway. I did what I could. It wasn't enough.
A Trump appointed Federal judge lifted the CDC's nationwide mandate yesterday as it relates to the requirement on wearing masks on public transportation. The CDC had extended it for some two weeks after the initial period expired and the Biden Administration happily signed off on it. I'm not a big fan of federal judges rendering decisions that impact the entire country but in this case it's a good thing and not a bad thing. The judge said the CDC had no such power to make these kinds of decisions and any like decisions would have to come from Congress. The left was in a tizzy, of course, and the right was running around giving high fives to everyone in sight. The Biden Administration has yet to file an appeal as I sit here some 24 hours after the ruling came down.
I've done a pretty good job over time keeping my thistle feeder filled and cleaned for the benefit of our resident finches. I ran out of thistle recently and had none to refill the feeder so it went unfilled for a good week or so. It never ran out completely but I was ever mindful of the fact that my finches would be looking for alternative sources of food were I to let it go unfilled much longer. I finally got around to refilling it yesterday and not a moment too soon is what I guess I would say seeing as I am that the Nor'easter is upon us in spades this morning. The finches are happily feeding at the feeder once again and they couldn't care less about the storm. You done good, Johnny.
Joey Bumbles Biden is coming to town this week for some reason or other. He's just such a fucking disgrace that you have to wonder why they let him out in public at all. I saw some video yesterday of Biden at an outing where he was chatting in his senile way to a line of well wishers about Afghanistan or something. He was going off on a tangent as dementia patients will often do on occasion and along comes the Easter Bunny (Secret Service?) to usher Biden off and away before he spilled national secrets or worse. This is the buffoon that will be making his way to my State this week. Will the Easter Bunny be joining him?
I'm thinking of making a sign to take down to where the President is holding his event. There are so many things, so many disasters, that this president is responsible for that I hardly know where to begin when it comes to my sign. Would I ever get close enough to Biden so that he could see my sign? Would he care? Would he have the Secret Service come and take my sign so as not to embarrass he and the First Lady on their first trip to New Hampshire? Would my sign be one of many in a sea of signs sending what we might hope to be just the right message to this senile old fuck? Does he even know how despised he is? I think I want my sign to read as follows: Stolen elections have catastrophic consequences."
I have a leftover wood pile from back in the day when we used our wood stove if only occasionally. It's been sitting there for years. I always knew that I wouldn't be burning the wood but didn't do anything with it in the event I changed my mind. It's good to have an alternative source of heat just in case. Right? I don't know how long wood stays good until it is no longer suitable to burn but, by pretty much any measure, this particular wood pile has seen its best days come and go. It's more of an eyesore than anything else these days so I decided that I would take a trunk load or two to the local recycling center every week until it was all gone. I'm getting there slowly but surely.
I could have paid someone to come and take the entire wood pile. I was trying to envision how exactly that might look. Would they dispatch two or three men to remove the woodpile log by log? Would they have a machine that might just come in and pick it all up in one or two fell swoops? How much would they charge to do a job like this? More often than not I'm looking for something to do these days so taking this job on had some appeal. Enough appeal so that doing it myself even if it took a few weeks was preferable to paying someone to come and do the job. Think of the sense of satisfaction that awaits me when all is said and done. I think I made the right decision. Almost there.
What the heck is happening with Netflix stock? I don't own any but I noticed some Twitter feeds blowing up after hours last night when Netflix stock took a nosedive. I think it lost something like 25% in the aftermarket. Their stock has gone from $700 something to $300 something in the space of five months. I thought this stock was a darling of sorts. That goes to show you how much I know about the company and their stock. If I understand it, it sounds like they had reported a loss of subscribers in one or more previous quarters. That's all it takes for a high flyer like Netflix to start trading like a penny stock? Talk about fickle.
Speaking of turkeys, did I mention that we have a family of turkeys living in our neighborhood? They're around pretty much all the time so there's that. I can't walk out my front door without seeing them here and there around our yard. I don't know that they're around because we have a bird feeder in one or more trees in and around our yard but that is where I find them more often than not. They don't bother me one way or another but I do find that they take some getting used to. We've gone from having zero turkeys around to having maybe a dozen or so around on any given day. I hope what they say about turkey's eating ticks is at least somewhat true.
Will there come a day when I find them to be a nuisance? I guess anything is possible. From all appearances, the males rule the roost so to speak. The male turkeys are quite obvious from the way they strut around with their tail feathers fanned while following the females. It reminds me of those male performance enhancement drug ads that I hear on the radio: If you have an erection for more than four hours you should consult your physician. I don't know the specific parts of the male anatomy but the coloration of the breast and neck area of the male turkeys become almost effervescent with red and blue hues when they're in close proximity to the females. The females, for the most part, seem oblivious to the charms of their male counterparts effervescent or otherwise.
The missus keeps asking me if I can find a clip of the video where Bumbles Biden is giving a speech at a lectern and he turns around after finishing his speech with his hand extended as though he expects to be shaking hands with someone. There was only one problem. There was no one there. Once Biden realizes that no one is there after standing with his hand extended for at least 5 seconds, he turns with his back to the audience and seems to wander aimlessly for a painful few seconds more before heading off to the sidelines. She wants to share the clip with her friend who is a die hard democrat. I'm not sure why she wants to do that exactly, but her friend is such a stalwart democrat and Biden supporter that he might well dismiss her good and honorable intentions as some kind of right wing conspiracy. Nothing could be further from the truth. She doesn't have a QAnon bone in her body.
It's too funny. Demented Joey Biden confided in his pal, Barack the goat herder, that he intends to take on Trump when he is up for re-election in 2024. It is the first announcement of its kind coming from Biden. It also comes as something of a surprise to those in his party who are lining up to run their own campaigns assuming that Joey's name won't be on the ballot. You would also think that such a pronouncement would get a certain amount of attention by the media and elsewhere that goes along with a party's candidate throwing his hat in the ring for re-election. It's so ludicrous to think that he is even going to be stable enough to run much less win in 2024 that this announcement of his has gotten zero traction in the media. The media can put a spin on a lot of things but this re-election thing is a bridge too far.
Depending on which television station you're tuned into during the day or during the evening, you are going to get two opposing views of Bumbles Biden. FOX puts these so-called blunders and so-called whatever's of Biden's on a loop whereas the CNN's of the world never show them at all. It tells you everything you need to know about the power of the media and their ability to weave or leave unwoven stories about political candidates and their shortcomings. CNN and their leftist sisters and brothers in the media have no intention of showing anything that detracts from the narrative that they have worked so hard to cultivate when it comes to Joey Bumbles Biden. Besides, he is the president of the United States and he deserves no less is what they would tell you.
On one hand, you can see where it makes sense to not show just how weak and fragile Biden is on one or more of our national and global networks. We have enemies around the world and having a president with the kinds of deficits that we see with Biden would be to invite trouble. Case in point: The invasion of Ukraine by Russia. I'm assuming that what I see on our domestic airwaves from the likes of CNN is what CNN is selling around the globe. I could be wrong about that. The same is probably true of FOX coverage although I don't know that FOX has the kind of a reach internationally that CNN has. At the end of the day, all politics is local. How you view it and what you end up believing depends on what you choose to watch.
I've got to hand it to Governor DeSantis in Florida. He took on Disney and their woke culture and he beat them at their own game. It's good to see these woke corporate fucks take one on the chin for a change. Disney pushed back against legislation that they loved to refer to as the "Don't say gay" bill. It was nothing of the kind but they decided to bow to their LGBTQ employees and push back against everything that the legislation was trying to accomplish anyway. Just so we're clear, it was legislation to make sure that Florida's first and second graders weren't exposed to any discussion of sex and gender issues in the classroom. The good news is, the Florida legislature voted yesterday to remove a special status that Disney has long enjoyed going back to the sixties. The executives at Disney must be scratching their heads this morning wondering why they ever took up this fight.
The Florida legislature also voted on a gerrymandering plan yesterday by DeSantis which ended up giving Florida 3 or 4 additional republican congressional seats at the expense of a couple of black militant congress people. Good for them. You should have seen the black legislators taking to the floor with all their pissing and moaning about losing the seats to the republicans. I think the end result was that Florida republicans will now have a 20-4 advantage in republican districts. This is how you do it, republicans. If you're listening, pay attention to what DeSantis is doing in Florida. And, believe you me, if the democrats had the same opportunity, they would be doing precisely what the republicans have done. All they have left now is to file their little lawsuits to see if the courts will weigh in on their behalf. It's probably too late to change anything even if they win a reprieve.
I saw this video yesterday of three cops collaring a ten-year old black kid for pinching a bag of potato chips. I'm not sure where it all happened but that was hardly the issue. You could hear a couple of adults in the background yelling at the police for nabbing the kid for what they perceived to be a minor transgression as transgressions go. It didn't look to me like they were manhandling him but he ended up in the back of the patrol car and where it went from there I'm not sure. You would think it was George Floyd all over again. You know, with the knee on the back of the neck and all the rest. It was nothing of the sort, of course, although it might have seemed a bit heavy handed for stealing or attempting to steal bag of chips. Would a ten-year old white kid have been handled the same way? Maybe, and maybe not. Let's see what kind of sentence he receives and we can revisit this issue. Spoiler alert: There will be no sentence.
The missus works on occasion with a person in another state. They do much of their work long distance. Every so often, the missus will make the trip and work with her person face to face. She'll get calls every so often when she's working from home where her person is having computer trouble with this or that and she's hard pressed to help him because she can't see what he's seeing and he doesn't do a very good job of describing the problem he's having. Maybe he's moved or renamed a document and he can no longer locate it. Maybe he's trying to open a document but the document will no longer cooperate. Maybe he can open the document but he can't change any of the text. You see where I'm going with all of this. Working long distance can be difficult.
Back in the day I used to work with an application called Timbuktu. It allowed me to locally access and control a computer in another location. I'm thinking that this is precisely what the missus needs to help expedite the requests of her "client" when he calls on her to lend a hand. I've been looking around for an application like Timbuktu and have found a lot of like-applications but now I worry about the missus's ability to go to her clients home, install the application, and work through the issues required to make it all work. I'm thinking I'll see if I can't have my brother-from-another-mother demo this little puppy, once I decide which one to use, and the missus can look over my shoulder while we're going through the motions. Let me run this by the missus and I'll see what she thinks. It could be the bees knees.
It was another tough day in the financial markets yesterday. It looks they are starting to come for the big boys. I'm talking about the Amazons, the Googles, the Tesla's, the Apples, etc. When the NASDAQ has a 500 point swing from the highs of the day to the lows of the day you know something is up. April is supposed to be a good month for the markets but it has been quite the opposite. It's almost as though the fed heads are wanting to suppress demand with the language that they're using. I suppose that's one way of reeling in inflation rates. With mortgage rates now above 5%, you have to feel for folks whose monthly payments are spiking due to the increase in rates. Prices at the pump aren't easing at all and that is taking a huge bite out of anyone who has any discretionary income left. Would things be any better if we had a president with approval ratings in something besides the thirties?
I watched a little bit of Marjorie Taylor Greene on the witness stand in Georgia yesterday. She's on trial for allegedly violating the 14th amendment to the Constitution that supposedly says something about insurrectionists not being able to run for political office. It's a stretch to say that she was even involved in the January 6th so-called insurrection in our nation's capitol since she was one of many congressmen who were in the building but tucked away while the riot was underway in another part of the building. Some loathsome democrat unearthed this strategy of theirs to prevent republican congressmen from running for re-election for their involvement in the "insurrection" but it's not going to work. The good people of Georgia will decided Ms. Green's fate and that is the way it should be. Full stop.
Did it irritate the hell out of me to watch this scumbag of an attorney working for the democrats try to get under her skin? You bet your ass it did. He went through tweet after tweet of Marjorie being Marjorie and some of it wasn't the least bit flattering. She stood by her convictions about the 2020 election being stolen and she didn't back away from any of her caustic remarks about Nancy Pelosi who is the current Speaker of the House in Congress. It just so happens that most God loving Americans with any sense of history find Nancy Pelosi to be about as despicable a human being as they come and referring to her as a "traitor" to our American ideals is not a stretch by any measure. I didn't get a chance to watch it all but what I did see hardly warranted what the democrats are trying to do to her and, to a lesser extent, the constituents she represents in the great state of Georgia. God love her!
False Flags
17/04/22 07:07
I don't know who this Dr. Oz guy is but Trump just endorsed him last night so that should be good enough for me. Right? I'm not so sure that's right. What I worry about is these squishy fucks who tell you what you want to hear and then they vote with the democrats every chance they get. I hear Ozzie even did a show recently about trannies and whatever. No self respecting republican would give that subject an airing much less have it as a featured topic. Get some damn counseling is what I say. Get your head out of your ass and start acting like the man or woman God intended you to be.
Calls like this have Trump supporters scratching their heads. What the hell was he thinking? I know the dufus, Sean Hannity, on FOX has been singing Oz’s praises for a while now. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that Trump was taking Hannity’s advice on this guy. I wish Trump would start paying attention to his gut and stop listening to these people like Hannity who have an entirely different agenda in mind. Maybe Hannity is calling in favors that he thinks Trump owes him for his support back in 2016. The last thing we need in the Senate when we take it back this fall is another Romney. I think Oz is another Romney. There, I said it.
Trump had yet another rally in North Carolina last night. He played to a sell-out crowd as is usually the case these days. He looks good, he looks strong, and his messaging is spot on. Americans need to hear other voices calling out the travesty that is the Biden Administration. I don’t know where the republicans are overall, but it’s fucking crickets if we’re talking about republicans in Washington, DC. Why they’re not singing from the rooftops about the goings-on in the Biden era, I’ll never know. This is when you do it, folks. If you want to represent us, then God damn it, represent us.
We had dinner out last night at a place in Exeter New Hampshire called the Sawbelly Brewery. It was the second time since March 2020 and the beginning of the Covid bullshit that we've been out to dinner. If the missus isn't ready, she isn't ready. Well, she was ready last night. Her sister was in town and that gave us the perfect opportunity to go out for a nice meal before her sister left town. The food was good, the drink was too strong, and the music was a little too loud here and there. Oh, and the salad that the missus ordered was not as good as the one that I ordered. Guess which one she ate?
It wasn't at all busy and that suited the missus just fine. Fewer people meant fewer opportunities to get exposure of any kind to the dreaded Covid. Covid has been on the wane as of late although Im hearing stories of it emerging in certain spots throughout the country. Emerging, my ass. They bring it out when they want to use it to achieve their political ends and not a moment sooner. There was an entire contingent of politicians in our nations's capitol last week that came down with Covid. How the hell does that work? It just so happens that the lot of them were slated to go on vacation so, voila, everyone comes down with Covid and everyone heads out of town a week or two early. Bastards.
Who the fuck do they think they're fooling? I do keep an eye out as to how many cases we have here in town and we've gone from zero cases two weeks ago to nine cases today. Maybe the politicians are just taking advantage of the rumor that the virus is starting to surge once again to do their dirty work. Never let a crisis go to waste, as the inimitable what's his name once said. You know where we're going with a of this. Right? The democrats are going to use it to suppress votes and resurrect absentee voting for the upcoming midterms in November. They are facing a tsunami of ungodly proportions and they have to do something. Maybe they can salvage the Senate if nothing else.
The missus's sister and I ordered burgers from the menu while the missus ordered a beet salad. Our burgers were quite nice while the beet salad was not up to snuff. The beets looked a little too blanched and the missus hardly touched her salad. She sure seemed to enjoy the chopped salad that I ordered though I'm certain she would have wished that they had put a little less bacon in the salad. The fries that came with the burgers were to die for. They were thick and quartered just so which left them looking more like wedges than what you might get at McDonalds with your Happy Meal. They were also a bit on the crispy side which gave them a bit of crunch and that was nice.
Nobody asks the question anymore about how you want things cooked. I might have preferred my burger medium rare but nobody asked. Maybe the default is medium and that takes the chef off the hook if the customer complains about how well or not so well the burger was cooked. Well, jackass, you should have voiced your preference if you had one. That's the waitress talking. Now that I think of it, the missus's sister was telling us about how she ordered a filet mignon the previous night when dining in Portsmouth with friends and it was served up medium rare. Let me get this straight. She ordered her filet well done but says nothing about how she might like her burger cooked? Interesting.
The lot of us were in town to visit with Mrs G who is still in rehab. Well, I think it's called the skilled nursing section if you want to get precise about it. Mrs G warned us earlier in the day that there was a single case of Covid in the building but on the second floor above her. I'm not sure if she was warning us to not come or not but I stopped in briefly just as we were heading out to the restaurant to bring her a couple of items she had requested. The missus and her sister stayed outside in the car and waited for me to return. If I had contracted Covid while in the building then the ladies waiting in the car were the unintended and unfortunate beneficiaries of said virus once I was back in the car. See how that works?
Mrs G didn't seem too concerned that neither of her daughters were coming into the building to pay a visit. She had other things on her mind and I didn't stay but a minute or two that it took to drop her things off. Mrs G knows all too well that some people are quite fearful of contracting the virus while others slough it off as an afterthought. The prevailing thought is that if you've had your shots, you'll probably not suffer much more than a runny nose or something equally as minor. The actual science behind it all suggests a causal connection between the number of shots one gets and their likelihood of contracting the virus. You'll not hear much about this theory in the Main Street Media.
Cases are nonetheless on the uptick at Mrs G's place. She shared a letter put out by management at her facility citing specific cases and where they were on the campus. Missing from the communication were any further restrictions or lockdowns the likes of which were commonplace just a year ago. Most of their residents have their shots so it's unlikely that things are going to go to hell in a hand basket if one or more residents come down with the virus. Fact of the matter is, nobody is dying of this virus anymore. In fact, this latest variant is even less deadly that its predecessor thus far.
I don't even get the sense that Mrs G is all that concerned when it comes to getting the virus. She's certainly never said as much. She seems more concerned for her children who seem more concerned than she is on any given day. She knows that my missus hasn't been out to eat in a restaurant in two to three years because of her fears unfounded or not that the virus will get to her and she knows that ain't healthy. Her days of pushing her children to live their lives one way or another are pretty much done. The translation back in the hood would be, they goin' to do what they goin' to do. Ain't no amount of cajoling on Mrs G's part that is going to change any of it. Those days are over.
We'll see what we get for the latest CPI number this morning at 8:30 Eastern Standard Time. Biden's people were out on the stump yesterday warning of an "elevated" number to come in when it gets released. It's hard to say what kind of game they're playing here. The consensus is somewhere in the 8 percent plus range so I suppose if it comes in with a 7 instead of an eight they can take a victory lap and the stock market will be off and running when it opens at 9:30. That's how you do it. Right? Maybe people will feel good about the fact that the number isn't starting off with a nine. If there's a golidlocks number out there, I'm not sure what it is. You know, not too hot and not too cold.
I''m seeing and hearing a lot about what teachers are exposing our children to these days in school and it's disturbing. If the subject is age appropriate then that's fine. When it's not age appropriate, then that's not fine. I hear the term "grooming" being kicked around quite a bit and that has some nasty fucking connotations to it truth be told. Much of what I'm referring to here has to do with gender and sexual matters so that's dicey no matter how you slice it. The last thing you want your kindergartner exposed to is a man who thinks he's a woman, or vice versa, telling your children that this sort of thing is mainstream or normal. It just isn't. And don't be giving my children hugs. I don't have any school-aged children but that's beside the point.
Is it too conspiracy minded to think that this is part of some larger programing effort on the past of the leftists in our country to attack our family structure? I can't for the life of me see the bigger picture but here but I suspect that it's part and parcel of some twisted version of what Hillary Clinton had in mind when she said, "it takes a village." You know, diversity, equality and all that bullshit. Parents can no longer be trusted to raise their children to be the kind of caring and compassionate individuals who will be strong and resilient enough to embrace the village that the leftists have constructed on their behalf.
This Elon Musk thing is getting interesting. He's not going to take the seat on the board of Twitter and will instead be pursuing a hostile takeover of Twitter? Holy cow-ski! This has to have the employees of Twitter in something of a meltdown is what I'm guessing. Tucker Carlson referred to Twitter as the town square and said something on his show last night about whomever controls town square controls everything. I think he's right about that. His comments opened my eyes a bit as to the power of Twitter and what it means when Twitter shuts down voices and controls narratives of their choosing.
Make no mistake about it. Twitter is king of social media platforms. It is truly a town square. Unfortunately, it has been taken over by the woke fucking mob that looks to take over everything else in the alternative media space. Tucker also said something about it (Twitter) being the only army on the field where, in a healthy competition, you have two competing armies on the field with competing interests. If Elon can take hold of this behemoth and rid the joint of its employees who control the algorithms I think we have a chance to restore free speech and a level playing field for all players.
Parties opposed to his hostile takeover have already filed lawsuits contesting the manner in which he purchased his shares in an effort to thwart his overall efforts to take over the company. I'm not sure that this is a David and Goliath story as much as it is a Goliath and Goliath story. Elon has the means and probably has the tenacity to go the distance if that is what he intends to do. You have to wonder how much of what he's doing is designed drive up the price of his shares but that's a conversation for another day. Near term, if Elon can pull this off, I look forward to having access to a platform where all voices are welcome and even encouraged. The impact on the mid term elections would be significant.
What the heck was that hellacious event that went down on the subway in NYC yesterday? You know, the guy who shot a bunch of people at rush hour and then just disappeared into the fucking ether. Does it strike anyone as weird that there were no cameras catching this guy either going or out of the area where all of this happened? The shooter apparently had a Glock which he left behind at the scene along with a number of other personal effects. Who does that? And, how do you shoot a lot of people but nobody gets killed? I said to the missus that I thought he must have had a small caliber pistol. So, you can imagine my surprise when I learned that he was using a Glock. What the fuck?
The NYPD was very quick to put out the word that this was not a terrorist shooting. They were also exceedingly careful not to refer to the person as a "suspect." He is simply a person of interest at this point, they maintained. We now know his name and I'm certain that they know everything there is to know about him but he is nowhere to be found. What are the chances that he turns up dead? What are the chances that there are a lot of things about this individual that the officials don't want the general public to know about? Is this just one more FBI operation that went terribly wrong? Or, maybe an FBI operation that went terribly right? Is there anything that the democrats won't do to take away our citizen's rights to keep and bear arms? Just thinking out loud here.
I've never much liked the idea of using power tools that can inflict bodily harm if not used properly. I've been especially leery of using power tools that have a mind of their own when things go awry. I'm referring to things like chain saws that can sever jugglers or femoral arteries in the blink of an eye. I just don't trust myself when it comes to using them. I don't know that I've shared these concerns of mine with the missus. There is no need to fill her head with concerns about something that may never come to pass. Well, I threw caution to the wind yesterday when I went to our local Home Depot to rent a chain saw. I finally had reason to use one for better or worse.
There were things to cut down around the house that required more than a handsaw. I actually started out using a hand saw and realized very quickly that it was just not going to cut the mustard. It would require far more effort on my part than I was willing to give and it would likely take longer than I was willing to spend on said tasks. I could have hired someone to do the job but why pay someone a king's ransom to do something that I could do myself. It meant using a tool that I had never used and one that I was rightly concerned about using. The missus tried to talk me out of it not because she was aware of my misgivings but rather because she too has heard stories over time of things getting out of hand when people using power tools like chainsaws.
I rented one of those chainsaws with an ion battery that seemed somehow less scary than a gas powered model. There was no training manual and the fella at the rental center offered no hints or clues on how I might get off on the right foot. I had all the pieces of the puzzle and it was up to me to put them together. I like puzzles so it seemed that I was going to get up close and personal with this nemesis of mine. It only had a sixteen inch blade. How much harm could it do? The missus had work to do in the house so couldn't otherwise oversee my progress or lack thereof once I was out and about with the chainsaw. She knew that there was nothing that she could say or do that would change the trajectory of the plan that I had laid out. I was on my own.
I learned a lot about chainsaws in the four hours that I spent using the tool yesterday. I learned that they are not as scary to use as one might suspect. I learned that they can be very effective if used properly. I learned that they can make a hard job seem easy. I was making so much progress around the yard in the first 45 minutes of using the chainsaw that I entertained the thought of asking my neighbor if she might have a limb or two that she needed trimming. That all came to a screeching halt when the chain on the saw came off while I was whacking away at an overgrown Forsythia bush on our property.
Thankfully, that came late in the game and well after I had used the chainsaw for the things that wanted to use the chainsaw for. That was fine. I had time to sort out the problem and still offer my services but the window of opportunity was closing quickly. I'd seen enough Alaskan reality shows on television where they too had chains come off mid-use and it was never a showstopper. I like taking things apart and putting them back together again so I was feeling very much up to the task. My efforts went unrewarded, unfortunately, although I felt somewhat vindicated when I returned the chainsaw and was told that the chain needed to be replaced. All in all, it was a good day.
Leesy-Weesy back in the Falls got a new car! It's her first new car and I couldn't be happier for her. Uncle Wally sent me a picture of her standing aside her car when she went to pick it up at the dealership. I suspect that Uncle Wally is not being particularly forthcoming when he says that he had nothing to do with putting Leesy behind the wheel of this car so there's that. He said something about talking to the owner of the dealership who lives in his neighborhood but I suspect there's more to the story that he's not telling me. Maybe he's not telling me because he wants this story to be all about Leesy-Weesy? Maybe he's not wanting me to feel like less of a player because they chose not to involve me?
That's fine. She has her new car and she's off to the races. I ordered her a set of floor mats from WeatherTech and she sent me a note yesterday telling me that she received them. She had mentioned earlier that she might like to have grey mats rather than black mats so that's what I ordered. Uncle Wally thought that the interior color of the car might make black mats a better match but this is what Lessy wanted so this is what I had delivered. The missus and I were unanimous in our thinking that the mats were just the right gift for a girl getting her first new car. This little puppy looks like it has all the newest bells and whistles and maybe a few whistles that Leesy might not much care about. It's just really good stuff.
Fast forward 24 hours and Elon Musk has tendered his offer for something like $54 a share to purchase Twitter. The leftists are going crazy. They're at their happiest when they have the platform to themselves when and where they can spew their narratives, shadow ban alternative voices, ban other voices all together, moderate content to their liking, and more generally speaking, use the platform to help them achieve their political and financial goals. The moment it looks like the platform might be used as a platform for all voices, the leftists all of a sudden detest the platform and wants to regulate and even shut it down. The sooner, the better. The even better news is that if Musk can pull this off, it could mean the end for other leftist platforms like FaceBook, etc. Who knew free speech could be so threatening?
Knowing what the leftists could do to your company were they to have the power to do it would be something of a disincentive for Musk if you think about it. Neither political party has had the muscle or maybe the will to take on any of the Tech Giants and that has only further empowered the social media companies to serve their political and governmental masters without fear of retribution from either political party. If Musk were to restore Twitter to a more open forum, that could be the death knell for the radical leftists whose voices have gone unopposed for these past many years. There's nothing to say that once the leftists return to power in Congress that they won't make Musk's dream of a more open town square became something of a dystopian nightmare. There are countless arrows in the quivers of radicals who want nothing to do with the First Amendment to our Constitution. This is your democrat party in the year of our Lord, 2022.
Trump also endorsed JD Vance for the Senate race in Ohio. You know, the guy who wrote the book, "Hillbilly Elegy." I've not been particularly inclined to like Vance because he seems to be something of a smug fuck but the more I listen to him the more I think Trump's endorsement makes sense. He's as smart as they come and he will give as good as he gets and then some once the debates get underway. I have to be very careful in not giving too much stock to what I'm reading in this or that newspaper about the prospects for other Trump-endorsed candidates like Herschel Walker in Georgia and Sarah Palin in Alaska. These democrat run rags will tell you whatever it takes to suppress voter participation. The lies they're telling about Herschel are just disgusting.
It's about time to wrap up this week's journal. Tomorrow's Easter and we'll be doing a little something although I'm not sure what. Maybe we'll have the Ev man over for a decent meal. If the weather cooperates, I'll get in a bike ride. I'd hoped to get the missus some of her favorite jelly beans today but the local store had run out of them so that's that. The store was so busy that I thought it was probably just as busy elsewhere and decided to just go home. I'm not in the mood to stand in lines today. A good friend told me long ago that you should never stand in line to spend your money. I've never forgotten that. Did I get some flowers for the missus? I did not. I did sleep in a Best Western last night though. No, really.
Calls like this have Trump supporters scratching their heads. What the hell was he thinking? I know the dufus, Sean Hannity, on FOX has been singing Oz’s praises for a while now. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that Trump was taking Hannity’s advice on this guy. I wish Trump would start paying attention to his gut and stop listening to these people like Hannity who have an entirely different agenda in mind. Maybe Hannity is calling in favors that he thinks Trump owes him for his support back in 2016. The last thing we need in the Senate when we take it back this fall is another Romney. I think Oz is another Romney. There, I said it.
Trump had yet another rally in North Carolina last night. He played to a sell-out crowd as is usually the case these days. He looks good, he looks strong, and his messaging is spot on. Americans need to hear other voices calling out the travesty that is the Biden Administration. I don’t know where the republicans are overall, but it’s fucking crickets if we’re talking about republicans in Washington, DC. Why they’re not singing from the rooftops about the goings-on in the Biden era, I’ll never know. This is when you do it, folks. If you want to represent us, then God damn it, represent us.
We had dinner out last night at a place in Exeter New Hampshire called the Sawbelly Brewery. It was the second time since March 2020 and the beginning of the Covid bullshit that we've been out to dinner. If the missus isn't ready, she isn't ready. Well, she was ready last night. Her sister was in town and that gave us the perfect opportunity to go out for a nice meal before her sister left town. The food was good, the drink was too strong, and the music was a little too loud here and there. Oh, and the salad that the missus ordered was not as good as the one that I ordered. Guess which one she ate?
It wasn't at all busy and that suited the missus just fine. Fewer people meant fewer opportunities to get exposure of any kind to the dreaded Covid. Covid has been on the wane as of late although Im hearing stories of it emerging in certain spots throughout the country. Emerging, my ass. They bring it out when they want to use it to achieve their political ends and not a moment sooner. There was an entire contingent of politicians in our nations's capitol last week that came down with Covid. How the hell does that work? It just so happens that the lot of them were slated to go on vacation so, voila, everyone comes down with Covid and everyone heads out of town a week or two early. Bastards.
Who the fuck do they think they're fooling? I do keep an eye out as to how many cases we have here in town and we've gone from zero cases two weeks ago to nine cases today. Maybe the politicians are just taking advantage of the rumor that the virus is starting to surge once again to do their dirty work. Never let a crisis go to waste, as the inimitable what's his name once said. You know where we're going with a of this. Right? The democrats are going to use it to suppress votes and resurrect absentee voting for the upcoming midterms in November. They are facing a tsunami of ungodly proportions and they have to do something. Maybe they can salvage the Senate if nothing else.
The missus's sister and I ordered burgers from the menu while the missus ordered a beet salad. Our burgers were quite nice while the beet salad was not up to snuff. The beets looked a little too blanched and the missus hardly touched her salad. She sure seemed to enjoy the chopped salad that I ordered though I'm certain she would have wished that they had put a little less bacon in the salad. The fries that came with the burgers were to die for. They were thick and quartered just so which left them looking more like wedges than what you might get at McDonalds with your Happy Meal. They were also a bit on the crispy side which gave them a bit of crunch and that was nice.
Nobody asks the question anymore about how you want things cooked. I might have preferred my burger medium rare but nobody asked. Maybe the default is medium and that takes the chef off the hook if the customer complains about how well or not so well the burger was cooked. Well, jackass, you should have voiced your preference if you had one. That's the waitress talking. Now that I think of it, the missus's sister was telling us about how she ordered a filet mignon the previous night when dining in Portsmouth with friends and it was served up medium rare. Let me get this straight. She ordered her filet well done but says nothing about how she might like her burger cooked? Interesting.
The lot of us were in town to visit with Mrs G who is still in rehab. Well, I think it's called the skilled nursing section if you want to get precise about it. Mrs G warned us earlier in the day that there was a single case of Covid in the building but on the second floor above her. I'm not sure if she was warning us to not come or not but I stopped in briefly just as we were heading out to the restaurant to bring her a couple of items she had requested. The missus and her sister stayed outside in the car and waited for me to return. If I had contracted Covid while in the building then the ladies waiting in the car were the unintended and unfortunate beneficiaries of said virus once I was back in the car. See how that works?
Mrs G didn't seem too concerned that neither of her daughters were coming into the building to pay a visit. She had other things on her mind and I didn't stay but a minute or two that it took to drop her things off. Mrs G knows all too well that some people are quite fearful of contracting the virus while others slough it off as an afterthought. The prevailing thought is that if you've had your shots, you'll probably not suffer much more than a runny nose or something equally as minor. The actual science behind it all suggests a causal connection between the number of shots one gets and their likelihood of contracting the virus. You'll not hear much about this theory in the Main Street Media.
Cases are nonetheless on the uptick at Mrs G's place. She shared a letter put out by management at her facility citing specific cases and where they were on the campus. Missing from the communication were any further restrictions or lockdowns the likes of which were commonplace just a year ago. Most of their residents have their shots so it's unlikely that things are going to go to hell in a hand basket if one or more residents come down with the virus. Fact of the matter is, nobody is dying of this virus anymore. In fact, this latest variant is even less deadly that its predecessor thus far.
I don't even get the sense that Mrs G is all that concerned when it comes to getting the virus. She's certainly never said as much. She seems more concerned for her children who seem more concerned than she is on any given day. She knows that my missus hasn't been out to eat in a restaurant in two to three years because of her fears unfounded or not that the virus will get to her and she knows that ain't healthy. Her days of pushing her children to live their lives one way or another are pretty much done. The translation back in the hood would be, they goin' to do what they goin' to do. Ain't no amount of cajoling on Mrs G's part that is going to change any of it. Those days are over.
We'll see what we get for the latest CPI number this morning at 8:30 Eastern Standard Time. Biden's people were out on the stump yesterday warning of an "elevated" number to come in when it gets released. It's hard to say what kind of game they're playing here. The consensus is somewhere in the 8 percent plus range so I suppose if it comes in with a 7 instead of an eight they can take a victory lap and the stock market will be off and running when it opens at 9:30. That's how you do it. Right? Maybe people will feel good about the fact that the number isn't starting off with a nine. If there's a golidlocks number out there, I'm not sure what it is. You know, not too hot and not too cold.
I''m seeing and hearing a lot about what teachers are exposing our children to these days in school and it's disturbing. If the subject is age appropriate then that's fine. When it's not age appropriate, then that's not fine. I hear the term "grooming" being kicked around quite a bit and that has some nasty fucking connotations to it truth be told. Much of what I'm referring to here has to do with gender and sexual matters so that's dicey no matter how you slice it. The last thing you want your kindergartner exposed to is a man who thinks he's a woman, or vice versa, telling your children that this sort of thing is mainstream or normal. It just isn't. And don't be giving my children hugs. I don't have any school-aged children but that's beside the point.
Is it too conspiracy minded to think that this is part of some larger programing effort on the past of the leftists in our country to attack our family structure? I can't for the life of me see the bigger picture but here but I suspect that it's part and parcel of some twisted version of what Hillary Clinton had in mind when she said, "it takes a village." You know, diversity, equality and all that bullshit. Parents can no longer be trusted to raise their children to be the kind of caring and compassionate individuals who will be strong and resilient enough to embrace the village that the leftists have constructed on their behalf.
This Elon Musk thing is getting interesting. He's not going to take the seat on the board of Twitter and will instead be pursuing a hostile takeover of Twitter? Holy cow-ski! This has to have the employees of Twitter in something of a meltdown is what I'm guessing. Tucker Carlson referred to Twitter as the town square and said something on his show last night about whomever controls town square controls everything. I think he's right about that. His comments opened my eyes a bit as to the power of Twitter and what it means when Twitter shuts down voices and controls narratives of their choosing.
Make no mistake about it. Twitter is king of social media platforms. It is truly a town square. Unfortunately, it has been taken over by the woke fucking mob that looks to take over everything else in the alternative media space. Tucker also said something about it (Twitter) being the only army on the field where, in a healthy competition, you have two competing armies on the field with competing interests. If Elon can take hold of this behemoth and rid the joint of its employees who control the algorithms I think we have a chance to restore free speech and a level playing field for all players.
Parties opposed to his hostile takeover have already filed lawsuits contesting the manner in which he purchased his shares in an effort to thwart his overall efforts to take over the company. I'm not sure that this is a David and Goliath story as much as it is a Goliath and Goliath story. Elon has the means and probably has the tenacity to go the distance if that is what he intends to do. You have to wonder how much of what he's doing is designed drive up the price of his shares but that's a conversation for another day. Near term, if Elon can pull this off, I look forward to having access to a platform where all voices are welcome and even encouraged. The impact on the mid term elections would be significant.
What the heck was that hellacious event that went down on the subway in NYC yesterday? You know, the guy who shot a bunch of people at rush hour and then just disappeared into the fucking ether. Does it strike anyone as weird that there were no cameras catching this guy either going or out of the area where all of this happened? The shooter apparently had a Glock which he left behind at the scene along with a number of other personal effects. Who does that? And, how do you shoot a lot of people but nobody gets killed? I said to the missus that I thought he must have had a small caliber pistol. So, you can imagine my surprise when I learned that he was using a Glock. What the fuck?
The NYPD was very quick to put out the word that this was not a terrorist shooting. They were also exceedingly careful not to refer to the person as a "suspect." He is simply a person of interest at this point, they maintained. We now know his name and I'm certain that they know everything there is to know about him but he is nowhere to be found. What are the chances that he turns up dead? What are the chances that there are a lot of things about this individual that the officials don't want the general public to know about? Is this just one more FBI operation that went terribly wrong? Or, maybe an FBI operation that went terribly right? Is there anything that the democrats won't do to take away our citizen's rights to keep and bear arms? Just thinking out loud here.
I've never much liked the idea of using power tools that can inflict bodily harm if not used properly. I've been especially leery of using power tools that have a mind of their own when things go awry. I'm referring to things like chain saws that can sever jugglers or femoral arteries in the blink of an eye. I just don't trust myself when it comes to using them. I don't know that I've shared these concerns of mine with the missus. There is no need to fill her head with concerns about something that may never come to pass. Well, I threw caution to the wind yesterday when I went to our local Home Depot to rent a chain saw. I finally had reason to use one for better or worse.
There were things to cut down around the house that required more than a handsaw. I actually started out using a hand saw and realized very quickly that it was just not going to cut the mustard. It would require far more effort on my part than I was willing to give and it would likely take longer than I was willing to spend on said tasks. I could have hired someone to do the job but why pay someone a king's ransom to do something that I could do myself. It meant using a tool that I had never used and one that I was rightly concerned about using. The missus tried to talk me out of it not because she was aware of my misgivings but rather because she too has heard stories over time of things getting out of hand when people using power tools like chainsaws.
I rented one of those chainsaws with an ion battery that seemed somehow less scary than a gas powered model. There was no training manual and the fella at the rental center offered no hints or clues on how I might get off on the right foot. I had all the pieces of the puzzle and it was up to me to put them together. I like puzzles so it seemed that I was going to get up close and personal with this nemesis of mine. It only had a sixteen inch blade. How much harm could it do? The missus had work to do in the house so couldn't otherwise oversee my progress or lack thereof once I was out and about with the chainsaw. She knew that there was nothing that she could say or do that would change the trajectory of the plan that I had laid out. I was on my own.
I learned a lot about chainsaws in the four hours that I spent using the tool yesterday. I learned that they are not as scary to use as one might suspect. I learned that they can be very effective if used properly. I learned that they can make a hard job seem easy. I was making so much progress around the yard in the first 45 minutes of using the chainsaw that I entertained the thought of asking my neighbor if she might have a limb or two that she needed trimming. That all came to a screeching halt when the chain on the saw came off while I was whacking away at an overgrown Forsythia bush on our property.
Thankfully, that came late in the game and well after I had used the chainsaw for the things that wanted to use the chainsaw for. That was fine. I had time to sort out the problem and still offer my services but the window of opportunity was closing quickly. I'd seen enough Alaskan reality shows on television where they too had chains come off mid-use and it was never a showstopper. I like taking things apart and putting them back together again so I was feeling very much up to the task. My efforts went unrewarded, unfortunately, although I felt somewhat vindicated when I returned the chainsaw and was told that the chain needed to be replaced. All in all, it was a good day.
Leesy-Weesy back in the Falls got a new car! It's her first new car and I couldn't be happier for her. Uncle Wally sent me a picture of her standing aside her car when she went to pick it up at the dealership. I suspect that Uncle Wally is not being particularly forthcoming when he says that he had nothing to do with putting Leesy behind the wheel of this car so there's that. He said something about talking to the owner of the dealership who lives in his neighborhood but I suspect there's more to the story that he's not telling me. Maybe he's not telling me because he wants this story to be all about Leesy-Weesy? Maybe he's not wanting me to feel like less of a player because they chose not to involve me?
That's fine. She has her new car and she's off to the races. I ordered her a set of floor mats from WeatherTech and she sent me a note yesterday telling me that she received them. She had mentioned earlier that she might like to have grey mats rather than black mats so that's what I ordered. Uncle Wally thought that the interior color of the car might make black mats a better match but this is what Lessy wanted so this is what I had delivered. The missus and I were unanimous in our thinking that the mats were just the right gift for a girl getting her first new car. This little puppy looks like it has all the newest bells and whistles and maybe a few whistles that Leesy might not much care about. It's just really good stuff.
Fast forward 24 hours and Elon Musk has tendered his offer for something like $54 a share to purchase Twitter. The leftists are going crazy. They're at their happiest when they have the platform to themselves when and where they can spew their narratives, shadow ban alternative voices, ban other voices all together, moderate content to their liking, and more generally speaking, use the platform to help them achieve their political and financial goals. The moment it looks like the platform might be used as a platform for all voices, the leftists all of a sudden detest the platform and wants to regulate and even shut it down. The sooner, the better. The even better news is that if Musk can pull this off, it could mean the end for other leftist platforms like FaceBook, etc. Who knew free speech could be so threatening?
Knowing what the leftists could do to your company were they to have the power to do it would be something of a disincentive for Musk if you think about it. Neither political party has had the muscle or maybe the will to take on any of the Tech Giants and that has only further empowered the social media companies to serve their political and governmental masters without fear of retribution from either political party. If Musk were to restore Twitter to a more open forum, that could be the death knell for the radical leftists whose voices have gone unopposed for these past many years. There's nothing to say that once the leftists return to power in Congress that they won't make Musk's dream of a more open town square became something of a dystopian nightmare. There are countless arrows in the quivers of radicals who want nothing to do with the First Amendment to our Constitution. This is your democrat party in the year of our Lord, 2022.
Trump also endorsed JD Vance for the Senate race in Ohio. You know, the guy who wrote the book, "Hillbilly Elegy." I've not been particularly inclined to like Vance because he seems to be something of a smug fuck but the more I listen to him the more I think Trump's endorsement makes sense. He's as smart as they come and he will give as good as he gets and then some once the debates get underway. I have to be very careful in not giving too much stock to what I'm reading in this or that newspaper about the prospects for other Trump-endorsed candidates like Herschel Walker in Georgia and Sarah Palin in Alaska. These democrat run rags will tell you whatever it takes to suppress voter participation. The lies they're telling about Herschel are just disgusting.
It's about time to wrap up this week's journal. Tomorrow's Easter and we'll be doing a little something although I'm not sure what. Maybe we'll have the Ev man over for a decent meal. If the weather cooperates, I'll get in a bike ride. I'd hoped to get the missus some of her favorite jelly beans today but the local store had run out of them so that's that. The store was so busy that I thought it was probably just as busy elsewhere and decided to just go home. I'm not in the mood to stand in lines today. A good friend told me long ago that you should never stand in line to spend your money. I've never forgotten that. Did I get some flowers for the missus? I did not. I did sleep in a Best Western last night though. No, really.
Rocket Man
10/04/22 14:32
Ray has put Mrs G on notice. She needs to be on the mend and back in the saddle for the upcoming Kentucky Derby on May 7th. I'm not sure what Ray and Mrs G do together precisely but she needs to be fit by the time the Derby comes along. It could be something as simple as passing out tickets and announcing winners at the viewing. That's a tall order knowing what we know about Mrs G's alleged disinclination to push the envelope when it comes to getting back on her feet. We sure hope that she wants this more than she's letting on. Maybe being ambulatory isn't all its cracked up to be. If it's just manual dexterity and a pretty face they're looking for, Mrs G might be their gal. What about Ray?
Will he give a whit about her being or not being back on her feet? Companionship comes in a lot of different flavors so maybe he'll be satisfied just to have her sitting by his side. It goes without saying that he could do a lot worse than hanging out with the likes of Mrs G. There are plenty of folks in her facility who don't have the desire or wherewithal to interact with people around them much less carry on a casual conversion from time to time. Mrs G is not one of them. Not even close. All we know about this Ray character is what we've heard on a couple of phone messages that he's left for Mrs G so there's that. More lately, those very same messages seem to be more impactful. If she's looking for a reason to get back on her feet, she seems to have found one.
I have a good sense of what Mrs G's mood looks like on any given day. I can tell you with absolute certainty that her mood is better after she's had a word or two with this Ray fella. I can also tell you with absolute certainty that her mood is a real shit when she thinks he's going to call and doesn't. Mrs G was talking to me the other day about a woman she knows at her facility who lost her ability to speak. This was apparently a bridge too far for her so-called boyfriend. He was out the door before you could say lickety-split. Mrs G didn't say it in so many words but I got the distinct impression she was not wanting the same fate for herself when it came to her relationship with Ray. No sireee, Bob.
But, I digress. The leftists are starting to lick their chops now at the prospects of Donald Trump being indicted and put behind bars. They think this is just what they need to rally their base for the upcoming midterm elections in November. If they can put their main political opposition in jail, there isn't anything they can't do to deliver what it is that their base thinks they want or need. It doesn't matter that putting your political opposition in jail is the hallmark of the Weimar Republic in Germany back in the 30's. It doesn't matter that this is what they do in banana republics. The only question now is whether or not Biden's DOJ is willing to do the political bidding of one of the most demented and corrupt Presidents since the founding of our Republic.
It's one of a couple of competing narratives out there in the media today. The other is the cacophony of stories about Hunter Biden and the alleged crimes of the Biden Crimes Family and Bumbling Joe's complicity in same. It's a crescendo of sorts on both counts that seems to be approaching peak insanity by any measure. Trump has yet to announce that he is running in 2024 but he's made it clear in every rally that he holds that he wouldn't be out on the stump were it not for his desire to make America great again..again. The longer Biden's DOJ waits to indict Trump, the more political it will look once they do it (not that it wouldn't look political were they to do it today). What is that saying again? If you come for the king, you best not miss?
As for this Biden Crime Family thing, if there was ever a better reason to appoint a Special Prosecutor I'm not aware of it. A politicized DOJ under Biden pursues their political opponents while looking the other way when the President of the United States and his family profits from deals made with the enemies of the United States. Influence has always been for sale since Joey Bumbles Biden got into office and the stench of the corruption has only gotten worse as he ascended to the Senate, then to the Vice Presidency, and now to the Presidency of the United States. I hope I'm wrong about the Attorney General and his DOJ under Biden. He seems like a decent sort so maybe he'll do the right thing.
The other calculus that I think everyone is overlooking is the fact that any attempt to put Trump in jail will result in a backlash the likes of which we haven't seen in this country since God only knows when. It could well keep democrats out of power for the next one hundred years. There would be a tsunami of republican voters at the polls in 2022 and 2024 registering their anger and frustration at a political party that had the audacity to attempt to put one of their own behind bars for clearly political reasons. In other words, their statement would be unequivocal: this is not who we are as a country. No person, party, or department involved in this conspiracy would be spared once the republicans return to power.
It looks like this pedo enabler of a Supreme Court nominee is going to make it to the highest court in the land here in the United States. What is her name again? Katanji Jackson Brown? Not one republican in the Judiciary Committee voted for her, and in fact, they voted "no" time and time again until all republican votes were counted. No sooner had those votes been logged than we started to hear from RINO's (Republican in name only) Romney, Collins, and Murkowski. All intend to vote "yes" once this goes to the floor of the Senate. This nominee's record is abysmal and it would be a stain on our Republic were she to get on the court but that isn't stopping these three freaks of nature. Here's hoping that a they pay a steep price come re-election. It's a lifetime appointment for chrissakes. WTF.
A friend asked me recently about any plans I might have for Spring cleaning. I said that I had no plans and that would have been the God's honest truth when I said it. Here I am just a week or two later and I seem to have more projects in the works than I thought possible. I'm actually feeling a little behind the eight ball truth be told. I'm making a list and checking it twice. It won't get my undivided attention if I don't put it down in writing. I'm not going to say what plans I have because that would be the literal definition of a death knell. Suffice it to say that I'm excited to have something to work on and I actually completed a little project yesterday. There is nothing like completing a project to give you the oomph to move on to the next project on your list.
I'm not quite sure what to make of this Elon Musk thing. He's one of the richest men on the planet and something of a renaissance man. You have to admire him for the things that he's done and the contributions that he's made to our overall society here in the United States. As founder and CEO of Tesla, he's done what other automakers could only dream of doing when he created and delivered an electric vehicle the likes of the Tesla. So, when I woke up yesterday morning to hear on the news that Elon Musk a bought 9.2% stake in Twitter, I was, well, intrigued. Why would Musk buy such a large chunk of Twitter? He is a free speech advocate so there's that. I had heard rumors about his wanting to launch a Twitter-like start-up so maybe he had a hostile takeover in mind when he bought what he did. Did I mention that Musk's company, SpaceX, develops rockets?
I'm a little less clear on what being the largest stockholder in a company means but I'm guessing we'll know fairly soon. I'm also guessing that he'll probably have a pretty good say in what the company does or does not do. He may insist that Donald J. Trump be allowed back on the service. Imagine that. Knowing what I know about Twitter's practice of shutting down voices, shadow banning comments, and permanently removing customers that they don't agree with from their service, I think that could be changing. I read somewhere that some of the leftists who run the joint are thinking of leaving the company after Musk's purchase of their stock. That would be incredibly good news. As a propaganda tool for the left, and Biden's government more specifically, Musk is likely going to deep-six their asses. So good!
I find it interesting that every time I log into my Twitter account here in my state I see a negative story about one or more people running against the current crop of worthless democratic congressmen and senators from my state who "represent" us in Washington. The placement of that story at the top of my feed is no coincidence. Twitter knows just enough about me so that they can now target me. I put the word "represents" in parentheses because they really represent the interests of their political party from Joe Biden on down and can care less about what we the people of our great state want or care about. Therein lies the genius of Twitter, I suppose. They do the bidding of the democrat party and they protect their own when all is said and done. It's pretty nice to have Big Tech in your corner when you're in need of powerful ally to push back on your political opponents.
One tweet at the top of my Twitter feed this morning is about a local republican candidate who allegedly voted twice (in different states) in 2016. I'm all about dumping every last democrat in office come this November so knowing that my candidate (he'll need to win the primary first) voted twice barely moves the needle for me. In other words, it's not enough of a reason for me to either vote for the democrat candidate or maybe stay home in November. If the democrats can look the other way when the time comes to put a pedophile enabler (Jackson) on the Supreme Court, then it shouldn't be much of push for me to look the other way on a lesser charge of my candidate voting twice. Keep in mind that you can't believe a fucking thing you see on Twitter not to mention the fact that much of the lying you see is intentional, blatant, and unapologetic.
The missus has her knickers in a bunch these days about the fact that our neighbors are building a garage on their property. It's not just any garage. It's a three-car garage! God fucking forbid! You should see her. She's following every last zoning or board meeting online where this so-called garage is being discussed and her imagination is running wild. I think it's not so much the placement of the garage but rather the size of the garage that has her in a tizzy. The missus is all of a sudden concerned that our neighbors won't be required to remove their old driveway before putting in a new driveway. Apparently, a home in our town with more than one driveway is a bridge too far for the missus. If that home is in our neighborhood, much less right next door, that's a fucking problem.
I'm more of a go-with-the-flow kinda guy so I don't share her concerns about the garage. We have a garage. I think everyone should have a garage. Who doesn't want a garage? A heated garage is even better if you can afford it. In fact, I feel sorry for people who don't have a garage. You know they want one but maybe can't afford one. If I were Elon Musk, I'd put together a plan to build garages for everyone on the planet in between planning sessions to send one or more rocket ships to Mars. Who knows. Maybe building a three-car garage will enhance property values here in the hood. I doubt very much, knowing what we know about the planning that is going into the building of this garage, that it's going to be an eye sore or otherwise detract from local property values. Lastly, I don't know what's taken our neighbors so long to get around to doing this. Git er done!
These garage builders I'm referring to are full-fledged loons who not only voted for Biden but had a huge banner on their front lawn asking people to vote for Biden in the days and weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election. I knew they were died-in-the-wool democrats so that didn't surprise me but putting up the banner seemed so desperate to me. I think I didn't realize how much they despised Donald J. Trump. Maybe it was the man or maybe it was his policies. Whatever it was, they seemed triggered. That surprised me too since Trump has always been a big supporter of Israel and they are off that a particular ethnic persuasion as well so go figure. I know there are Jewish people who don't like Trump. I get it. Part of me has to wonder if they don't now, seeing as they do what Biden has done to our country, miss Trump's infamous mean tweets.
This Title-42 thing that threatens to let millions of illegal immigrants into our country through our southern border should Biden sign off on it, and he will, is yet another one of the democrat's efforts to reset the new world order here in the United States. Democrat Senators in border states are running for the hills knowing full well that Biden's policies as it relates to the Title-42 issue mean that they will lose their seats in Congress to their republican opponents. I'm delighted at the thought of taking back the majority in the Senate and the House but I'm less enthralled with the thought of letting millions of illegal immigrants into our country.
The democrats are desperate to turn our red states blue so they can win elections in perpetuity. They couldn't care less about what that means to the citizenry currently residing within our borders. Governor's DeSantis of Florida and Abbott of Texas are threatening to bus the flood of illegal immigrants that cross the borders of their respective states to sanctuary cities throughout the United States. Making blue states bluer is fine with me. Flood their neighborhoods with these illegals and see how they feel. Let them experience the impact of the invasion first hand. There's nothing like having illegal immigrants defecating on your front lawn to get ones attention. That will be the least of their problems.
Our country is facing so many headwinds these days with inflation and other problems that you have to wonder why Biden and his minions are willing to make matters even worse by letting millions of illegal aliens into our country. Why would a president have any interest in seeing his country go to hell in a hand basket? We're talking about a president who probably can't remember what he had for breakfast on any given day. It tells you a lot about the people who surround him and what constituencies they serve. They are about to be reminded in the upcoming midterm elections that the majority of Americans don't agree with much of anything that Biden and his handlers behind the scenes are forcing on them. It's going to be an electoral bloodbath.
It's also likely to be the beginning of the end for one Joey Bumbles Biden. Once the republicans take back the house they are likely to begin impeachment proceedings in earnest. The first charge will be the President's abdication of his responsibilities as it relates to the protection of our borders. Biden's grasp of reality due to his advanced dementia is tenuous at best today so it's hard to imagine he'll be up to the rigors of an impeachment and all that entails once the proceedings begin. If Harris takes over and she continues Biden's policies, she'll be brought up on charges as well. There will such a hue and cry from the citizenry that the democrats will lose whatever good will they'd hoped to build upon after the election of one Joey Bumbles Biden. We're talking toast here, folks. It's over. It's all over.
Where the Ev man be? He has a call with his place today to talk about this and that. We've told him that this call was coming up and he needed to make himself available. Since when does he not return his phone calls? I'm also not sure if this is one of those calls where his mom sits in or not. Sometimes she's an active participant and sometimes she's not. I checked his texts yesterday to see when he last texted. I checked one other source and noticed that he had made a purchase or two in the last 24 hours. We phoned him and our calls did not go to voice mail so that was good. He's around and he's just ignoring our efforts to contact him? What up, dude? We don't recognize this Ev man.
That was yesterday. I hope he's come to his senses today and will get around to returning our calls. That reminds me. His mom hasn't seen him for maybe a couple of weeks now and she wouldn't mind doing so if only so that she can lay eyes on him. It's one thing to get a sense of someone in the course of a phone call and quite another to size someone up face to face. Has he lost or gained weight? Is he taking care of himself? Are his clothes clean? What's he been up to and how do those words of his roll off his lips? How much of what he's telling us are we to believe? How much of what he's telling us is designed to make us feel good? I don't think that he thinks that we think the worse on any given day but we do have good days and bad days like any parents and that is not lost on him.
I bought some ratatouille at a local shop recently and it reminded me how much I like that dish. It's easy enough to make so I should be making my own. Today is a rainy day and I'll have a bit more inside time that I had planned so maybe I'll make a pot of ratatouille. The missus can take it or leave to so I'll not be making it with her in mind. I'm sure she'll have no objections one way or another although if she had her druthers she might rather have me making something that we both enjoy. I'd also rather be making it when the vegetables I'll be using are in season but you make do with what you have seasonality be damned. It means making a trip to the supermarket for the ingredients as well so I'll have a chance to pick up a few things that we're running short on.
The missus won't eat the salads that I make without croutons so croutons are on my list. I suppose that I could make my own croutons but the store-bought croutons are just fine and I can avoid all the fuss and muss involved in making them at home. I know, I know. Sometimes it's easy peasy to throw a piece of toast in the toaster and, voila, you're halfway there. So what if I don't have the requisite spices and condiments to bring my crouton creations to life? If I top my salads off with a nice drizzling of balsamic vinegar and organic cold-pressed olive oil who will be the wiser? My salads are usually chock full of things like beets, carrots, kalamata olives, broccoli florets, marinated mushrooms, and chunks of freshly diced avocado so she's likely not to notice that her croutons are homemade if I choose to go that route. Did I just talk myself into making homemade croutons?
One of our favorite take-out places that we love to frequent closed their doors yesterday. It was our go-to joint for everything Italian. Their sauces and dishes were, in a word, to die for. They were the best around by far. No other place came even close. It was Northern Italian on steroids. The Ev man doesn't know it yet but he's not going to be happy when gets word that they've closed their doors. We'd buy him three and four dishes at a time and they might last him a day or two. Their dishes were priced right at around $10 an entrée and I can't recall a time at their shop when we had the luxury or being able to peruse the dishes without one or more customers breathing down our necks while waiting for their chance to make their selections. Who's going to tell the Ev man?
Will he give a whit about her being or not being back on her feet? Companionship comes in a lot of different flavors so maybe he'll be satisfied just to have her sitting by his side. It goes without saying that he could do a lot worse than hanging out with the likes of Mrs G. There are plenty of folks in her facility who don't have the desire or wherewithal to interact with people around them much less carry on a casual conversion from time to time. Mrs G is not one of them. Not even close. All we know about this Ray character is what we've heard on a couple of phone messages that he's left for Mrs G so there's that. More lately, those very same messages seem to be more impactful. If she's looking for a reason to get back on her feet, she seems to have found one.
I have a good sense of what Mrs G's mood looks like on any given day. I can tell you with absolute certainty that her mood is better after she's had a word or two with this Ray fella. I can also tell you with absolute certainty that her mood is a real shit when she thinks he's going to call and doesn't. Mrs G was talking to me the other day about a woman she knows at her facility who lost her ability to speak. This was apparently a bridge too far for her so-called boyfriend. He was out the door before you could say lickety-split. Mrs G didn't say it in so many words but I got the distinct impression she was not wanting the same fate for herself when it came to her relationship with Ray. No sireee, Bob.
But, I digress. The leftists are starting to lick their chops now at the prospects of Donald Trump being indicted and put behind bars. They think this is just what they need to rally their base for the upcoming midterm elections in November. If they can put their main political opposition in jail, there isn't anything they can't do to deliver what it is that their base thinks they want or need. It doesn't matter that putting your political opposition in jail is the hallmark of the Weimar Republic in Germany back in the 30's. It doesn't matter that this is what they do in banana republics. The only question now is whether or not Biden's DOJ is willing to do the political bidding of one of the most demented and corrupt Presidents since the founding of our Republic.
It's one of a couple of competing narratives out there in the media today. The other is the cacophony of stories about Hunter Biden and the alleged crimes of the Biden Crimes Family and Bumbling Joe's complicity in same. It's a crescendo of sorts on both counts that seems to be approaching peak insanity by any measure. Trump has yet to announce that he is running in 2024 but he's made it clear in every rally that he holds that he wouldn't be out on the stump were it not for his desire to make America great again..again. The longer Biden's DOJ waits to indict Trump, the more political it will look once they do it (not that it wouldn't look political were they to do it today). What is that saying again? If you come for the king, you best not miss?
As for this Biden Crime Family thing, if there was ever a better reason to appoint a Special Prosecutor I'm not aware of it. A politicized DOJ under Biden pursues their political opponents while looking the other way when the President of the United States and his family profits from deals made with the enemies of the United States. Influence has always been for sale since Joey Bumbles Biden got into office and the stench of the corruption has only gotten worse as he ascended to the Senate, then to the Vice Presidency, and now to the Presidency of the United States. I hope I'm wrong about the Attorney General and his DOJ under Biden. He seems like a decent sort so maybe he'll do the right thing.
The other calculus that I think everyone is overlooking is the fact that any attempt to put Trump in jail will result in a backlash the likes of which we haven't seen in this country since God only knows when. It could well keep democrats out of power for the next one hundred years. There would be a tsunami of republican voters at the polls in 2022 and 2024 registering their anger and frustration at a political party that had the audacity to attempt to put one of their own behind bars for clearly political reasons. In other words, their statement would be unequivocal: this is not who we are as a country. No person, party, or department involved in this conspiracy would be spared once the republicans return to power.
It looks like this pedo enabler of a Supreme Court nominee is going to make it to the highest court in the land here in the United States. What is her name again? Katanji Jackson Brown? Not one republican in the Judiciary Committee voted for her, and in fact, they voted "no" time and time again until all republican votes were counted. No sooner had those votes been logged than we started to hear from RINO's (Republican in name only) Romney, Collins, and Murkowski. All intend to vote "yes" once this goes to the floor of the Senate. This nominee's record is abysmal and it would be a stain on our Republic were she to get on the court but that isn't stopping these three freaks of nature. Here's hoping that a they pay a steep price come re-election. It's a lifetime appointment for chrissakes. WTF.
A friend asked me recently about any plans I might have for Spring cleaning. I said that I had no plans and that would have been the God's honest truth when I said it. Here I am just a week or two later and I seem to have more projects in the works than I thought possible. I'm actually feeling a little behind the eight ball truth be told. I'm making a list and checking it twice. It won't get my undivided attention if I don't put it down in writing. I'm not going to say what plans I have because that would be the literal definition of a death knell. Suffice it to say that I'm excited to have something to work on and I actually completed a little project yesterday. There is nothing like completing a project to give you the oomph to move on to the next project on your list.
I'm not quite sure what to make of this Elon Musk thing. He's one of the richest men on the planet and something of a renaissance man. You have to admire him for the things that he's done and the contributions that he's made to our overall society here in the United States. As founder and CEO of Tesla, he's done what other automakers could only dream of doing when he created and delivered an electric vehicle the likes of the Tesla. So, when I woke up yesterday morning to hear on the news that Elon Musk a bought 9.2% stake in Twitter, I was, well, intrigued. Why would Musk buy such a large chunk of Twitter? He is a free speech advocate so there's that. I had heard rumors about his wanting to launch a Twitter-like start-up so maybe he had a hostile takeover in mind when he bought what he did. Did I mention that Musk's company, SpaceX, develops rockets?
I'm a little less clear on what being the largest stockholder in a company means but I'm guessing we'll know fairly soon. I'm also guessing that he'll probably have a pretty good say in what the company does or does not do. He may insist that Donald J. Trump be allowed back on the service. Imagine that. Knowing what I know about Twitter's practice of shutting down voices, shadow banning comments, and permanently removing customers that they don't agree with from their service, I think that could be changing. I read somewhere that some of the leftists who run the joint are thinking of leaving the company after Musk's purchase of their stock. That would be incredibly good news. As a propaganda tool for the left, and Biden's government more specifically, Musk is likely going to deep-six their asses. So good!
I find it interesting that every time I log into my Twitter account here in my state I see a negative story about one or more people running against the current crop of worthless democratic congressmen and senators from my state who "represent" us in Washington. The placement of that story at the top of my feed is no coincidence. Twitter knows just enough about me so that they can now target me. I put the word "represents" in parentheses because they really represent the interests of their political party from Joe Biden on down and can care less about what we the people of our great state want or care about. Therein lies the genius of Twitter, I suppose. They do the bidding of the democrat party and they protect their own when all is said and done. It's pretty nice to have Big Tech in your corner when you're in need of powerful ally to push back on your political opponents.
One tweet at the top of my Twitter feed this morning is about a local republican candidate who allegedly voted twice (in different states) in 2016. I'm all about dumping every last democrat in office come this November so knowing that my candidate (he'll need to win the primary first) voted twice barely moves the needle for me. In other words, it's not enough of a reason for me to either vote for the democrat candidate or maybe stay home in November. If the democrats can look the other way when the time comes to put a pedophile enabler (Jackson) on the Supreme Court, then it shouldn't be much of push for me to look the other way on a lesser charge of my candidate voting twice. Keep in mind that you can't believe a fucking thing you see on Twitter not to mention the fact that much of the lying you see is intentional, blatant, and unapologetic.
The missus has her knickers in a bunch these days about the fact that our neighbors are building a garage on their property. It's not just any garage. It's a three-car garage! God fucking forbid! You should see her. She's following every last zoning or board meeting online where this so-called garage is being discussed and her imagination is running wild. I think it's not so much the placement of the garage but rather the size of the garage that has her in a tizzy. The missus is all of a sudden concerned that our neighbors won't be required to remove their old driveway before putting in a new driveway. Apparently, a home in our town with more than one driveway is a bridge too far for the missus. If that home is in our neighborhood, much less right next door, that's a fucking problem.
I'm more of a go-with-the-flow kinda guy so I don't share her concerns about the garage. We have a garage. I think everyone should have a garage. Who doesn't want a garage? A heated garage is even better if you can afford it. In fact, I feel sorry for people who don't have a garage. You know they want one but maybe can't afford one. If I were Elon Musk, I'd put together a plan to build garages for everyone on the planet in between planning sessions to send one or more rocket ships to Mars. Who knows. Maybe building a three-car garage will enhance property values here in the hood. I doubt very much, knowing what we know about the planning that is going into the building of this garage, that it's going to be an eye sore or otherwise detract from local property values. Lastly, I don't know what's taken our neighbors so long to get around to doing this. Git er done!
These garage builders I'm referring to are full-fledged loons who not only voted for Biden but had a huge banner on their front lawn asking people to vote for Biden in the days and weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election. I knew they were died-in-the-wool democrats so that didn't surprise me but putting up the banner seemed so desperate to me. I think I didn't realize how much they despised Donald J. Trump. Maybe it was the man or maybe it was his policies. Whatever it was, they seemed triggered. That surprised me too since Trump has always been a big supporter of Israel and they are off that a particular ethnic persuasion as well so go figure. I know there are Jewish people who don't like Trump. I get it. Part of me has to wonder if they don't now, seeing as they do what Biden has done to our country, miss Trump's infamous mean tweets.
This Title-42 thing that threatens to let millions of illegal immigrants into our country through our southern border should Biden sign off on it, and he will, is yet another one of the democrat's efforts to reset the new world order here in the United States. Democrat Senators in border states are running for the hills knowing full well that Biden's policies as it relates to the Title-42 issue mean that they will lose their seats in Congress to their republican opponents. I'm delighted at the thought of taking back the majority in the Senate and the House but I'm less enthralled with the thought of letting millions of illegal immigrants into our country.
The democrats are desperate to turn our red states blue so they can win elections in perpetuity. They couldn't care less about what that means to the citizenry currently residing within our borders. Governor's DeSantis of Florida and Abbott of Texas are threatening to bus the flood of illegal immigrants that cross the borders of their respective states to sanctuary cities throughout the United States. Making blue states bluer is fine with me. Flood their neighborhoods with these illegals and see how they feel. Let them experience the impact of the invasion first hand. There's nothing like having illegal immigrants defecating on your front lawn to get ones attention. That will be the least of their problems.
Our country is facing so many headwinds these days with inflation and other problems that you have to wonder why Biden and his minions are willing to make matters even worse by letting millions of illegal aliens into our country. Why would a president have any interest in seeing his country go to hell in a hand basket? We're talking about a president who probably can't remember what he had for breakfast on any given day. It tells you a lot about the people who surround him and what constituencies they serve. They are about to be reminded in the upcoming midterm elections that the majority of Americans don't agree with much of anything that Biden and his handlers behind the scenes are forcing on them. It's going to be an electoral bloodbath.
It's also likely to be the beginning of the end for one Joey Bumbles Biden. Once the republicans take back the house they are likely to begin impeachment proceedings in earnest. The first charge will be the President's abdication of his responsibilities as it relates to the protection of our borders. Biden's grasp of reality due to his advanced dementia is tenuous at best today so it's hard to imagine he'll be up to the rigors of an impeachment and all that entails once the proceedings begin. If Harris takes over and she continues Biden's policies, she'll be brought up on charges as well. There will such a hue and cry from the citizenry that the democrats will lose whatever good will they'd hoped to build upon after the election of one Joey Bumbles Biden. We're talking toast here, folks. It's over. It's all over.
Where the Ev man be? He has a call with his place today to talk about this and that. We've told him that this call was coming up and he needed to make himself available. Since when does he not return his phone calls? I'm also not sure if this is one of those calls where his mom sits in or not. Sometimes she's an active participant and sometimes she's not. I checked his texts yesterday to see when he last texted. I checked one other source and noticed that he had made a purchase or two in the last 24 hours. We phoned him and our calls did not go to voice mail so that was good. He's around and he's just ignoring our efforts to contact him? What up, dude? We don't recognize this Ev man.
That was yesterday. I hope he's come to his senses today and will get around to returning our calls. That reminds me. His mom hasn't seen him for maybe a couple of weeks now and she wouldn't mind doing so if only so that she can lay eyes on him. It's one thing to get a sense of someone in the course of a phone call and quite another to size someone up face to face. Has he lost or gained weight? Is he taking care of himself? Are his clothes clean? What's he been up to and how do those words of his roll off his lips? How much of what he's telling us are we to believe? How much of what he's telling us is designed to make us feel good? I don't think that he thinks that we think the worse on any given day but we do have good days and bad days like any parents and that is not lost on him.
I bought some ratatouille at a local shop recently and it reminded me how much I like that dish. It's easy enough to make so I should be making my own. Today is a rainy day and I'll have a bit more inside time that I had planned so maybe I'll make a pot of ratatouille. The missus can take it or leave to so I'll not be making it with her in mind. I'm sure she'll have no objections one way or another although if she had her druthers she might rather have me making something that we both enjoy. I'd also rather be making it when the vegetables I'll be using are in season but you make do with what you have seasonality be damned. It means making a trip to the supermarket for the ingredients as well so I'll have a chance to pick up a few things that we're running short on.
The missus won't eat the salads that I make without croutons so croutons are on my list. I suppose that I could make my own croutons but the store-bought croutons are just fine and I can avoid all the fuss and muss involved in making them at home. I know, I know. Sometimes it's easy peasy to throw a piece of toast in the toaster and, voila, you're halfway there. So what if I don't have the requisite spices and condiments to bring my crouton creations to life? If I top my salads off with a nice drizzling of balsamic vinegar and organic cold-pressed olive oil who will be the wiser? My salads are usually chock full of things like beets, carrots, kalamata olives, broccoli florets, marinated mushrooms, and chunks of freshly diced avocado so she's likely not to notice that her croutons are homemade if I choose to go that route. Did I just talk myself into making homemade croutons?
One of our favorite take-out places that we love to frequent closed their doors yesterday. It was our go-to joint for everything Italian. Their sauces and dishes were, in a word, to die for. They were the best around by far. No other place came even close. It was Northern Italian on steroids. The Ev man doesn't know it yet but he's not going to be happy when gets word that they've closed their doors. We'd buy him three and four dishes at a time and they might last him a day or two. Their dishes were priced right at around $10 an entrée and I can't recall a time at their shop when we had the luxury or being able to peruse the dishes without one or more customers breathing down our necks while waiting for their chance to make their selections. Who's going to tell the Ev man?
Hard Time
03/04/22 07:04
I have a good mind to call into one of my favorite morning radio talk shows and set the host and his audience straight on this Will Smith and Chris Rock thing. That's all anyone is talking about this morning. Smith got out of his seat at the Oscars last night and walked onto the stage where he proceeded to give Chris Rock, the host, a bitch slap for making an off-color comment about his wife's alopecia. How can anyone not see that this was staged and for good reason. This is what they wanted everyone in America to be talking about on Monday morning.
The bigger story, and this is what they didn't want everyone talking about, was Joey Bumbles Biden's disastrous trip to Europe where he made a fool of himself on the world stage. He was there meeting with European leaders on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and he made three or four major gaffes that were sadly illustrative of his late-stage dementia. One report coming out of a newspaper in Prague referred to Biden as "merely a fool" and called out American's "multitude of fools" for electing him as their president. Yes, all eighty-one million of them if you're to believe the American media.
Joey's handlers probably thought it better to endure the slings and arrows of a European press by having him attend the meetings rather than have him stay home and have the American right-wing media make him out to be "not ready for prime time" president. It was a colossal miscalculation and it would take a colossal sleight of hand to take the Biden "gaffes" off the front pages of every newspaper from coast to coast upon his return. This is where Hollywood gets the chance to double down on their man who now hangs by the thinnest of threads in the eyes of the American Public. This is where Hollywood's finest step up to the plate and take one for the team. Who better than Will Smith and Chris Rock to pull this one off.
Are Biden's gaffes really gaffes if he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about? Do you pay any mind to the dementia patient walking the halls of his institution yammering about this and that? The simple answer to that question is, you do not. Biden's comments would be easy to dismiss were he not the president of the United States. Therein lies the problem. It gets worse when you start to think about the fact that if Biden is not up to the task of being president, who precisely is pulling the strings behind the scenes? Is it Obama? Is it Susan Rice? The policies coming out of the White House tell me that it's "all of the above." Just when you think that things can't get any worse, they get worse. This is where we are one year out from Biden's inauguration.
I don't like rolling out of bed on a Monday morning with a hair across my ass because of something this traveling side show of an American President did or didn't do. When I see Hollywood staging this so-called skulduggery or subterfuge with Will Smith and Chris Rock in order to cover for Bumbles Biden, someone has to set the record straight. I'm in with both feet when it comes to exposing the dumb-fuckery of Bumbles Biden and his minions across the plains that we lovingly refer to as America. This is a low point in the annals of the American Presidency and Steve Bannon had it right when he said "elections have consequences and stolen elections have catastrophic consequences."
The democrats threw the 25th Amendment to the Constitution around like a hot potato when Trump was in office. You know, the amendment that the politicians in Washington turn to when they need to remove an American President from office when he is no longer capable of performing his duties. It is usually the opposition party that first broaches the subject and it's typically nothing more than a flimsy reason to remove someone who is probably doing a pretty good job but you just don't like his or her politics. That was certainly the case with Trump. He was getting things done and the democrats were having none of it. But discussion of the 25th amendment, even for the democrats, and especially when it came to Trump, was simply a bridge too far.
That said, it may be just what the doctor ordered when it comes to Bumbles Biden. You should have seen the moron yesterday at a presser in Washington. He was holding index cards that held specific answers to specific questions that his handlers thought the media might be asking. Who does this? He occasionally went off script and things went from bad to worse. He started refuting facts that were already well established in answers that he had given within the past couple of days. He actually walked back comments that had already been walked back by his staff in the White House. None of this was lost on the media. They were stunned. It was stunning.
Mrs G will return to her facility today after spending a few days in the hospital getting all fixed up. You know, a tweak here and a tweak there. Things can only get better from here. She'll be back in familiar surroundings and back amongst friends. It's one thing to let your body get on with whatever it's going to do to recover but it's quite another to surround yourself with the kinds of things, people included, that will assist you in said recovery. Here's hoping that they have more liberal visitation policy than her prior hosts at the hospital in town. That's not to say that the missus and I have any plans to skip the light fantastic when paying a visit, but we have a couple of ideas that will work out better if we can do it together. Together is better. Right?
As for the Ev man, I'm sorry to say he's back in the thick of things. It's hard to say why this time although I can't say that we didn't seen this coming. It's like a slow roll that takes on a life of its own. Even he is along for the ride if I'm right about what I'm seeing day in and day out. I suspect that he is not at all surprised to find himself in this so-called predicament once again. Maybe "predicament" is too harsh a word. It's self imposed so that's a good thing. Nobody knows the Ev man like he does and we've told him time and time again that we as his parents think that he has exceptional insight when it comes to this stuff. He doesn't disagree. That doesn't make it any less painful. Godspeed, young man.
If I can get myself together today I'll be bringing our Christmas tree to the recycling center. It's about time, don't you think? It's still damn cold outside for the month of March, a mere 17 degrees or so, so we're still in something of a winter mode. This has to be some kind of a record. I'm wanting to desperately turn off the heat and open a few windows and Mother Nature is having none of it. One of my friends asked about Spring Cleaning and if I had any plans along those lines. I'm thinking to myself, Spring what? Oh, that thing that people do when temperatures start to warm up and when people start to get the urge to go outside, move their bodies, and come out of their damn burrows. So far, I'm just not feeling it. I'm not sure how much of that has to do with the weather.
The missus seems to be sleeping in today. Not sure why since she has a busy day ahead of her. I have a good mind to talk to her this morning about last night's take-out meal from the local seafood place. I need her to tell me more vociferously not to eat certain things like French fries and fried food in general. It was, admittedly, a moment of weakness for me. I don't typically eat that stuff for all the reasons you're told not to eat that stuff. The grease clogs your arteries, the French fries leave you feeling bloated and unsatisfied, and eating it just makes you want to eat more of it. I owe it to myself to be more selective and to seek out alternative and more healthful choices. Something as simple as a nice lentil soup would have been just as satisfying and with none of the guilt. Lessons learned.
The missus ordered a broiled half-scallop half-haddock dish that was to die for. She got it right. Her dish might have been a little heavy on the butter but that was maybe the worst thing you could say about the dish. I'm not sure if the restaurant had a version of her dish that used less butter but she wasn't asking and I was in no position to be waving any red flags given my order. It was one of those nights where we were hadn't had a decent meal for a few nights, our son was where he was, and the missus had had a long day at work. It seemed an easy road to go down and nobody had much fight in them when the hour of six o'clock rolled around. It was the veritable path of least resistance and we willingly and hungrily stepped into the fray.
Bumbles Biden signed off on an anti-lynching bill last night at the White House. Yes, you heard that right. I know, I know. There hasn't been a lynching in the United Sates in God only knows how long. It was perhaps a clarion call by the democrats who are facing a crushing electoral defeat this coming November that the forces of evil are still amongst us and they call themselves "Republicans." You might also know them as the White Supremacists Trump supporters who, not incidentally, stormed the Capitol on January 6th. It was a reaffirmation of the Democrat's commitment to the black community and a warning that should they be abandoned now, they could no longer protect the interests of the black community once the Republicans were back in power should that day come to pass (the sooner, the better.)
We are likely to hear and see similar types of gaslighting in the coming months as the Democrats try to keep the House of Representatives and, God willing (their words, not mine), the Senate out of Republican hands. I take some comfort this morning in the results overnight of a race for a State Senate seat in South Carolina where the republican candidate beat his opponent like a rented mule. I'm not sure how you otherwise characterize a 90-something percent to a 9 something percent result. I think Trump won that district by a 60-40 margin back in 2016 so that makes this result that much more stunning. Bottom line? Americans have had it with Bumbles Biden and his pathetic sidekick, Kamala Harris. The gig is up.
This one clown of a talk show host on progressive radio last night was going on and on about Trump and how Biden's Attorney General had everything he needed to investigate and indict President Trump for his role in the January 2020 insurrection in our nation's Capitol. Some Federal judge had commented or maybe even put something in writing about Trump being "likely guilty" of any and all charges related to the incident and this further enraged the talk show host. "He has all he needs to investigate Trump," he said. "But, I'm not hearing any rumors about any investigation and I demand to know why he's not being investigated," he went on. He was incensed and he wanted to do everything he could to incense his audience. Whatever the hell it takes to get them to the damn polls in November!
It feels and looks like a multi-front strategy that the democrats are waging. They even had that lame-brained bartender Congresswoman from Queens, Ocassio Cortex, out on the stump yesterday calling for Justice Clarence Thomas to step down from the Supreme Court because of his wife's role in the January 6th insurrection. The democrats want that Supreme Court seat and they are willing to get it back by hook or crook. What's next? A million woman march in Washington? How far are they really willing to go to get what they want? It's all about the power of the incumbency for the democrats. The allure of a hold on government in perpetuity is the wet dream of every democratic socialist from the streets of Caracas, Venezuela to the back alleys of Washington D.C.. It's within their grasp until it isn't. November 2022 can't come around soon enough.
The missus and I paid Mrs G a visit at her facility yesterday. She's home now, or at least back in her facility if not in her own unit, and that has to be of some comfort to her. It's a step in the right direction after what must have been a harrowing few days for Mrs G not know how things might turn out. There is a propensity to think the worst when you're in the middle of a shitstorm of a health crisis and Mrs G was knee deep in hurt. She's over the worst of it now but it's still an uphill battle. We feel good, as does she, that she is in good hands and that there will be a collective effort by all involved to get Mrs G back own her feet and back out onto the dance floor as soon as possible. That's the plan anyway.
Fast forward 24 hours and we were visiting Mrs G once again. It was not my intention to go this time around and I'm pushing back on the notion that I need to go every time the missus goes. Mrs G is not my mother is what I would tell anyone wanting to know why. That said, sometimes you go along to get along. I knew the missus had had a tough day and if I have one charge in life it is to keep the missus happy. There is always tomorrow and you do have to pick your spots so I pulled myself together and off we went. We found Mrs G sitting up in a plush lounge chair and looking and sounding chipper than just 24 hours ago. That's what we're talking about. You go, girl! Let's go through some of that mail, shall we?
What is this whole Disney thing about queers, gender fluid, and binary pansexual bullshit that we're hearing about? I don't even know what half of these terms mean. It sounds like Disney wants to turn what has become a profitable business model and an American institution into some version of itself that has to have good ole Walt rolling over in his grave. They want to do what? They will no longer greet their customers as "boys and girls." Is this some kind of joke? Disney's employees are putting their high heels down. They are insisting that their CEO bend to their every twisted and tortured version of how they see themselves and their queer friends. Boys can love boys, girls can love girls, and if Mickey Mouse wants a boyfriend, Minnie will have to suck it up and move the fuck out. It's a new day at Disney and the queers are now in charge. Well, we'll see about that.
This could end up being a defining moment for Disney and for our society at large. No one cares quite frankly, what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes but they care a lot when it comes to their children and the cultural influences that impact them. Parents want the last word when it comes to what their children hear and see. Disney has always been about family values and their brand has been unassailable in that regard for decades. Now that the Disney culture has been exposed to the light of day thanks to their employees reaction to Florida's "Don't say Gay" bill in Florida, it has exposed an underlying culture of queer debauchery at Disney that now threatens that very same institution. Disney might well become in short order here the veritable canary in the coal mine for every other institution embracing woke-ism. Go woke, go broke?
You have to admire Florida Governor DeSantis for standing up to Disney when the Disney CEO criticized him for signing Florida's "Don't say Gay" bill. It takes a certain amount of courage to stand up to the woke mob these days but DeSantis rightly called Disney out as the profligate purveyors of the kind of cultural rubbish that most people, and most parents, find reprehensible and he wasn't wrong to do it. There is a political angle here that could serve the Republican Party well going into the midterm elections in November if they play their cards right. When Governor Youngkin of Virginia pushed back against the teachers unions in 2020 when they went all-in to keep the CRT (Critical Race Theory) curriculum in the schools, he had overwhelming support from parents and they subsequently rewarded him with the governorship. In Virginia-speak, there's gold in them thar hills. This could go nation wide. That's a good thing.
I've never liked the idea of allowing lunatics to run the asylum. I've never liked or respected weak-kneed leaders who allow their employees to dictate what a corporation is and is not allowed to say and do. The lunatic fringe within any organization can have their fanciful ideas about what constitutes reality and they can share them with like minded loons at the water cooler or other oasis's as they see fit. That's fine but when the natural hierarchy within any organization comes unhinged, we get what we're now seeing at Disney. Superimpose a culture of rabid queer-ness on top of an already disastrous organizational structure and you have a special kind of mayhem. Parents will have the last word here and I think I know what that sounds like.
Bumbles was at the podium the other day reading haltingly as he does behind his trusty teleprompter. He was blathering on and on about celebrating the rights of trans people. I'm not sure how many trans people there are in the United States but I'm pretty sure their numbers are insignificant in the scheme of things. Is this a constituency that Biden feels that he and his leftist minions need to cultivate? Does this have anything to do with the fact that recent survey of a majority of young people under the age of eighteen in the United States now think of themselves as "trans"? I think this says more about the progress that the left is making in inculcating certain perverse cultural values in our children than anything else. It's high time we as parents insist that cameras be put in every classroom. Teachers found to be departing from the standard curriculum should be summarily dismissed without warning. Go directly to jail. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Who doesn't like a good Monopoly reference?
The missus and I are watching a show on HULU about Elizabeth Holmes and her now defunct company, Theranos. We've watched similar shows on HULU and we think they do a pretty good job with these types of shows. I read the book back a while ago and I can't say that HULU's version of Holmes's character is what I was expecting. That said, she's growing on me a bit here as I am six episodes in to this eight episode series. Hulu's version of Holmes is a somewhat flighty and less-than-serious version of the Holmes who fancied herself a reincarnated version of Steve Jobs. It wasn't enough to dress like Steve Jobs. She shamelessly co-opted his entire public persona. It was all a deliberate ruse to continue to distract and confuse while running a nine billion dollar company built on a series of lies and obfuscations.
It's hard to believe that it went on as long as it did. It's hard to believe that she had investors who bought into the crock of hooey that she was selling. They had a product that never worked but she sold them on the promise that this was something that would revolutionize the industry and that was seemingly enough to keep both her company and her delusion alive for yet another day. We're not talking about just any investors. We're talking about Larry Ellis (Founder of Oracle), Rupert Murdoch, and countless others who ponied up big bucks to get in on the ground floor. Any and all efforts by her detractors to expose her for the fraud that she was fell flat. Like any other house of cards, it ultimately collapsed under its own weight. Her sentencing is scheduled for September of this year (2022.) All I can say is, she had better get some hard time.
The bigger story, and this is what they didn't want everyone talking about, was Joey Bumbles Biden's disastrous trip to Europe where he made a fool of himself on the world stage. He was there meeting with European leaders on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and he made three or four major gaffes that were sadly illustrative of his late-stage dementia. One report coming out of a newspaper in Prague referred to Biden as "merely a fool" and called out American's "multitude of fools" for electing him as their president. Yes, all eighty-one million of them if you're to believe the American media.
Joey's handlers probably thought it better to endure the slings and arrows of a European press by having him attend the meetings rather than have him stay home and have the American right-wing media make him out to be "not ready for prime time" president. It was a colossal miscalculation and it would take a colossal sleight of hand to take the Biden "gaffes" off the front pages of every newspaper from coast to coast upon his return. This is where Hollywood gets the chance to double down on their man who now hangs by the thinnest of threads in the eyes of the American Public. This is where Hollywood's finest step up to the plate and take one for the team. Who better than Will Smith and Chris Rock to pull this one off.
Are Biden's gaffes really gaffes if he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about? Do you pay any mind to the dementia patient walking the halls of his institution yammering about this and that? The simple answer to that question is, you do not. Biden's comments would be easy to dismiss were he not the president of the United States. Therein lies the problem. It gets worse when you start to think about the fact that if Biden is not up to the task of being president, who precisely is pulling the strings behind the scenes? Is it Obama? Is it Susan Rice? The policies coming out of the White House tell me that it's "all of the above." Just when you think that things can't get any worse, they get worse. This is where we are one year out from Biden's inauguration.
I don't like rolling out of bed on a Monday morning with a hair across my ass because of something this traveling side show of an American President did or didn't do. When I see Hollywood staging this so-called skulduggery or subterfuge with Will Smith and Chris Rock in order to cover for Bumbles Biden, someone has to set the record straight. I'm in with both feet when it comes to exposing the dumb-fuckery of Bumbles Biden and his minions across the plains that we lovingly refer to as America. This is a low point in the annals of the American Presidency and Steve Bannon had it right when he said "elections have consequences and stolen elections have catastrophic consequences."
The democrats threw the 25th Amendment to the Constitution around like a hot potato when Trump was in office. You know, the amendment that the politicians in Washington turn to when they need to remove an American President from office when he is no longer capable of performing his duties. It is usually the opposition party that first broaches the subject and it's typically nothing more than a flimsy reason to remove someone who is probably doing a pretty good job but you just don't like his or her politics. That was certainly the case with Trump. He was getting things done and the democrats were having none of it. But discussion of the 25th amendment, even for the democrats, and especially when it came to Trump, was simply a bridge too far.
That said, it may be just what the doctor ordered when it comes to Bumbles Biden. You should have seen the moron yesterday at a presser in Washington. He was holding index cards that held specific answers to specific questions that his handlers thought the media might be asking. Who does this? He occasionally went off script and things went from bad to worse. He started refuting facts that were already well established in answers that he had given within the past couple of days. He actually walked back comments that had already been walked back by his staff in the White House. None of this was lost on the media. They were stunned. It was stunning.
Mrs G will return to her facility today after spending a few days in the hospital getting all fixed up. You know, a tweak here and a tweak there. Things can only get better from here. She'll be back in familiar surroundings and back amongst friends. It's one thing to let your body get on with whatever it's going to do to recover but it's quite another to surround yourself with the kinds of things, people included, that will assist you in said recovery. Here's hoping that they have more liberal visitation policy than her prior hosts at the hospital in town. That's not to say that the missus and I have any plans to skip the light fantastic when paying a visit, but we have a couple of ideas that will work out better if we can do it together. Together is better. Right?
As for the Ev man, I'm sorry to say he's back in the thick of things. It's hard to say why this time although I can't say that we didn't seen this coming. It's like a slow roll that takes on a life of its own. Even he is along for the ride if I'm right about what I'm seeing day in and day out. I suspect that he is not at all surprised to find himself in this so-called predicament once again. Maybe "predicament" is too harsh a word. It's self imposed so that's a good thing. Nobody knows the Ev man like he does and we've told him time and time again that we as his parents think that he has exceptional insight when it comes to this stuff. He doesn't disagree. That doesn't make it any less painful. Godspeed, young man.
If I can get myself together today I'll be bringing our Christmas tree to the recycling center. It's about time, don't you think? It's still damn cold outside for the month of March, a mere 17 degrees or so, so we're still in something of a winter mode. This has to be some kind of a record. I'm wanting to desperately turn off the heat and open a few windows and Mother Nature is having none of it. One of my friends asked about Spring Cleaning and if I had any plans along those lines. I'm thinking to myself, Spring what? Oh, that thing that people do when temperatures start to warm up and when people start to get the urge to go outside, move their bodies, and come out of their damn burrows. So far, I'm just not feeling it. I'm not sure how much of that has to do with the weather.
The missus seems to be sleeping in today. Not sure why since she has a busy day ahead of her. I have a good mind to talk to her this morning about last night's take-out meal from the local seafood place. I need her to tell me more vociferously not to eat certain things like French fries and fried food in general. It was, admittedly, a moment of weakness for me. I don't typically eat that stuff for all the reasons you're told not to eat that stuff. The grease clogs your arteries, the French fries leave you feeling bloated and unsatisfied, and eating it just makes you want to eat more of it. I owe it to myself to be more selective and to seek out alternative and more healthful choices. Something as simple as a nice lentil soup would have been just as satisfying and with none of the guilt. Lessons learned.
The missus ordered a broiled half-scallop half-haddock dish that was to die for. She got it right. Her dish might have been a little heavy on the butter but that was maybe the worst thing you could say about the dish. I'm not sure if the restaurant had a version of her dish that used less butter but she wasn't asking and I was in no position to be waving any red flags given my order. It was one of those nights where we were hadn't had a decent meal for a few nights, our son was where he was, and the missus had had a long day at work. It seemed an easy road to go down and nobody had much fight in them when the hour of six o'clock rolled around. It was the veritable path of least resistance and we willingly and hungrily stepped into the fray.
Bumbles Biden signed off on an anti-lynching bill last night at the White House. Yes, you heard that right. I know, I know. There hasn't been a lynching in the United Sates in God only knows how long. It was perhaps a clarion call by the democrats who are facing a crushing electoral defeat this coming November that the forces of evil are still amongst us and they call themselves "Republicans." You might also know them as the White Supremacists Trump supporters who, not incidentally, stormed the Capitol on January 6th. It was a reaffirmation of the Democrat's commitment to the black community and a warning that should they be abandoned now, they could no longer protect the interests of the black community once the Republicans were back in power should that day come to pass (the sooner, the better.)
We are likely to hear and see similar types of gaslighting in the coming months as the Democrats try to keep the House of Representatives and, God willing (their words, not mine), the Senate out of Republican hands. I take some comfort this morning in the results overnight of a race for a State Senate seat in South Carolina where the republican candidate beat his opponent like a rented mule. I'm not sure how you otherwise characterize a 90-something percent to a 9 something percent result. I think Trump won that district by a 60-40 margin back in 2016 so that makes this result that much more stunning. Bottom line? Americans have had it with Bumbles Biden and his pathetic sidekick, Kamala Harris. The gig is up.
This one clown of a talk show host on progressive radio last night was going on and on about Trump and how Biden's Attorney General had everything he needed to investigate and indict President Trump for his role in the January 2020 insurrection in our nation's Capitol. Some Federal judge had commented or maybe even put something in writing about Trump being "likely guilty" of any and all charges related to the incident and this further enraged the talk show host. "He has all he needs to investigate Trump," he said. "But, I'm not hearing any rumors about any investigation and I demand to know why he's not being investigated," he went on. He was incensed and he wanted to do everything he could to incense his audience. Whatever the hell it takes to get them to the damn polls in November!
It feels and looks like a multi-front strategy that the democrats are waging. They even had that lame-brained bartender Congresswoman from Queens, Ocassio Cortex, out on the stump yesterday calling for Justice Clarence Thomas to step down from the Supreme Court because of his wife's role in the January 6th insurrection. The democrats want that Supreme Court seat and they are willing to get it back by hook or crook. What's next? A million woman march in Washington? How far are they really willing to go to get what they want? It's all about the power of the incumbency for the democrats. The allure of a hold on government in perpetuity is the wet dream of every democratic socialist from the streets of Caracas, Venezuela to the back alleys of Washington D.C.. It's within their grasp until it isn't. November 2022 can't come around soon enough.
The missus and I paid Mrs G a visit at her facility yesterday. She's home now, or at least back in her facility if not in her own unit, and that has to be of some comfort to her. It's a step in the right direction after what must have been a harrowing few days for Mrs G not know how things might turn out. There is a propensity to think the worst when you're in the middle of a shitstorm of a health crisis and Mrs G was knee deep in hurt. She's over the worst of it now but it's still an uphill battle. We feel good, as does she, that she is in good hands and that there will be a collective effort by all involved to get Mrs G back own her feet and back out onto the dance floor as soon as possible. That's the plan anyway.
Fast forward 24 hours and we were visiting Mrs G once again. It was not my intention to go this time around and I'm pushing back on the notion that I need to go every time the missus goes. Mrs G is not my mother is what I would tell anyone wanting to know why. That said, sometimes you go along to get along. I knew the missus had had a tough day and if I have one charge in life it is to keep the missus happy. There is always tomorrow and you do have to pick your spots so I pulled myself together and off we went. We found Mrs G sitting up in a plush lounge chair and looking and sounding chipper than just 24 hours ago. That's what we're talking about. You go, girl! Let's go through some of that mail, shall we?
What is this whole Disney thing about queers, gender fluid, and binary pansexual bullshit that we're hearing about? I don't even know what half of these terms mean. It sounds like Disney wants to turn what has become a profitable business model and an American institution into some version of itself that has to have good ole Walt rolling over in his grave. They want to do what? They will no longer greet their customers as "boys and girls." Is this some kind of joke? Disney's employees are putting their high heels down. They are insisting that their CEO bend to their every twisted and tortured version of how they see themselves and their queer friends. Boys can love boys, girls can love girls, and if Mickey Mouse wants a boyfriend, Minnie will have to suck it up and move the fuck out. It's a new day at Disney and the queers are now in charge. Well, we'll see about that.
This could end up being a defining moment for Disney and for our society at large. No one cares quite frankly, what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes but they care a lot when it comes to their children and the cultural influences that impact them. Parents want the last word when it comes to what their children hear and see. Disney has always been about family values and their brand has been unassailable in that regard for decades. Now that the Disney culture has been exposed to the light of day thanks to their employees reaction to Florida's "Don't say Gay" bill in Florida, it has exposed an underlying culture of queer debauchery at Disney that now threatens that very same institution. Disney might well become in short order here the veritable canary in the coal mine for every other institution embracing woke-ism. Go woke, go broke?
You have to admire Florida Governor DeSantis for standing up to Disney when the Disney CEO criticized him for signing Florida's "Don't say Gay" bill. It takes a certain amount of courage to stand up to the woke mob these days but DeSantis rightly called Disney out as the profligate purveyors of the kind of cultural rubbish that most people, and most parents, find reprehensible and he wasn't wrong to do it. There is a political angle here that could serve the Republican Party well going into the midterm elections in November if they play their cards right. When Governor Youngkin of Virginia pushed back against the teachers unions in 2020 when they went all-in to keep the CRT (Critical Race Theory) curriculum in the schools, he had overwhelming support from parents and they subsequently rewarded him with the governorship. In Virginia-speak, there's gold in them thar hills. This could go nation wide. That's a good thing.
I've never liked the idea of allowing lunatics to run the asylum. I've never liked or respected weak-kneed leaders who allow their employees to dictate what a corporation is and is not allowed to say and do. The lunatic fringe within any organization can have their fanciful ideas about what constitutes reality and they can share them with like minded loons at the water cooler or other oasis's as they see fit. That's fine but when the natural hierarchy within any organization comes unhinged, we get what we're now seeing at Disney. Superimpose a culture of rabid queer-ness on top of an already disastrous organizational structure and you have a special kind of mayhem. Parents will have the last word here and I think I know what that sounds like.
Bumbles was at the podium the other day reading haltingly as he does behind his trusty teleprompter. He was blathering on and on about celebrating the rights of trans people. I'm not sure how many trans people there are in the United States but I'm pretty sure their numbers are insignificant in the scheme of things. Is this a constituency that Biden feels that he and his leftist minions need to cultivate? Does this have anything to do with the fact that recent survey of a majority of young people under the age of eighteen in the United States now think of themselves as "trans"? I think this says more about the progress that the left is making in inculcating certain perverse cultural values in our children than anything else. It's high time we as parents insist that cameras be put in every classroom. Teachers found to be departing from the standard curriculum should be summarily dismissed without warning. Go directly to jail. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Who doesn't like a good Monopoly reference?
The missus and I are watching a show on HULU about Elizabeth Holmes and her now defunct company, Theranos. We've watched similar shows on HULU and we think they do a pretty good job with these types of shows. I read the book back a while ago and I can't say that HULU's version of Holmes's character is what I was expecting. That said, she's growing on me a bit here as I am six episodes in to this eight episode series. Hulu's version of Holmes is a somewhat flighty and less-than-serious version of the Holmes who fancied herself a reincarnated version of Steve Jobs. It wasn't enough to dress like Steve Jobs. She shamelessly co-opted his entire public persona. It was all a deliberate ruse to continue to distract and confuse while running a nine billion dollar company built on a series of lies and obfuscations.
It's hard to believe that it went on as long as it did. It's hard to believe that she had investors who bought into the crock of hooey that she was selling. They had a product that never worked but she sold them on the promise that this was something that would revolutionize the industry and that was seemingly enough to keep both her company and her delusion alive for yet another day. We're not talking about just any investors. We're talking about Larry Ellis (Founder of Oracle), Rupert Murdoch, and countless others who ponied up big bucks to get in on the ground floor. Any and all efforts by her detractors to expose her for the fraud that she was fell flat. Like any other house of cards, it ultimately collapsed under its own weight. Her sentencing is scheduled for September of this year (2022.) All I can say is, she had better get some hard time.
Blah Blah Blah
27/03/22 07:00
Just when you thought you've heard everything, there was this: NBC is being accused of airbrushing a photo of this trans swimmer person to make him look more "feminine." You just can't make this fucking stuff up. It isn't bad enough that you have a man wanting to compete in women's sports events and someone is pushing for that to happen? Who the fuck thinks this is normal in any sense of the word? What is NBC trying to accomplish? Do they think "feminizing" this freak will change the hearts and minds of Americans who find this tomfoolery to be a bridge too far? Let's call it what it is.
The missus and I stopped by the Ev man's place yesterday. We thought it might be a good idea to lend a hand and see if we couldn't spruce things up a bit while he's away. His only concern was that he might have left something or other out that would go bad and smell up the place. He's not much of a housekeeper so we weren't surprised to find his place in need of a good cleaning. Yes, there was organizing to do but we needed to do a few washes, clean up a few dishes, vacuum this and that, and I'd rather not comment on everything that we ended up carrying out to the trash bin.
All in a good day's work, I suppose. By the time dinner time rolled around, we were done. Not finished, but done. All the twisting and turning, all the bending and all the lifting, and that was about it. We were done. To do any more would have been to risk injury or perhaps having to endure days of recovery with maybe ice packs and heating pads or maybe just taking a break from our normal activities until such a time we were once again up to the task as it were. I'm feeling better after a good night's sleep but that could be short lived so we'll see. Baby steps.
We stopped by a local burger place to pick up something to go for dinner on the way home. The missus ordered a fish sandwich and I ordered their burger of the day. I'm not a big burger guy but I hadn't had one in a while so why not. "Pink or no pink," they asked when I placed my order. I like a good medium rare and was about to say as much when the missus replied for me. "No pink." she said. I was too tired to argue and the horse had left the barn so I may have huffed and puffed a little bit but then it was over. It was just as well. When I finally sat down to have my burger, she was pink as can be. Just the way I would have ordered it if I had placed the order. The Lord works in mysterious ways!
Russia's Putin said something recently about denazification as being one of his goals while invading Ukraine. Who could disagree with that? Nobody wants Nazi's roaming around their neighborhood. It sounded a bit far fetched truth be told. When is the last time you heard of Nazi's anywhere except in history books going back to World War II? Well, I'm watching Tucker on FOX last night and he's going on and on about Nazi's in Ukraine. So, it is a thing? That has me jumping on the Putin bandwagon so far as it involves doing away with the Nazis. Maybe Putin isn't a madman after all.
We've heard too about the Nazi's that escaped after World War II and we've heard about the jews who tracked these war criminals down and brought them to justice. That's a good thing. Tucker went on to say that many of these Nazi's are now aiding and abetting President Zelensky in Ukraine. I suppose you can't be picky about your alliances when you're trying to stay alive so that's fine. And then Tucker starts talking about how Zelensky outlawed his political opponents and shut down many of the television stations that supported them. Only despots do such a thing and democracies in Europe and elsewhere should want nothing to do with someone who wants to fashion their government after the China's and Venezuela's of the world.
Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, you have all these politicians here in the United States singing Zelensky's praises. I'm talking about politicians on both side of the political aisle. Are they tone deaf or just abominally stupid? It's one thing to want to help defend a country whose President represents one of many democracies in Europe but it's quite another to help prop up a dictator in the making. Not a one has said anything about Zelensky's latest moves to quash or maybe even destroy his political opponents and that has to have you scratching your head. Just what the hell are they thinking?
Were it not for the good people in Ukraine whose lives have been uprooted as a result of Putin's invasion, I would be rooting for Putin. I would want him to go into Ukraine and burn the Zelensky government to the ground. Just take them out root and branch. Take that little mother fucking pip-squeak of a president out to the woodshed and teach him a lesson he'll never forget. This is how you go from hero to zero overnight. Enough of your Churchillian speeches and enough of your lectures to the western world about how Putin's invasion of your country is going to be the start of World War III. You're the dictator wannabe so you figure it out. Ain't nobody coming' to your fucking rescue, dawg.
This whole thing has gone from good versus evil to evil versus evil for me. Putin is certainly just as despicable if not more despicable than the dictator wannabe, Zelensky, so let's just put that out there. The politicians here into US may not care that Zelensky has gone full despot but here's hoping that the democracies in Europe are taking notice. Give him just enough of whatever it takes to repel the Russians or maybe force them into a stalemate. Then, the Ukrainians should insist that their country be restored to the flourishing democracy that it once was. Well, "flourishing" might be too strong a word.
I wasn't planning to watch any of the hearings on Katanji Brown Jackson, Biden's nominee for the Supreme Court, but I thought better of it when I heard through the grapevine that the Republicans were asking real honest-to-goodness questions about her judicial record when and where it involved child pornographers. I thought she was probably a shoe-in to get the position and the usual cadre of two or three republicans would join the democrats win putting this woman on the court. After listening to the Republicans and their questioning of her yesterday, I'm no longer certain that she will get the votes she needs to get across the finish line.
I won't say that her inability to define what a "woman" is was the defining moment for me but it was a damnable moment. Thank you, Senator Marsha Blacburn for asking the question. In a day and age when the left is trying to redefine every cultural norm under the sun, including the definition of "gender", it is supremely important that we Americans put our foot down and say no to someone who holds such radical beliefs and who aspires to sit on the highest court in our land. It is the proverbial slippery slope into the abyss at a time when majorities on the court are fickle and can change overnight. We do not need this nominee being the deciding vote on anything or any issue. How hard would it have been for the nominee to respond as follows: A "woman" is an adult female?
I was very troubled by her continuous harping on the issue of disparity in sentencing. That's code for black men and women receiving disproportionally longer sentences than their white counterparts for the same crime. I won't deny that it doesn't happen but I also detected a certain social justice tinge to her responses that left me wondering just how far she was willing to go to correct the "wrongs" of the past. It's one thing to want to correct the wrongs of the past while working the night court circuit and it's quite another to do the same when you're a Supreme Court Justice. It gets even more incendiary when you consider her record of leniency when it comes to child pornographers and what that could mean to our society at large. It's the stuff that nightmares are made of.
She said that she didn't know much about Critical Race Theory other than the fact that it was some theoretical framework that was studied at the college or law school level. Her response to that question was pure unadulterated hocum. It turns out that she is a board member of a private school in Washington, DC, where the curriculum includes books like "Antiracist Baby" and other works by radicals and leftists. She sat slack jawed as Cruz laid bare her lies and deceptions. It was astounding. Senator Cruz had posters prepared which further exposed her lies for all the world to see. I couldn't have been more proud as a conservative to see that the gloves had come off on my side of the political aisle and the world would come to know this nominee for better or worse.
At the end of the day, I just don't think that this woman has the chops to become a Supreme Court Justice. I wouldn't say that she's dumb as a bag of rocks but I certainly was not impressed by the lack of heft in her responses when asked about this and that precedent by republican senators. By her very admission, she has been a district court judge for several years and that is the sum and substance of her experience. We're still waiting to see her LSAT scores and the 14,000 pages of documentation relating to her time on the court that the Biden White House will not release. Might there be something in there about affirmative action? If the democrats are looking for a rubber stamp, she's their girl.
I was showing the missus a picture that the Biden Administration had posted to Twitter yesterday where Biden was approaching a waiting helicopter with the White House in the background. He had on his usual aviator shades and was saluting the marine who stood at the entrance of the helicopter awaiting his arrival. Biden was on his way to visit his European counterparts in Europe to discuss strategies to assist Ukraine. There was only one problem. The photo was taken sometime last year. The trees in the picture around the White House were in full bloom. That's hardly the case at this time of year in Washington. It's just more smoke and mirrors from this smoke and mirrors administration.
I'm actually embarrassed to think that this feeble old fuck is the best we can do as the most powerful nation in the world. You can hide a lot of things but dementia and senility are not amongst them. Is this jackass supposed to be projecting American prowess and muscularity on the world stage at a time when the Europeans are looking to our country for leadership? Surely, our adversaries are laughing hysterically at the sight of this benevolent old fool mumbling and fumbling as he attempts to read his cue cards at opportune or, worse yet, inopportune moments. Not to worry. Unless we somehow catch sight of it thanks to the Europeans, it will be whitewashed and disappeared by the American media as though it never happened. They've propped up this fool this far. They can't stop now.
I was pointing out to the missus the other day that the local home heating oil companies hereabouts have stopped posting their prices outside their establishments ( or on the backs of their trucks). I found that to be interesting to say the least. Why would they do that? It was okay to post the prices when the prices were in the $1.75 to $2.00 a gallon range but now that prices are hovering at $5.00 or more a gallon it's not okay? Do they think that any price starting with a "5" is just too scary for prospective buyers? Am I not correct in assuming that they post their prices to begin with because they want consumers to see that they have the best prices in town? Why is it any different now that prices are at or above $5 a gallon? Inquiring minds want to know.
I got a card in the mail the other day from our neighbor. It was a very nice card and enclosed with the card was a gift certificate to Penzy's. If you know anything about Penzy's, you know that they sell every spice under the sun and then some. We've actually been to one of their stores in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it was a fun place to visit. If you need or want some newfangled spice the likes of which you'll never find in your local supermarket, Penzy's is your place. Anyway, the gift card was her way of saying thank you for my snow blowing services over the course of the winter. The gift card was unnecessary, but I knew it was important to her that she be allowed to express her appreciation so that was that. The missus now tells me that Penzy's is a very woke company. Should I care?
There are very few things that bring a tear to the missus's eyes but getting a birthday card from her son with a nice note is at the very top of the list. I would post that note here if I thought I wasn't betraying any confidences but I'm thinking better of it so it will not appear here in any way, shape, or form. Suffice it to say, it did bring a tear to her eye and it may have even made up for my not making a comment on the very same card. I had no intention of stepping on the Ev man's sentiment and I surely didn't want to detract from his note and the impact that I knew it would have on the missus. As we all know, and can surely appreciate, there is no greater love than that that a mom has for her son (and maybe vice versa?)
I had high hopes that I might be able to take the missus out to a nice restaurant for her birthday. That seems unlikely as I sit here this morning. I think she's still just not ready. Maybe this is what they mean when they reference the term "long Covid." Long in the sense that it's been around seemingly forever seeing as we are now in our third year of this dreadful ebbing and flowing of the viral shitstorm delivered to our shores from the wet markets of Eastern Asia back in March of 2020. Every commercial nook and cranny of a shop, restaurant, or store is now, and has been since 2020, a veritable Petri dish of Covid-19. I know it's not the medical definition of Long Covid but there you have it. The missus is dug in deep. I'm less so but along for the ride.
We spent the day, the missus's birthday, staying under cover for the most part. It was a rainy and dismal day weather-wise so that seemed to be the best course of action. We picked up the Ev man and waited while he did his business over Exeter way. We then grabbed lunch at Jersey Mike's and the three of us hunkered down back at home. What more could mom have asked for on her birthday? She was spending time with the people she valued most in her life. If she wanted to have more than her allotted share of potato chips from the small bag that came with the subs, then I was good with it. There are always more potato chips. The same cannot be said for more moms.
We got a call from Mrs G in the early evening. She sounded her usual chipper self. There was noise in the background on the call that I mistook for a raucous gathering at her independent living facility. She doesn't usually call us while partying with her buds (bud-ettes?) but I dismissed it as a fanciful thought and went back to what I was doing while the missus and her mum carried on. That background noises that I mistook for partying were actually the muffled but busy sounds of a local hospital emergency room. You quickly try to make sense of what you're hearing, a sub-conscious reconciliation really, of what you're being told and how that compares or doesn't compare to the voice and associated intonation of the message being communicated.
She sounded fine but she wasn't fine? What on God's green earth was she doing in the emergency room then? How did she get there? The clarity in Mrs G's voice betrayed nothing more serious than a garden variety this or that until she told us her story. Yes, there was an accident and, yes, she had been injured in said accident. The injury was certainly not garden variety but it was all very early in the game and things were moving ahead, maybe a little too slowly for Mrs G's tastes, but moving ahead nonetheless. The experts would soon weigh in but nothing happens quickly in an emergency room so everyone waits.
It was helpful to Mrs G's loved ones to hear from Mrs G herself that she was in good spirits and not in any pain. Her injury, at least what we know of it as we sit here some 12 hours later, is correctable. That's what hospitals are for. Right? They fix things. The fixing is not usually the problem if that's all there is to it. It's all the things that follow the fix that make for a quick recovery or a less-than-quick recovery. If the Baby Jesus has his way when it comes to Mrs G, it will be the former.
So you take things one day at a time and, with the support of your family and loved ones, you do what you have to do to get back to where you started before all of this happened. For now, the card games, the pool aerobics, the trips back and forth from the cafe for your favorite dishes, the trips to and from the library to read the daily newspapers, the online chess games, and the quick drives into town and back, will have to take a back seat to something more important. It's all about the healing now. Her coffee flavored Nips, her 12-ounce cans of sugar-less A&W root beer, and her leisure time with her peeps back in the hood will have to wait.
You do worry about the person or persons doing the fixing when it comes to your loved ones. Are they up to snuff? Do they have the qualifications to do what they're doing? There comes a point in the process where you just have to hold your breath and hope for the best. An older more experienced hand might be able to do a rote job but nobody wants rote when it comes to your family members. It's not always about just getting in and out. When they're in there, and we're taking about surgery here, they had better damn well know where they're going and what they're doing. If they can perform a little magic while they're in there, all the better. God loves a good magic act.
The patient is resting comfortably or so I'm told now that we are some 24 hours out from the surgery. In hospital nomenclature, that means that the drugs are doing what they're supposed to be doing and the patient is not experiencing any discomfort. There will be difficult days ahead but today is not one of them. Starting today, she will entertain visitors one at a time as per the hospital policy while precautions remain in place due to the presence of Covid in the community. Reconnecting with reality after going through surgery means seeing familiar faces, hearing familiar voices, and playing once again to the audiences that were in attendance before the accident. We now present to you, the inimitable, the implacable, the always impressive, and now better and stronger than ever, Mrs G!
Speaking of hospitalizations, what the heck was going on with Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas? Word got out a week ago that he had been hospitalized with an undisclosed illness. In some news reports, there were references to a flu-like illness. The last thing we need these days is to have our Supreme Court up in the air not knowing what there is to know about Thomas's return to the court and seeing as we have the introduction of Biden's leftist and woke nominee to the Court, Katanji Brown Jackson. It goes to show you how fickle a majority we conservatives have (6-3) and how important it is to protect that majority at all costs. Thomas is now out of the hospital and apparently no worse for wear. The prospects of Jackson sitting on the court have, unfortunately, improved albeit along party lines. Am I the only one still asking to see her LSAT scores?
I was almost certain that Justice Thomas would suffer the same fate as Justice Scalia back in the day when they found justice Scalia dead in his hotel room. There were rumors at the time that they found Justice Scalia with a pillow over his head. Who doesn't think for a moment that the leftists are capable of such a monstrous act? It's a small price to pay, assuming someone goes to jail for the crime, to make sure that they have the last word when it comes to signing off on their leftist wet dreams. In other words, I put nothing past the democrats when it comes to solidifying their power at the highest levels of our government.
On last thing. Bumbles Biden is running around Europe giving speeches about how everyone is going to have to make sacrifices now that we've got this Ukraine thing going on. What the hell is he talking about? And what does he mean when he makes reference to food shortages coming to our country because of the war? Does he not know that America is a major producer of crops like wheat, corn, and soybeans that have reliably fed our nation though thick and thin for decades? These are not the words of a can-do president. It makes you wonder if he knows what our great nation is capable of. I, for one, know that our nation would be better off without this loser at the helm. I'm not sure how we survive the three long years remaining in his first term. God help us all.
The missus and I stopped by the Ev man's place yesterday. We thought it might be a good idea to lend a hand and see if we couldn't spruce things up a bit while he's away. His only concern was that he might have left something or other out that would go bad and smell up the place. He's not much of a housekeeper so we weren't surprised to find his place in need of a good cleaning. Yes, there was organizing to do but we needed to do a few washes, clean up a few dishes, vacuum this and that, and I'd rather not comment on everything that we ended up carrying out to the trash bin.
All in a good day's work, I suppose. By the time dinner time rolled around, we were done. Not finished, but done. All the twisting and turning, all the bending and all the lifting, and that was about it. We were done. To do any more would have been to risk injury or perhaps having to endure days of recovery with maybe ice packs and heating pads or maybe just taking a break from our normal activities until such a time we were once again up to the task as it were. I'm feeling better after a good night's sleep but that could be short lived so we'll see. Baby steps.
We stopped by a local burger place to pick up something to go for dinner on the way home. The missus ordered a fish sandwich and I ordered their burger of the day. I'm not a big burger guy but I hadn't had one in a while so why not. "Pink or no pink," they asked when I placed my order. I like a good medium rare and was about to say as much when the missus replied for me. "No pink." she said. I was too tired to argue and the horse had left the barn so I may have huffed and puffed a little bit but then it was over. It was just as well. When I finally sat down to have my burger, she was pink as can be. Just the way I would have ordered it if I had placed the order. The Lord works in mysterious ways!
Russia's Putin said something recently about denazification as being one of his goals while invading Ukraine. Who could disagree with that? Nobody wants Nazi's roaming around their neighborhood. It sounded a bit far fetched truth be told. When is the last time you heard of Nazi's anywhere except in history books going back to World War II? Well, I'm watching Tucker on FOX last night and he's going on and on about Nazi's in Ukraine. So, it is a thing? That has me jumping on the Putin bandwagon so far as it involves doing away with the Nazis. Maybe Putin isn't a madman after all.
We've heard too about the Nazi's that escaped after World War II and we've heard about the jews who tracked these war criminals down and brought them to justice. That's a good thing. Tucker went on to say that many of these Nazi's are now aiding and abetting President Zelensky in Ukraine. I suppose you can't be picky about your alliances when you're trying to stay alive so that's fine. And then Tucker starts talking about how Zelensky outlawed his political opponents and shut down many of the television stations that supported them. Only despots do such a thing and democracies in Europe and elsewhere should want nothing to do with someone who wants to fashion their government after the China's and Venezuela's of the world.
Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, you have all these politicians here in the United States singing Zelensky's praises. I'm talking about politicians on both side of the political aisle. Are they tone deaf or just abominally stupid? It's one thing to want to help defend a country whose President represents one of many democracies in Europe but it's quite another to help prop up a dictator in the making. Not a one has said anything about Zelensky's latest moves to quash or maybe even destroy his political opponents and that has to have you scratching your head. Just what the hell are they thinking?
Were it not for the good people in Ukraine whose lives have been uprooted as a result of Putin's invasion, I would be rooting for Putin. I would want him to go into Ukraine and burn the Zelensky government to the ground. Just take them out root and branch. Take that little mother fucking pip-squeak of a president out to the woodshed and teach him a lesson he'll never forget. This is how you go from hero to zero overnight. Enough of your Churchillian speeches and enough of your lectures to the western world about how Putin's invasion of your country is going to be the start of World War III. You're the dictator wannabe so you figure it out. Ain't nobody coming' to your fucking rescue, dawg.
This whole thing has gone from good versus evil to evil versus evil for me. Putin is certainly just as despicable if not more despicable than the dictator wannabe, Zelensky, so let's just put that out there. The politicians here into US may not care that Zelensky has gone full despot but here's hoping that the democracies in Europe are taking notice. Give him just enough of whatever it takes to repel the Russians or maybe force them into a stalemate. Then, the Ukrainians should insist that their country be restored to the flourishing democracy that it once was. Well, "flourishing" might be too strong a word.
I wasn't planning to watch any of the hearings on Katanji Brown Jackson, Biden's nominee for the Supreme Court, but I thought better of it when I heard through the grapevine that the Republicans were asking real honest-to-goodness questions about her judicial record when and where it involved child pornographers. I thought she was probably a shoe-in to get the position and the usual cadre of two or three republicans would join the democrats win putting this woman on the court. After listening to the Republicans and their questioning of her yesterday, I'm no longer certain that she will get the votes she needs to get across the finish line.
I won't say that her inability to define what a "woman" is was the defining moment for me but it was a damnable moment. Thank you, Senator Marsha Blacburn for asking the question. In a day and age when the left is trying to redefine every cultural norm under the sun, including the definition of "gender", it is supremely important that we Americans put our foot down and say no to someone who holds such radical beliefs and who aspires to sit on the highest court in our land. It is the proverbial slippery slope into the abyss at a time when majorities on the court are fickle and can change overnight. We do not need this nominee being the deciding vote on anything or any issue. How hard would it have been for the nominee to respond as follows: A "woman" is an adult female?
I was very troubled by her continuous harping on the issue of disparity in sentencing. That's code for black men and women receiving disproportionally longer sentences than their white counterparts for the same crime. I won't deny that it doesn't happen but I also detected a certain social justice tinge to her responses that left me wondering just how far she was willing to go to correct the "wrongs" of the past. It's one thing to want to correct the wrongs of the past while working the night court circuit and it's quite another to do the same when you're a Supreme Court Justice. It gets even more incendiary when you consider her record of leniency when it comes to child pornographers and what that could mean to our society at large. It's the stuff that nightmares are made of.
She said that she didn't know much about Critical Race Theory other than the fact that it was some theoretical framework that was studied at the college or law school level. Her response to that question was pure unadulterated hocum. It turns out that she is a board member of a private school in Washington, DC, where the curriculum includes books like "Antiracist Baby" and other works by radicals and leftists. She sat slack jawed as Cruz laid bare her lies and deceptions. It was astounding. Senator Cruz had posters prepared which further exposed her lies for all the world to see. I couldn't have been more proud as a conservative to see that the gloves had come off on my side of the political aisle and the world would come to know this nominee for better or worse.
At the end of the day, I just don't think that this woman has the chops to become a Supreme Court Justice. I wouldn't say that she's dumb as a bag of rocks but I certainly was not impressed by the lack of heft in her responses when asked about this and that precedent by republican senators. By her very admission, she has been a district court judge for several years and that is the sum and substance of her experience. We're still waiting to see her LSAT scores and the 14,000 pages of documentation relating to her time on the court that the Biden White House will not release. Might there be something in there about affirmative action? If the democrats are looking for a rubber stamp, she's their girl.
I was showing the missus a picture that the Biden Administration had posted to Twitter yesterday where Biden was approaching a waiting helicopter with the White House in the background. He had on his usual aviator shades and was saluting the marine who stood at the entrance of the helicopter awaiting his arrival. Biden was on his way to visit his European counterparts in Europe to discuss strategies to assist Ukraine. There was only one problem. The photo was taken sometime last year. The trees in the picture around the White House were in full bloom. That's hardly the case at this time of year in Washington. It's just more smoke and mirrors from this smoke and mirrors administration.
I'm actually embarrassed to think that this feeble old fuck is the best we can do as the most powerful nation in the world. You can hide a lot of things but dementia and senility are not amongst them. Is this jackass supposed to be projecting American prowess and muscularity on the world stage at a time when the Europeans are looking to our country for leadership? Surely, our adversaries are laughing hysterically at the sight of this benevolent old fool mumbling and fumbling as he attempts to read his cue cards at opportune or, worse yet, inopportune moments. Not to worry. Unless we somehow catch sight of it thanks to the Europeans, it will be whitewashed and disappeared by the American media as though it never happened. They've propped up this fool this far. They can't stop now.
I was pointing out to the missus the other day that the local home heating oil companies hereabouts have stopped posting their prices outside their establishments ( or on the backs of their trucks). I found that to be interesting to say the least. Why would they do that? It was okay to post the prices when the prices were in the $1.75 to $2.00 a gallon range but now that prices are hovering at $5.00 or more a gallon it's not okay? Do they think that any price starting with a "5" is just too scary for prospective buyers? Am I not correct in assuming that they post their prices to begin with because they want consumers to see that they have the best prices in town? Why is it any different now that prices are at or above $5 a gallon? Inquiring minds want to know.
I got a card in the mail the other day from our neighbor. It was a very nice card and enclosed with the card was a gift certificate to Penzy's. If you know anything about Penzy's, you know that they sell every spice under the sun and then some. We've actually been to one of their stores in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it was a fun place to visit. If you need or want some newfangled spice the likes of which you'll never find in your local supermarket, Penzy's is your place. Anyway, the gift card was her way of saying thank you for my snow blowing services over the course of the winter. The gift card was unnecessary, but I knew it was important to her that she be allowed to express her appreciation so that was that. The missus now tells me that Penzy's is a very woke company. Should I care?
There are very few things that bring a tear to the missus's eyes but getting a birthday card from her son with a nice note is at the very top of the list. I would post that note here if I thought I wasn't betraying any confidences but I'm thinking better of it so it will not appear here in any way, shape, or form. Suffice it to say, it did bring a tear to her eye and it may have even made up for my not making a comment on the very same card. I had no intention of stepping on the Ev man's sentiment and I surely didn't want to detract from his note and the impact that I knew it would have on the missus. As we all know, and can surely appreciate, there is no greater love than that that a mom has for her son (and maybe vice versa?)
I had high hopes that I might be able to take the missus out to a nice restaurant for her birthday. That seems unlikely as I sit here this morning. I think she's still just not ready. Maybe this is what they mean when they reference the term "long Covid." Long in the sense that it's been around seemingly forever seeing as we are now in our third year of this dreadful ebbing and flowing of the viral shitstorm delivered to our shores from the wet markets of Eastern Asia back in March of 2020. Every commercial nook and cranny of a shop, restaurant, or store is now, and has been since 2020, a veritable Petri dish of Covid-19. I know it's not the medical definition of Long Covid but there you have it. The missus is dug in deep. I'm less so but along for the ride.
We spent the day, the missus's birthday, staying under cover for the most part. It was a rainy and dismal day weather-wise so that seemed to be the best course of action. We picked up the Ev man and waited while he did his business over Exeter way. We then grabbed lunch at Jersey Mike's and the three of us hunkered down back at home. What more could mom have asked for on her birthday? She was spending time with the people she valued most in her life. If she wanted to have more than her allotted share of potato chips from the small bag that came with the subs, then I was good with it. There are always more potato chips. The same cannot be said for more moms.
We got a call from Mrs G in the early evening. She sounded her usual chipper self. There was noise in the background on the call that I mistook for a raucous gathering at her independent living facility. She doesn't usually call us while partying with her buds (bud-ettes?) but I dismissed it as a fanciful thought and went back to what I was doing while the missus and her mum carried on. That background noises that I mistook for partying were actually the muffled but busy sounds of a local hospital emergency room. You quickly try to make sense of what you're hearing, a sub-conscious reconciliation really, of what you're being told and how that compares or doesn't compare to the voice and associated intonation of the message being communicated.
She sounded fine but she wasn't fine? What on God's green earth was she doing in the emergency room then? How did she get there? The clarity in Mrs G's voice betrayed nothing more serious than a garden variety this or that until she told us her story. Yes, there was an accident and, yes, she had been injured in said accident. The injury was certainly not garden variety but it was all very early in the game and things were moving ahead, maybe a little too slowly for Mrs G's tastes, but moving ahead nonetheless. The experts would soon weigh in but nothing happens quickly in an emergency room so everyone waits.
It was helpful to Mrs G's loved ones to hear from Mrs G herself that she was in good spirits and not in any pain. Her injury, at least what we know of it as we sit here some 12 hours later, is correctable. That's what hospitals are for. Right? They fix things. The fixing is not usually the problem if that's all there is to it. It's all the things that follow the fix that make for a quick recovery or a less-than-quick recovery. If the Baby Jesus has his way when it comes to Mrs G, it will be the former.
So you take things one day at a time and, with the support of your family and loved ones, you do what you have to do to get back to where you started before all of this happened. For now, the card games, the pool aerobics, the trips back and forth from the cafe for your favorite dishes, the trips to and from the library to read the daily newspapers, the online chess games, and the quick drives into town and back, will have to take a back seat to something more important. It's all about the healing now. Her coffee flavored Nips, her 12-ounce cans of sugar-less A&W root beer, and her leisure time with her peeps back in the hood will have to wait.
You do worry about the person or persons doing the fixing when it comes to your loved ones. Are they up to snuff? Do they have the qualifications to do what they're doing? There comes a point in the process where you just have to hold your breath and hope for the best. An older more experienced hand might be able to do a rote job but nobody wants rote when it comes to your family members. It's not always about just getting in and out. When they're in there, and we're taking about surgery here, they had better damn well know where they're going and what they're doing. If they can perform a little magic while they're in there, all the better. God loves a good magic act.
The patient is resting comfortably or so I'm told now that we are some 24 hours out from the surgery. In hospital nomenclature, that means that the drugs are doing what they're supposed to be doing and the patient is not experiencing any discomfort. There will be difficult days ahead but today is not one of them. Starting today, she will entertain visitors one at a time as per the hospital policy while precautions remain in place due to the presence of Covid in the community. Reconnecting with reality after going through surgery means seeing familiar faces, hearing familiar voices, and playing once again to the audiences that were in attendance before the accident. We now present to you, the inimitable, the implacable, the always impressive, and now better and stronger than ever, Mrs G!
Speaking of hospitalizations, what the heck was going on with Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas? Word got out a week ago that he had been hospitalized with an undisclosed illness. In some news reports, there were references to a flu-like illness. The last thing we need these days is to have our Supreme Court up in the air not knowing what there is to know about Thomas's return to the court and seeing as we have the introduction of Biden's leftist and woke nominee to the Court, Katanji Brown Jackson. It goes to show you how fickle a majority we conservatives have (6-3) and how important it is to protect that majority at all costs. Thomas is now out of the hospital and apparently no worse for wear. The prospects of Jackson sitting on the court have, unfortunately, improved albeit along party lines. Am I the only one still asking to see her LSAT scores?
I was almost certain that Justice Thomas would suffer the same fate as Justice Scalia back in the day when they found justice Scalia dead in his hotel room. There were rumors at the time that they found Justice Scalia with a pillow over his head. Who doesn't think for a moment that the leftists are capable of such a monstrous act? It's a small price to pay, assuming someone goes to jail for the crime, to make sure that they have the last word when it comes to signing off on their leftist wet dreams. In other words, I put nothing past the democrats when it comes to solidifying their power at the highest levels of our government.
On last thing. Bumbles Biden is running around Europe giving speeches about how everyone is going to have to make sacrifices now that we've got this Ukraine thing going on. What the hell is he talking about? And what does he mean when he makes reference to food shortages coming to our country because of the war? Does he not know that America is a major producer of crops like wheat, corn, and soybeans that have reliably fed our nation though thick and thin for decades? These are not the words of a can-do president. It makes you wonder if he knows what our great nation is capable of. I, for one, know that our nation would be better off without this loser at the helm. I'm not sure how we survive the three long years remaining in his first term. God help us all.
Whack-a-Doodle
20/03/22 07:10
I got a telephone call from Mrs G last night around 8:30. She was having trouble logging on to her computer. We got the puppy restarted but she couldn't get past the login screen. I couldn't tell precisely what the problem was not being able to see what she was doing but we tried a few things none of which worked. I think she had typed in the wrong password and she didn't know how to delete the incorrect characters. I even tried doing FaceTime with her so I could see her keyboard and maybe help her find the right delete key to use. She finally said something about waiting until the following day when the person at the front desk in her facility might be able to assist her. That's how we left it.
I don't know if Mrs G forgot how to use the delete key or maybe she's never deleted characters moving from right to left or left to right. This is typing 101, no? When she finally found the delete key, she was holding it down instead of tapping it once for each keystroke. I was tempted to go to my computer to restart it and see what she was seeing. I've never experienced the problem that she was having although that's not to say that I won't at some point in my computing experience. I told her to let me know how things worked out. I'm half expecting to hear tell me that it was something simple. I probably should have told her to make sure she writes it down. You know, the solution. The thing.
Not sure where I saw this but I thought I saw something in my travels yesterday about heating oil costing $5 a gallon. That's up from $2 or so just a month ago. This is getting insane. One of the nice things about our home is that we have an electric heat option. We also have a wood stove although I've become less interested in using the wood stove over these past many years. We also live near a nuclear power plant so maybe we're paying less per kilowatt hour when we use electric heat? Living near a nuclear power plant also puts us at ground zero in the event of a nuclear attack so there's that.
So, I think I'm going to call our oil company today and have them take us off automatic delivery. We'll give the electric heat a try and see if that doesn't make a difference. It's not an issue of affordabilty but rather it's my way of fighting back against the Biden Administration whom I hold personally responsible for the outrageous hikes in oil prices not to mention the out-of-control inflationary forces that he and his minions have unleashed on our country in the interest of forcing a green economy on our citizenry. Not surprisingly, Biden blames it all on Putin.
In other words, fuck Joe Biden and the horses that he rode in on. We've never used our electric heat in all the years that we've lived here so this is going to be an experiment of sorts. Each room in our home has a separate control so that's good. We don't need to heat every room although, truth be told, we don't live in a big house so doing that wouldn't be the end of the world. I'm guessing we're like most people who spend most of their time when we're home in just a handful of rooms. We're also not in the middle of winter where this newfangled strategy of ours might work less well.
I'm reminded of the fact that there is a certain equilibrium in the economy that works well when everything is in check. When and where things go awry, like oil prices skyrocketing or the cost of necessities getting out of hand due to inflation, finite resources and the distribution of same go into a cocked hat for better or worse. In most cases, for the worst. You end up spending an inordinate amount of your resources on heating your home or commuting to and from work or both. That leaves a mere pittance for other necessities in your life like feeding your children, supporting your local stores, and maybe putting a few shekels away for a rainy day. It's a vicious and unrelenting cycle of pain.
My heart goes out to people who live on a shoestring of a budget to begin with. Where do they find the extra money to put gas in their cars or heating oil in their homes? I was out for my usual bike ride yesterday and I thought I noticed that there were fewer cars on the road. Who can afford going for a joy ride with gas prices at $5 a gallon? The cars that were out and about were traveling slower in an attempt to keep their foot off the gas as much as possible. I felt bad for the occasional SUV knowing as I do how many gallons it takes to fill those tanks and just how few miles to the gallon that they get.
I have a good mind to talk to the Ev man about only filling his gas tank up half way for the foreseeable future. I've seen stories about people siphoning gas out of cars in the middle of the night because they can't otherwise afford to put gas in their tanks. The Ev man can ill afford to wake up one morning to an empty tank of gas so we should probably start with that conversation. I'm also thinking that it wouldn't hurt to have him park in the upper lot of his facility where there is more light and less of a chance that someone will go unseen if they're out to steal gas. I don't want to scare him but a word to the wise can't hurt in these lean times.
The missus and I woke up to sort of clanking sound around 11:30 last night. It was definitely metal on metal although we couldn't agree on where the sound was coming from. Maybe it was the latch on the door to the enclosure that houses our oil tank that had come loose and was now flapping in the wind. There was little to no wind so that seemed unlikely. If someone was out and about in the middle of the night wanting to steal heating oil then they came to the right place. This is where the man of the household gets out of bed, runs around in the buff turning a few lights off and on just to let the imaginary thieves know that we're on to them, and then goes back to bed after securing the perimeter.
I'll be checking the tank today just to make sure that the tank is still full. Did I mention that I ran the Ev man down to Worcester yesterday? He'll be spending a week away to take care of a few things that he's let slip these past few weeks. Who can't use a little sabbatical from time to time to keep their demons at bay? I was happy to give him a lift although I'd forgotten how miserable driving that particular route is especially in and around rush hour. The traffic wasn't bad but the road itself left a lot to be desired. I found myself slipping in and out of "commute" mode. If that wasn't anxiety provoking enough, there were the rampaging 18-wheelers which have a way of narrowing your focus.
On my way back home, I swung by Mrs G's place. I thought I might take a look at her computer problem. The person she thought might be able to fix it wasn't able to fix it so I figured it wouldn't hurt to have a look-see myself. I've only had to bring my computer for servicing one time in all the years I've owned computers and that was due to a faulty video card. It was the kind of problem that I would have never diagnosed so I had no problem bringing it out for servicing. That is to say, I feel fairly confident that I can solve most issues that come up even if and when I've had never experienced them before.
Mrs G had apparently tried to log into her computer one too many times and it essentially locked her device after the third time. It was an interesting problem and just the kind of problem that I enjoy troubleshooting. This has to be a common problem and if it's a common problem then there must be solutions galore out there on the internet if you know where to look. Right? Then again, there are a lot of rabbit holes one can go down and I went down a few of them when I was looking around for a solution. Going down rabbit holes goes with the territory so I figured this would be a bit of a slog. I wasn't wrong.
Mrs G said something to me about bringing it out for servicing and I thought to myself, not on your fucking life. She asked me how old the computer was and I'm thinking she was probably thinking that the computer was still under warranty and that we might be able to get someone at Apple to give us a hand in finding a fix. She wasn't pacing and she wasn't looking over my shoulder so I appreciated that. It took me about twenty minutes and a trip to the dark side (terminal) before I got her up and running again. Interestingly enough, I had to detach certain peripherals and reattach the peripherals to the actual computer instead of a third-party connector in order to get her mouse and keyboard to work again. All in a good day's work, eh Johnny boy?
This time change thing has my head spinning, I'm up too late and up too early. I hate getting up too early. I end up fighting the urge to go back to bed and it's not a battle that I usually win. Going back to bed means not writing in this here journal and waking up again some time after 9am leaves me wondering where the morning went. Everything is off. I'm doing the journal thing now because it's probably the one thing that I'd regret not doing if I do end up going back to bed. If all of this sounds muddled, it's probably because that's the way I'm feeling. That's what journals are for. Right?
We half expected to hear from the Ev man last night. His parting words to me when I dropped him off in Worcester on Monday were, "I'll call you in a couple of days." He hasn't phoned and the missus is sounding a little concerned. Is he doing so well that he feels that he doesn't need to touch base with us? Have they taken away his phone so he doesn't have the inclination or opportunity to reach out to the people who are maybe responsible for him being where he is? Nothing could be further from the truth. That is to say, the missus and I being responsible for his being where he is. Here's just hoping that he makes the best of his time there. Everything in good time.
We're watching this show on HULU called "Pam and Tommy." Or, is it "Tommy and Pam."? I know who Pamela Anderson is and I recall her from the 80's or 90's as one of many actors or actresses who came out of the Baywatch series and went on to do other things. David Hassenfeld was another one of those characters. Pam was quite the looker and very easy on the eyes to be sure. She was one of a handful of iconoclastic beauties who graced many a poster hanging on the walls of garages, back rooms, and bedrooms of adolescent boys back in the day. I'm a lot less familiar with this whole Tommy Lee thing. Did I even know who he was? I'm not, nor was I ever, a Motley Crue fan so the answer to that question is a resounding "no."
It's a romp of a show to be sure. The acting is superb and there is never a dull moment. I'm learning more about their relationship than I care to know but the show is fun and who doesn't like to watch a fun show? The show does a good job of putting the viewer in a time machine and taking us back to the days when the personal computer, online services like AOL, and VCR tapes were all the rage. It all seems so yesterday. And then there's this Tommy and Pamela porn tape thing that I have absolutely no recollection of whatsoever. Not that it would have crossed my radar but the show makes it sound like it (the tape) was part and parcel of the testosterone culture during that particular time period.
Part of me thinks that those were the good old days. You could enjoy looking at a poster of a scantily clad woman like Pamela Anderson or Farrah Fawcett and not feel guilty about it. Men were all in when it came to the objectification of women and it was free love as far as the eye could see. Think "Woodstock." That all changes in episode two or three of the show when Pam starts to get her knickers in a bunch when the producers are working overtime rearranging her bathing suit to reveal more of her buttocks when all she wants is a speaking part in one or more of the beach scenes they're filming.
She becomes even more incensed once she learns that the sex tape of her and Tommy is being sold on the internet. Things go from bad to worse when Tommy laughs it off as some prurient conquest while she envisions her career going down the tubes. Tommy is nothing if not empathetic and he marshals every available resource to find the culprits responsible for releasing the tape. It's important to remember that had Tommy paid the people who stole the tapes the money he owed them for some carpentry work they did in his home that this never would have happened. I'm guessing that none of this lasts too long so I'm enjoying it while it lasts.
This whole Ukraine thing is getting weird. The president of Ukraine, Zelensky, is reaching out to various and sundry countries to see if he can't whip up some support to help he and his fellow Ukranians keep the Russians at bay. He addressed our Congress here in the US yesterday and it was, from a production standpoint, some sappy well produced melodrama the likes of which had to be put together in the back rooms of Hollywood. Some mother fucker, and I don't know who, is trying to drag our country into World War III with Russia. Oh, the tears. Gimme a fucking break.
What if the president of some African backwater came around asking to address our Congress because he and his people have been fighting a decades long battle and the tide was starting to take a turn for the worse. What kind of reception do you think he would get? Would they roll out the red carpet so he could do his dog and pony for the Mitt Romney's and Nancy Pelosi's in our Congress? Not on your fucking life. But there they were yesterday in Congress lining up to take their seats in the theater for this epic speech and movie presented by Zelensky and whoever it is that is funding him behind the scenes.
He seemed to suggest that we (US) would be going to war soon enough with Russia so we might as well jump in now. Who's buying this bullshit? Thus far, it looks like we're still not doing a no-fly zone so that's a good thing. We have no plans to put boots on the ground so that's a good thing too. I'm okay with giving them the tools to fight a defensive battle against their neighbors. They've put up a pretty good fight so far and the Russians have yet to take a major city despite their being in Ukraine now for some three weeks. Not sure how true this is but the Ukrainians are reporting that they have killed three Russian generals to date. Sounds like they're kicking butt and taking names. Good stuff.
Some would say that this is the fight between the US and Russia that has been in the making for years. Don't think for a minute that the people who would profit the most from a fight like this aren't working through their proxies in Congress and elsewhere to bring this thing to fruition. They can care less that Russia has 2600 nuclear weapons, most of which, are pointed at the US. Short of a nuclear holocaust, there are monies to be made and wars to be waged all of which enrich those in what we affectionalty refer to these days as the Military Industrial Complex. When you factor in 10% for the big guy, and I'm referring here to the guy who makes the decision to go or not go, what more do you need to know?
I caught some comments yesterday made by Governor DeSantis of Florida which I found interesting. He was commenting on Trump's actions during Trump's time in the White House as it related to Ukraine. I'm thinking to myself, these are not the comments of someone who is expecting Trump to be a competitor in the upcoming 2024 election. More to the point, they were comments made by someone who was maybe trying to gain favor with the person most likely to win the nomination in the hopes of maybe being selected as a Vice President. Can you imagine DeSantis on the stage in a debate between he and Kamala Harris? This assumes that she would still be on the ticket. Anyway, interesting. At a minimum, this bears watching.
I'm hearing that Biden is planning a trip to Europe in coming weeks to meet with our NATO allies. Here's my take: He and his handlers will find one or more reasons not to make the trip. Can you imagine Biden over there in his mumbling bumbling state trying to communicate with his peers using cue cards and teleprompters? It doesn't get any more ridiculous than that. I mean, who the hell wants to stand on a stage with a guy who can't form a complete sentence without using cue cards and when he isn't using cue cards you never know what kind of insanity he's going to veer off into. Just yesterday, he referred to his Vice President as his "First Lady." This is just whack-a-doodle.
Yep, there's a plan afoot. There were four or five democrats in Congress that came down with Covid yesterday. The Second Gentleman also reported coming down with Covid. Who makes up these fucking titles? He's the husband of the Vice President for chrissakes. Anyway, you can see how the circle is tightening. Biden is at the core of this concentric circle so he is likely to be exposed or even come down with the virus sooner or later. It's a pretext in the making is what I would tell you. It's a scam just like his presidency is a scam. It's all smoke and mirrors. I'm betting you dollars to doughnuts that he never makes the trip and that he uses Covid as a pretext to not make the trip. I would go so far as to say that the so-called aforementioned Covid sufferers are not suffering from Covid at all. More smoke and mirrors.
Have I said anything about this Supreme Court nominee that Biden put up? He promised back in the day when he was running for president that he would nominate a black woman for the court should he be elected. Qualifications be damned. It was going to be a black woman come hell or high water. Imagine for a minute if Trump promised to nominate a white woman to sit on the Supreme Court. The coverage in the media would be wall-to-wall racist racist racist. That's just the way it works in this country of ours. That being the case, you can't argue with Trump when he says that the media in America is the enemy of the people. It would be more appropriate to refer to them as the propaganda arm of the democrat party.
Anyway, Biden got his stooge of a nominee. She's an alleged black activist and BLM acolyte who has spent most of her judicial career adjudicating parking tickets and domestic abuse cases in district court. She's only written one opinion in her role as a Federal Appeals Court judge and that opinion was quickly penned in the days leading up to her nomination so as to be able to say that she had written at least one opinion. So far, so good. Now, we're starting to hear rumors that she has gone particularly easy on child pornographers in her somewhat brief career as a judge. We're also hearing that the records of those cases seem to be under seal and no longer available to the public.
Keep in mind that Biden himself has something of a shady past when and where it comes to children. One only needs to point to the many online pictures and videos going back a number of years of Biden and the children that he seems to be fondling, sniffing, caressing, and some would say, grooming. He just can't seem to keep his hands off them if you're to believe your eyes. They are, for better or worse, displays of affection that are both cringeworthy and out there for the world to see. You know that the parents of these children are just dying a slow death behind their sycophantic and politicallly correct smiles as Biden reaches for their children with his grubby hands, his sad but hungry eyes, and his slow and suffocating breaths.
It's just not a pretty picture. And now, this very same president has nominated someone for our country's highest court who has a particular disinterest in pursuing or putting away criminals with a penchant for sexual crimes related to children. The Senate hearings for this nominee begin next week so we'll see who does and who doesn't seem to think that her record as it relates to crimes against children is a problem. If I had to guess, all republicans will insist that she provide a full accounting of every case revealed thus far and that she release any and all records that have been sealed to date before rendering a verdict on this nominee. As for the democrats, it will be all about equity, inclusion, and the marginalization of the black woman in today's society. Wait for it.
Make no mistake about it. If this woman is put on the court she will be nothing more than a rubber stamp for the democrat party. From what I've seen so far, she doesn't have what it takes to properly adjudicate some of the more difficult cases that she is likely to see come before the court. That's just a fact. How she ends up formulating decisions will be interesting to watch. Not that any of us will have front row seats to watch this train wreck of a nominee but if the court ever goes public we'll get an inside glimpse of just how the sausage gets made. We may decide at the end of the day that we need a mechanism for removing incompetent justices and, assuming that conservatives have a say in that decision, we will thank the baby Jesus for the 6-3 majority that we currently hold.
Looks like the Ev man is going to hang in down in Worcester for another week or so. He's good with everything thus far and if he's good then we're good. He says that they're treating him like a human being whatever that means. Where precisely has he not been treated like a human being? Inquiring minds want to know. He said something about feeling good about having access to the stable thing so he can grab a bite from the vending machines here and there. He should have access to his phone this week as well so I expect we'll be hearing from him more frequently. Who doesn't think that's a good thing.
If we're to believe the progressive talk show moonbats out and about in the ether it sounds like the Covid thing might be coming around again. They say that if it's in Europe then we're two to three weeks away from seeing it come here to the states. Entire cities have been locked down in China because of an alleged resurgence but who believes a fucking thing they hear coming out of the mouths of the communists in that country? The Moderna and Pfizers of the world are out there requesting approval for a third and fourth booster so they can drive up their sales ahead of the second quarters earnings reports. I'm not sure if they've given up on trying to get jabs into the arms of the first and second graders as yet so there's that. I'm not putting any more of that poison in my body. My body, my choice.
I'll keep an eye on the numbers locally (Currently 0 cases) to satisfy myself that the virus is either surging or not. I don't run from it but I also don't go out of my way to try and contract it. In other words, I'm not out there tempting fate. If it gets me, it gets me. Give me a box or two of Kleenex and I'll see you on the other side. If it's anything like the last surge of the omicron virus, I definitely saw an uptick in our community but the numbers came down just as fast or faster than they went up. It came and went in maybe six weeks time. It also seemed to disappear from every state and every community around the same time which was weird. There was none of this hopscotching from one state to another like we'd seen in previous surges. Stay tuned for more panic porn from the Main Street media.
I don't know if Mrs G forgot how to use the delete key or maybe she's never deleted characters moving from right to left or left to right. This is typing 101, no? When she finally found the delete key, she was holding it down instead of tapping it once for each keystroke. I was tempted to go to my computer to restart it and see what she was seeing. I've never experienced the problem that she was having although that's not to say that I won't at some point in my computing experience. I told her to let me know how things worked out. I'm half expecting to hear tell me that it was something simple. I probably should have told her to make sure she writes it down. You know, the solution. The thing.
Not sure where I saw this but I thought I saw something in my travels yesterday about heating oil costing $5 a gallon. That's up from $2 or so just a month ago. This is getting insane. One of the nice things about our home is that we have an electric heat option. We also have a wood stove although I've become less interested in using the wood stove over these past many years. We also live near a nuclear power plant so maybe we're paying less per kilowatt hour when we use electric heat? Living near a nuclear power plant also puts us at ground zero in the event of a nuclear attack so there's that.
So, I think I'm going to call our oil company today and have them take us off automatic delivery. We'll give the electric heat a try and see if that doesn't make a difference. It's not an issue of affordabilty but rather it's my way of fighting back against the Biden Administration whom I hold personally responsible for the outrageous hikes in oil prices not to mention the out-of-control inflationary forces that he and his minions have unleashed on our country in the interest of forcing a green economy on our citizenry. Not surprisingly, Biden blames it all on Putin.
In other words, fuck Joe Biden and the horses that he rode in on. We've never used our electric heat in all the years that we've lived here so this is going to be an experiment of sorts. Each room in our home has a separate control so that's good. We don't need to heat every room although, truth be told, we don't live in a big house so doing that wouldn't be the end of the world. I'm guessing we're like most people who spend most of their time when we're home in just a handful of rooms. We're also not in the middle of winter where this newfangled strategy of ours might work less well.
I'm reminded of the fact that there is a certain equilibrium in the economy that works well when everything is in check. When and where things go awry, like oil prices skyrocketing or the cost of necessities getting out of hand due to inflation, finite resources and the distribution of same go into a cocked hat for better or worse. In most cases, for the worst. You end up spending an inordinate amount of your resources on heating your home or commuting to and from work or both. That leaves a mere pittance for other necessities in your life like feeding your children, supporting your local stores, and maybe putting a few shekels away for a rainy day. It's a vicious and unrelenting cycle of pain.
My heart goes out to people who live on a shoestring of a budget to begin with. Where do they find the extra money to put gas in their cars or heating oil in their homes? I was out for my usual bike ride yesterday and I thought I noticed that there were fewer cars on the road. Who can afford going for a joy ride with gas prices at $5 a gallon? The cars that were out and about were traveling slower in an attempt to keep their foot off the gas as much as possible. I felt bad for the occasional SUV knowing as I do how many gallons it takes to fill those tanks and just how few miles to the gallon that they get.
I have a good mind to talk to the Ev man about only filling his gas tank up half way for the foreseeable future. I've seen stories about people siphoning gas out of cars in the middle of the night because they can't otherwise afford to put gas in their tanks. The Ev man can ill afford to wake up one morning to an empty tank of gas so we should probably start with that conversation. I'm also thinking that it wouldn't hurt to have him park in the upper lot of his facility where there is more light and less of a chance that someone will go unseen if they're out to steal gas. I don't want to scare him but a word to the wise can't hurt in these lean times.
The missus and I woke up to sort of clanking sound around 11:30 last night. It was definitely metal on metal although we couldn't agree on where the sound was coming from. Maybe it was the latch on the door to the enclosure that houses our oil tank that had come loose and was now flapping in the wind. There was little to no wind so that seemed unlikely. If someone was out and about in the middle of the night wanting to steal heating oil then they came to the right place. This is where the man of the household gets out of bed, runs around in the buff turning a few lights off and on just to let the imaginary thieves know that we're on to them, and then goes back to bed after securing the perimeter.
I'll be checking the tank today just to make sure that the tank is still full. Did I mention that I ran the Ev man down to Worcester yesterday? He'll be spending a week away to take care of a few things that he's let slip these past few weeks. Who can't use a little sabbatical from time to time to keep their demons at bay? I was happy to give him a lift although I'd forgotten how miserable driving that particular route is especially in and around rush hour. The traffic wasn't bad but the road itself left a lot to be desired. I found myself slipping in and out of "commute" mode. If that wasn't anxiety provoking enough, there were the rampaging 18-wheelers which have a way of narrowing your focus.
On my way back home, I swung by Mrs G's place. I thought I might take a look at her computer problem. The person she thought might be able to fix it wasn't able to fix it so I figured it wouldn't hurt to have a look-see myself. I've only had to bring my computer for servicing one time in all the years I've owned computers and that was due to a faulty video card. It was the kind of problem that I would have never diagnosed so I had no problem bringing it out for servicing. That is to say, I feel fairly confident that I can solve most issues that come up even if and when I've had never experienced them before.
Mrs G had apparently tried to log into her computer one too many times and it essentially locked her device after the third time. It was an interesting problem and just the kind of problem that I enjoy troubleshooting. This has to be a common problem and if it's a common problem then there must be solutions galore out there on the internet if you know where to look. Right? Then again, there are a lot of rabbit holes one can go down and I went down a few of them when I was looking around for a solution. Going down rabbit holes goes with the territory so I figured this would be a bit of a slog. I wasn't wrong.
Mrs G said something to me about bringing it out for servicing and I thought to myself, not on your fucking life. She asked me how old the computer was and I'm thinking she was probably thinking that the computer was still under warranty and that we might be able to get someone at Apple to give us a hand in finding a fix. She wasn't pacing and she wasn't looking over my shoulder so I appreciated that. It took me about twenty minutes and a trip to the dark side (terminal) before I got her up and running again. Interestingly enough, I had to detach certain peripherals and reattach the peripherals to the actual computer instead of a third-party connector in order to get her mouse and keyboard to work again. All in a good day's work, eh Johnny boy?
This time change thing has my head spinning, I'm up too late and up too early. I hate getting up too early. I end up fighting the urge to go back to bed and it's not a battle that I usually win. Going back to bed means not writing in this here journal and waking up again some time after 9am leaves me wondering where the morning went. Everything is off. I'm doing the journal thing now because it's probably the one thing that I'd regret not doing if I do end up going back to bed. If all of this sounds muddled, it's probably because that's the way I'm feeling. That's what journals are for. Right?
We half expected to hear from the Ev man last night. His parting words to me when I dropped him off in Worcester on Monday were, "I'll call you in a couple of days." He hasn't phoned and the missus is sounding a little concerned. Is he doing so well that he feels that he doesn't need to touch base with us? Have they taken away his phone so he doesn't have the inclination or opportunity to reach out to the people who are maybe responsible for him being where he is? Nothing could be further from the truth. That is to say, the missus and I being responsible for his being where he is. Here's just hoping that he makes the best of his time there. Everything in good time.
We're watching this show on HULU called "Pam and Tommy." Or, is it "Tommy and Pam."? I know who Pamela Anderson is and I recall her from the 80's or 90's as one of many actors or actresses who came out of the Baywatch series and went on to do other things. David Hassenfeld was another one of those characters. Pam was quite the looker and very easy on the eyes to be sure. She was one of a handful of iconoclastic beauties who graced many a poster hanging on the walls of garages, back rooms, and bedrooms of adolescent boys back in the day. I'm a lot less familiar with this whole Tommy Lee thing. Did I even know who he was? I'm not, nor was I ever, a Motley Crue fan so the answer to that question is a resounding "no."
It's a romp of a show to be sure. The acting is superb and there is never a dull moment. I'm learning more about their relationship than I care to know but the show is fun and who doesn't like to watch a fun show? The show does a good job of putting the viewer in a time machine and taking us back to the days when the personal computer, online services like AOL, and VCR tapes were all the rage. It all seems so yesterday. And then there's this Tommy and Pamela porn tape thing that I have absolutely no recollection of whatsoever. Not that it would have crossed my radar but the show makes it sound like it (the tape) was part and parcel of the testosterone culture during that particular time period.
Part of me thinks that those were the good old days. You could enjoy looking at a poster of a scantily clad woman like Pamela Anderson or Farrah Fawcett and not feel guilty about it. Men were all in when it came to the objectification of women and it was free love as far as the eye could see. Think "Woodstock." That all changes in episode two or three of the show when Pam starts to get her knickers in a bunch when the producers are working overtime rearranging her bathing suit to reveal more of her buttocks when all she wants is a speaking part in one or more of the beach scenes they're filming.
She becomes even more incensed once she learns that the sex tape of her and Tommy is being sold on the internet. Things go from bad to worse when Tommy laughs it off as some prurient conquest while she envisions her career going down the tubes. Tommy is nothing if not empathetic and he marshals every available resource to find the culprits responsible for releasing the tape. It's important to remember that had Tommy paid the people who stole the tapes the money he owed them for some carpentry work they did in his home that this never would have happened. I'm guessing that none of this lasts too long so I'm enjoying it while it lasts.
This whole Ukraine thing is getting weird. The president of Ukraine, Zelensky, is reaching out to various and sundry countries to see if he can't whip up some support to help he and his fellow Ukranians keep the Russians at bay. He addressed our Congress here in the US yesterday and it was, from a production standpoint, some sappy well produced melodrama the likes of which had to be put together in the back rooms of Hollywood. Some mother fucker, and I don't know who, is trying to drag our country into World War III with Russia. Oh, the tears. Gimme a fucking break.
What if the president of some African backwater came around asking to address our Congress because he and his people have been fighting a decades long battle and the tide was starting to take a turn for the worse. What kind of reception do you think he would get? Would they roll out the red carpet so he could do his dog and pony for the Mitt Romney's and Nancy Pelosi's in our Congress? Not on your fucking life. But there they were yesterday in Congress lining up to take their seats in the theater for this epic speech and movie presented by Zelensky and whoever it is that is funding him behind the scenes.
He seemed to suggest that we (US) would be going to war soon enough with Russia so we might as well jump in now. Who's buying this bullshit? Thus far, it looks like we're still not doing a no-fly zone so that's a good thing. We have no plans to put boots on the ground so that's a good thing too. I'm okay with giving them the tools to fight a defensive battle against their neighbors. They've put up a pretty good fight so far and the Russians have yet to take a major city despite their being in Ukraine now for some three weeks. Not sure how true this is but the Ukrainians are reporting that they have killed three Russian generals to date. Sounds like they're kicking butt and taking names. Good stuff.
Some would say that this is the fight between the US and Russia that has been in the making for years. Don't think for a minute that the people who would profit the most from a fight like this aren't working through their proxies in Congress and elsewhere to bring this thing to fruition. They can care less that Russia has 2600 nuclear weapons, most of which, are pointed at the US. Short of a nuclear holocaust, there are monies to be made and wars to be waged all of which enrich those in what we affectionalty refer to these days as the Military Industrial Complex. When you factor in 10% for the big guy, and I'm referring here to the guy who makes the decision to go or not go, what more do you need to know?
I caught some comments yesterday made by Governor DeSantis of Florida which I found interesting. He was commenting on Trump's actions during Trump's time in the White House as it related to Ukraine. I'm thinking to myself, these are not the comments of someone who is expecting Trump to be a competitor in the upcoming 2024 election. More to the point, they were comments made by someone who was maybe trying to gain favor with the person most likely to win the nomination in the hopes of maybe being selected as a Vice President. Can you imagine DeSantis on the stage in a debate between he and Kamala Harris? This assumes that she would still be on the ticket. Anyway, interesting. At a minimum, this bears watching.
I'm hearing that Biden is planning a trip to Europe in coming weeks to meet with our NATO allies. Here's my take: He and his handlers will find one or more reasons not to make the trip. Can you imagine Biden over there in his mumbling bumbling state trying to communicate with his peers using cue cards and teleprompters? It doesn't get any more ridiculous than that. I mean, who the hell wants to stand on a stage with a guy who can't form a complete sentence without using cue cards and when he isn't using cue cards you never know what kind of insanity he's going to veer off into. Just yesterday, he referred to his Vice President as his "First Lady." This is just whack-a-doodle.
Yep, there's a plan afoot. There were four or five democrats in Congress that came down with Covid yesterday. The Second Gentleman also reported coming down with Covid. Who makes up these fucking titles? He's the husband of the Vice President for chrissakes. Anyway, you can see how the circle is tightening. Biden is at the core of this concentric circle so he is likely to be exposed or even come down with the virus sooner or later. It's a pretext in the making is what I would tell you. It's a scam just like his presidency is a scam. It's all smoke and mirrors. I'm betting you dollars to doughnuts that he never makes the trip and that he uses Covid as a pretext to not make the trip. I would go so far as to say that the so-called aforementioned Covid sufferers are not suffering from Covid at all. More smoke and mirrors.
Have I said anything about this Supreme Court nominee that Biden put up? He promised back in the day when he was running for president that he would nominate a black woman for the court should he be elected. Qualifications be damned. It was going to be a black woman come hell or high water. Imagine for a minute if Trump promised to nominate a white woman to sit on the Supreme Court. The coverage in the media would be wall-to-wall racist racist racist. That's just the way it works in this country of ours. That being the case, you can't argue with Trump when he says that the media in America is the enemy of the people. It would be more appropriate to refer to them as the propaganda arm of the democrat party.
Anyway, Biden got his stooge of a nominee. She's an alleged black activist and BLM acolyte who has spent most of her judicial career adjudicating parking tickets and domestic abuse cases in district court. She's only written one opinion in her role as a Federal Appeals Court judge and that opinion was quickly penned in the days leading up to her nomination so as to be able to say that she had written at least one opinion. So far, so good. Now, we're starting to hear rumors that she has gone particularly easy on child pornographers in her somewhat brief career as a judge. We're also hearing that the records of those cases seem to be under seal and no longer available to the public.
Keep in mind that Biden himself has something of a shady past when and where it comes to children. One only needs to point to the many online pictures and videos going back a number of years of Biden and the children that he seems to be fondling, sniffing, caressing, and some would say, grooming. He just can't seem to keep his hands off them if you're to believe your eyes. They are, for better or worse, displays of affection that are both cringeworthy and out there for the world to see. You know that the parents of these children are just dying a slow death behind their sycophantic and politicallly correct smiles as Biden reaches for their children with his grubby hands, his sad but hungry eyes, and his slow and suffocating breaths.
It's just not a pretty picture. And now, this very same president has nominated someone for our country's highest court who has a particular disinterest in pursuing or putting away criminals with a penchant for sexual crimes related to children. The Senate hearings for this nominee begin next week so we'll see who does and who doesn't seem to think that her record as it relates to crimes against children is a problem. If I had to guess, all republicans will insist that she provide a full accounting of every case revealed thus far and that she release any and all records that have been sealed to date before rendering a verdict on this nominee. As for the democrats, it will be all about equity, inclusion, and the marginalization of the black woman in today's society. Wait for it.
Make no mistake about it. If this woman is put on the court she will be nothing more than a rubber stamp for the democrat party. From what I've seen so far, she doesn't have what it takes to properly adjudicate some of the more difficult cases that she is likely to see come before the court. That's just a fact. How she ends up formulating decisions will be interesting to watch. Not that any of us will have front row seats to watch this train wreck of a nominee but if the court ever goes public we'll get an inside glimpse of just how the sausage gets made. We may decide at the end of the day that we need a mechanism for removing incompetent justices and, assuming that conservatives have a say in that decision, we will thank the baby Jesus for the 6-3 majority that we currently hold.
Looks like the Ev man is going to hang in down in Worcester for another week or so. He's good with everything thus far and if he's good then we're good. He says that they're treating him like a human being whatever that means. Where precisely has he not been treated like a human being? Inquiring minds want to know. He said something about feeling good about having access to the stable thing so he can grab a bite from the vending machines here and there. He should have access to his phone this week as well so I expect we'll be hearing from him more frequently. Who doesn't think that's a good thing.
If we're to believe the progressive talk show moonbats out and about in the ether it sounds like the Covid thing might be coming around again. They say that if it's in Europe then we're two to three weeks away from seeing it come here to the states. Entire cities have been locked down in China because of an alleged resurgence but who believes a fucking thing they hear coming out of the mouths of the communists in that country? The Moderna and Pfizers of the world are out there requesting approval for a third and fourth booster so they can drive up their sales ahead of the second quarters earnings reports. I'm not sure if they've given up on trying to get jabs into the arms of the first and second graders as yet so there's that. I'm not putting any more of that poison in my body. My body, my choice.
I'll keep an eye on the numbers locally (Currently 0 cases) to satisfy myself that the virus is either surging or not. I don't run from it but I also don't go out of my way to try and contract it. In other words, I'm not out there tempting fate. If it gets me, it gets me. Give me a box or two of Kleenex and I'll see you on the other side. If it's anything like the last surge of the omicron virus, I definitely saw an uptick in our community but the numbers came down just as fast or faster than they went up. It came and went in maybe six weeks time. It also seemed to disappear from every state and every community around the same time which was weird. There was none of this hopscotching from one state to another like we'd seen in previous surges. Stay tuned for more panic porn from the Main Street media.
Elections Have Consequences
13/03/22 06:45
Is this how World War 3 starts? We're going all in when it comes to Ukraine? It's a fucking European backwater with a history of corruption that has been bailing out democrats since the beginning of time. That's probably a bit of a short selling when and where it comes to knowing the country of Ukraine so I have a book that I intend to read so I can be better informed. I have to be honest though. What I hear coming out of Putin's mouth reminds me a lot of Donald Trump and how his unpredictability kept his friends and foes alike at arms length. For better or worse, it's true.
Putin can barely manage the war he's waging in Ukraine so it's doubtful, short of unleashing nuclear weapons, that he can take on the enormity of the world's powers who are now aligned against him and his criminal regime. See what I did there? It is precisely what our media is doing here in the United States. I'm whipping up hate and, in doing so, I'm moving us inexorably towards whatever is in store for us as a country should we go head-to-head with another nuclear power. This increases rather than decreases the likelihood that a confrontation will take place. I'm not sure I want to know what that looks like.
If we blow each other to smithereens then who, pray tell, steps into the fray if and when the dust settles? That would be China, of course. They have everything to gain and nothing to lose. I don't think that is what Sun Tzu had in mind when he wrote the "Art Of War" but there must be something in his book about letting your opponents destroy each other. Did Sun Tzu presage the nuclear conflict between Russia and the West when he wrote, "There are five ways of attacking with fire. The first is to burn soldiers in their camp." That wasn't possible 5000 years ago. It is now.
I think I like my chances given a limited volley of nuclear weapons. I'm guessing that the Russians will want to send one or two across our bow just to show that they mean business. Turning a small town in Iowa into dust might be just the trick rather than taking out a million or more citizens in a large city. That's wishful thinking on my part and probably a bit selfish. I mean, if it's going to happen then you just have to fasten your seat belt and hope for the best. Right?
It wouldn't take much to tip the scales into what the planners refer to as "Mutually Assured Destruction" so maybe this small-town-first theory of mine is a best case scenario. It irritates the hell out of me to think that the only people left after all is said and done are the people who got us here in the first place. I'm talking about the mother fucking politicians and the military brass who will be ushered to their designated seats in the bowels of a well appointed fallout shelter well ahead of the first strike where they will ride out the apocalypse in relative comfort. The rest of us, not so much.
In the meantime, Bumbles Biden and his minions are getting in bed with socialists and tyrannical regimes across the globe like Madura from Venezuela and the Mullahs from Iran where they hope to secure just enough oil to make it both scarce and expensive by the time it becomes available on Main Street USA. Trump warned us that Biden would give us $7 a gallon gas when we were paying less than $2 a gallon at the pump under Trump. He was right. Almost prophetic if you want to know the truth. We may actually see the day when we look back on paying $7 for a gallon of gas as a vestige of a bygone era.
The Bidenista's are determined to force the green economy on the people of the United States whether they like it or not. They can't take our guns away so why not cripple us with a crashing economy? This is a problem that goes away overnight if we start drilling again here in the United States. What is their end game here, anyway? Is it to force-wean us off of our reliance on carbon based energy so they can fulfill some leftist fantasy they have about climate change? Our enemies abroad would probably like nothing better than to see us move away from a carbon based economy. How many of the tanks, planes, and mobile units now engaged in the Russian invasion of Ukraine are powered by electricity? How many indeed.
The fact that the leftists in our country are effectively aiding and abetting our enemies by working on their behalf to move us away from a carbon based economy should give us pause. If that doesn't give us pause, then consider if you will the effect that higher and higher gas prices have on everything from the cost of a gallon of milk to what it costs the average commuter to go back and forth to work every day. If you drive a SUV, god help you. Moms getting behind the wheels of their vans are thinking twice about those away soccer games and concluding that putting food on the table may be more important than their sons or daughters athletic pursuits. This is not what they had in mind when they decided that voting for Trump was a bridge too far back in 2020.
"Elections have consequences and stolen elections have catastrophic consequences" - Steve Bannon. Is there a more apt expression of what we're experiencing here in our country in 2022? I think not. Trump warned us that voting for Joe Biden was going to be a disaster and he wasn't wrong. These are tumultuous times for our country. When you add the threat of a nuclear disaster to everything else going on it all seems so self inflicted. Seeing what Joe Biden is unwilling to do to change it all up for the better, and kick starting our energy production again is just one thing that could make a difference, you have to wonder where his allegiances lie. It's almost enough to make you forget about the invasion that Joe Biden inititated when he opened our southern border to migrants from across the globe.
I don't begin to understand all of the unfortunate economic undercurrents that Biden and his minions have unleashed on the good people of our country. Maybe the goal at the end of the day is to see to it that the middle class in our country owns nothing. The elite will own all the wealth and the scraps are up for grabs. The value of the dollar will likely go into the ash heap of history and the reserve currency will be god only knows what. Between now and then, or between now and when Trump returns to office in 2024 to save us from another four years of Biden, we'll be scraping by as best we can until we can vote these communists the hell out of office.
The missus and I went to vote in our town elections yesterday. Just so you know what we're up against here in town, one of the ballot measures was to do away with the voting machines. You know, the damn voting machines that have allegedly corrupted counts either by hook or crook to get the people and the votes to go one way or another. I don't know if someone is physically hacking into the machines or whether or not they're accessing the machines through the Internet to change counts after the fact. We certainly know from experiencing these frauds first hand in the 2020 election that nothing is off the table when it comes to the left stealing and manipulating votes. It seems as though we have more leftists in town than I thought. The vote is in and the machines aren't going anywhere. Like I said, by hook or crook.
In case you wondered what other kind of mischief the leftists were up to yesterday as we all went to cast our votes, they put a petition on the ballot to change "Columbus Day" to "Indigenous People's Day." I gather that the thought of good old Christopher Columbus doing whatever he did back in the day was so outrageous that having a holiday in his name is just beyond the pale for the leftists. They are too triggered, too emotionally fragile, too deluded in their leftist wet dreams, and too far gone to allow a grievance of this magnitude to go one more day without waging a war or worse to get his name off the Calendar. Unfortunately, there were more of them than us. Thank the Baby Jesus that we don't have a statute of Christopher Columbus in town. It would be more grist for their mill.
Thank God that nobody in our household has to commute anywhere. With gas prices approaching $5 a gallon, I don't know what the average person who has to commute to work every day does to survive. If you're a minimum wage worker, chances are you're spending more money to fill up your tank than you're receiving in your paycheck every week. It is not a sustainable position. Something has to change. Maybe you change jobs so you're closer to home. You can't afford an electric car so don't even think about it. Maybe you forgo having lunch out at the local diner with your buds every day and bring a bagged lunch instead. How about joining a carpool? Oh, and keeping your thermostat at 50 degrees during the winter months is not an option especially if you have children at home.
With gas prices and the prices of everything else going through the roof it comes as no comfort to know that the stock market is not faring well either. If you've been saving your pennies in the bank for years and have recently moved those same monies into the stock market hoping for a better return, god help you if you need to redeem those shares. The NASDAQ is off some 20% just this year and it could get markedly worse if China invades Taiwan. Maybe you take some comfort in the fact that the NASDAQ was off some 75% back in 2010. Yes, Olive, what goes up also goes down. The converse is true as well. You just need to have the time and patience to let the market do what markets do. Not everyone has that luxury. Retiring soon? Think again.
I try very hard to stay away from Main Street media these days. You'd think our country was at war given the breathless coverage. Truth be told, it's almost was though the media is pushing for war on behalf of the Bidenista's. Just yesterday, the media was in a kerfuffle about the Russians bombing a children's hospital in one of the cities in Ukraine. The day before, it was all about the Russians bombing a nuclear facility and the imminency of a meltdown that would be ten times worse than Chernobyl. Today, I suspect it will be all about the biological weapons lab that, were the Russians to get hold of it, god only knows what might happen. See how that works? Their ratings have never been better. War is good for the Main Street media. It's even better for the Military Industrial Complex who would like nothing better than to kick off a conflict in Eastern Europe.
Here's the dirty little secret: Nobody died in the children's hospital despite the spasmodic coverage and the nuclear facility was really never at risk. That didn't stop the media from showing video of screaming moms against the backdrop of crumbling buildings and fires erupting in and around the nuclear power plant on a continuous loop for the better part of two or three days. Oh, and I almost forgot. There was the whole thing about the US giving fighter jets to Poland to replace fighter jets that they were planning to give to the Ukrainians. And then, Bumbling Biden stepped in and put a stop to that deal much to the consternation of the Ukrainians. You can't make this stuff up.
I heard one guy on the radio last night talking about the fact that maybe the US doesn't want the Ukrainians to win this war. Were that to happen, it might increase the likelihood of Putin doing something beyond the pale like launching a tactical nuclear weapon across their border into Ukraine. Do they fear that something like that would escalate the whole kit and caboodle into the proverbial and long dreaded world war three? Honestly, I just don't know who or what to believe anymore. We see what the media and the government want us to see and hear and the truth is probably somewhere in between. Maybe I need to include radio in my list of things that I'm better off tuning out.
I wholeheartedly believe that the US has no dog in this fight in Ukraine. I take issue with the president of Ukraine going on national television and lecturing the west for not doing more to support the war in his country. It feels personal when he shows up on camera in some undisclosed location wearing his camouflage colored vest and going on and on about needing this and that from the US and our allies. There is no doubt in my mind that the supply chains are not moving as fast as they might like in terms of getting the weaponry that they've been promised. All that said, Ukraine is surrounded by countries in Europe who have a vested interest in what Russia does and does not do in Ukraine. Is it not in their best interest to step in and help their neighbors in Ukraine? I know, I know. It's complicated.
One minute it's Covid-19 around the clock. You can't escape it. Now, if you can forget about our problems with raging inflation and an open southern border, it's all about Ukraine. It's funny how Covid just disappeared overnight. I don't even see Tony Fauci on television anymore. The media has bigger fish to fry. The part I worry about is that Biden's people don't want this Ukraine thing to get resolved. It's good for his ratings and it takes the shit show that is our economy off the front pages. The question is, how far is Biden willing to go to keep the war in Ukraine on the front pages? That is the part that keeps me up at night. I put nothing past the democrats when it comes to doing what they can to stay in power. As an aside, or maybe not, how far are the Europeans willing to go to aid and abet Biden's skullduggery?
Did you see that nitwit, Kamala Harris, on the telly? As Vice President, she was dispatched to Poland to reassure them of our country's steadfast support as a NATO ally. She really is a sorry excuse for a politician much less a Vice President. One has to ask themselves how she ever became Attorney General for the state of California realizing as we all do after seeing her in action these past many months that she is a complete idiot. I've heard all the rumors about her and Wille Brown and it's all starting to make sense now that we're getting a better look at her as she stumbles from one fiasco to the other in her role as VP.
So, she's doing a press conference with the Polish President, Duda, and she takes a question from a journalist about what the US is willing to do to assist with the Ukrainian refugees. She starts to cackle like a fool before making a ridiculous comment like, "with friends like this, who needs enemies," and it was completely inappropriate and just a real WTF moment for American diplomacy. The Duda guy just looked over at her in abject horror as she made a fool of herself and, by extension, the country that she was there to represent. It's the very Kamala that we know so well here in America but the very Kamala that one would hope they would have the good sense to not send anywhere for this very reason. Why did the Biden people send her to Poland knowing what they do about her inability to project power and gravitas in the moment? It isn't enough that we have a senile old fuck as President?
One last thing about Kamala Harris. Y'all know that she was put on the ticket with Biden because they figured that it would be a cold day in hell before they did anything to get rid of Biden knowing that Harris was the one who would step into the fray. Right? It's a scary thought to be sure but maybe a good strategy when all is said and done. If they can keep propping demented Joe up at the teleprompter or with the language appropriate cue cards then the people really running out government can continue to work their "magic" behind the scenes. It's a political shell game the likes of which we've never seen. One of these days here's hoping that the real puppeteer or puppeteers are identified and prosecuted as appropriate. It's more likely that he or she will be disappeared and that will be that.
Do I know everything I need to know about this "Don't Say Gay Bill" that Governor DeSantis is planning to sign into law in Florida? My understanding is that it will prevent or head off the grooming of first and second graders on subjects like sexual orientation and transgenderism. That seems reasonable to me. Is this something that these children need exposure to at that age? Hardly. This bill isn't sitting well with the leftists who want first crack at these fertile minds when it comes to introducing ideologies and social mores. Maybe more importantly, this is an issue which, if properly positioned, will solidify constituencies along lines that could prove beneficial to democrats in upcoming elections. In addition, if they can take DeSantis down a notch or two, that might well nix his presidential prospects in 2024 and beyond.
My guess is that there are more people that agree with DeSantis than there are people who disagree with him. Isn't that always the political calculus? The cool thing about DeSantis is that he rarely seems to care which way the political winds are blowing when it comes to making decisions. Seeing as how he just tends to dig in his heels when confronted by the opposition, the leftists do what they can in the social media space to garner support and bring in the big dogs to do their bidding. In this case, the CEO from Disney is on board with the cause so we'll see where it goes. DeSantis is likely tell him to fuck off which would be the appropriate response. Let's see how Disney likes operating out of Georgia instead of Florida. Now try to imagine Mickey Mouse speaking with a southern drawl.
I was telling the missus last night that I was feeling a little bad about how the whole Wordle thing was playing out. You know, the Worldle game that we both play each day. It's the online word game where you have just so many chances to guess the word after certain letters are revealed. The missus dragged me kicking and screaming before I decided to jump in with both feet myself. I was getting tired of seeing her have all the fun. Having to look over her shoulder while she played wasn't much fun either. I don't know if it was the angle at which I was taking in the game or just the fact that I'm wasn't in the driver's seat. Either way, I finally started playing my own games and the rest is history.
The part that I'm feeling bad about is that the missus so loved the game when she and she alone was playing it each day. She was so proud of the fact that she was doing as well as she was. She got a lot of satisfaction out of trying to get other people to play as well. It didn't matter that they decided not to play when they either lost interest or maybe they decided that it wasn't something that they thought they were interested in playing. Some people, like her mum, thought it was a bit too complicated and that was the end of that. In other words, things were going swimmingly for her in this newfound game of hers called Wordle. Not to worry. I'm getting to the "feeling bad" part.
Things started to take a turn for the worse when I started to play. The missus was happy to have me on board when I was just learning the game. She's a tutor at heart and I was a willing student learning at the knee of the master. Well, maybe "mistress" would be the more appropriate term here. Finally, she had someone she could play with and against. Each player plays their own online game but there is only one right answer each day the game is posted. Maybe I'm a better guesser than the missus or maybe I just have a better sense as to what it takes to win the game. Whichever the case, I started doing better than the missus and that wasn't sitting well with her.
What was once a game that she loved to play each day was now becoming a game that she started to lose interest in when she saw what she was up against. If I guessed the word correctly after three tries (words), the missus became miffed if it took her more than three tries. So much so, in fact, that she sometimes just walked away and quit playing before the game was over. I had essentially deprived her of the opportunity to beat me. The fact that I did all of that so effortlessly didn't help matters. Maybe there's a cardinal rule somewhere in the manual for marriages that speaks to the issue of competitive play. You know, like all is fair in love and war (Wordle)?
I've decided that I'll continue to play each day but I'm no longer going to tell her how many words it took me to win. If she does better than expected, or maybe matches my game, I'll congratulate her on her game and move on. Maybe just knowing that I probably did well in playing my game, that will somehow motivate her to try a little harder. There is something to be said for competition. It makes you a better player if it all works out the way it's supposed to work out. This is all about getting the missus to not throw in the towel. I owe her that much as my main squeeze and loving partner. I will no longer steal victory from the jaws of defeat as the inestimable announcer, Howard Cosell, once declared while sitting ringside at an Ali-Frazier bout. No sireee, Bob.
Yesterday was a productive visit with Mrs G after all was said and done. I busied myself installing a phone she had purchased through Amazon and the missus walked her mum through various online accounts she had to ensure that nothing was falling through the cracks. Did I mention that we finally got around to picking up some liver and onions for Mrs G? I mention this previously but the restaurant that we had hoped to visit was closed by the time we got around to placing our order. Mrs G had mentioned that her facility rarely has liver and onions and she was quite fond of the dish so the missus and I planned accordingly. It took a couple of weeks but everything fell into place yesterday and we arrived at the appointed hour with liver and onions in hand. You could smell the stuff from a mile away.
Mrs G was tickled as you might well imagine at receiving the food. She cracked the lid on the to-go container just long enough to take a peek before closing it back up again. The meal was laid out nicely with a heaping side of mashed potatoes and a side of broccoli florets occupying their own space inside the container. The liver was barely visible beneath what appeared to be a very nice portion of grilled onions. Have some liver with your onions, won't you. I was hoping that Mrs G would have a taste or two while the dish was still hot but she thought better of it for whatever reason. If we wanted feedback, it would have to wait. It came later by way of a phone call so that was good. She thoroughly enjoyed her liver and onions and all was well with the world. I think the word she used was "delicious."
I put her phone thing together and if I had to change one thing it would be the voice mail thing. I set it up to use the default voice rather than have Mrs G have to figure out what specific voice mail message she might want to leave. We all know how difficult that can be. Do you want to leave a humorous message? Maybe something less humorous and more to the point? I was thinking too about the fact that having an elderly person's voice on a voice mail message might well be an invitation to disaster if some fraudster decided to take advantage. I should have warned Mrs G to be on the lookout for a caller with a Nigerian accent asking her to send cashier checks to a P.O. Box. Seeing as she was quite pleased with the message that she decided to leave, I was wanting to leave well enough alone. And I did.
Putin can barely manage the war he's waging in Ukraine so it's doubtful, short of unleashing nuclear weapons, that he can take on the enormity of the world's powers who are now aligned against him and his criminal regime. See what I did there? It is precisely what our media is doing here in the United States. I'm whipping up hate and, in doing so, I'm moving us inexorably towards whatever is in store for us as a country should we go head-to-head with another nuclear power. This increases rather than decreases the likelihood that a confrontation will take place. I'm not sure I want to know what that looks like.
If we blow each other to smithereens then who, pray tell, steps into the fray if and when the dust settles? That would be China, of course. They have everything to gain and nothing to lose. I don't think that is what Sun Tzu had in mind when he wrote the "Art Of War" but there must be something in his book about letting your opponents destroy each other. Did Sun Tzu presage the nuclear conflict between Russia and the West when he wrote, "There are five ways of attacking with fire. The first is to burn soldiers in their camp." That wasn't possible 5000 years ago. It is now.
I think I like my chances given a limited volley of nuclear weapons. I'm guessing that the Russians will want to send one or two across our bow just to show that they mean business. Turning a small town in Iowa into dust might be just the trick rather than taking out a million or more citizens in a large city. That's wishful thinking on my part and probably a bit selfish. I mean, if it's going to happen then you just have to fasten your seat belt and hope for the best. Right?
It wouldn't take much to tip the scales into what the planners refer to as "Mutually Assured Destruction" so maybe this small-town-first theory of mine is a best case scenario. It irritates the hell out of me to think that the only people left after all is said and done are the people who got us here in the first place. I'm talking about the mother fucking politicians and the military brass who will be ushered to their designated seats in the bowels of a well appointed fallout shelter well ahead of the first strike where they will ride out the apocalypse in relative comfort. The rest of us, not so much.
In the meantime, Bumbles Biden and his minions are getting in bed with socialists and tyrannical regimes across the globe like Madura from Venezuela and the Mullahs from Iran where they hope to secure just enough oil to make it both scarce and expensive by the time it becomes available on Main Street USA. Trump warned us that Biden would give us $7 a gallon gas when we were paying less than $2 a gallon at the pump under Trump. He was right. Almost prophetic if you want to know the truth. We may actually see the day when we look back on paying $7 for a gallon of gas as a vestige of a bygone era.
The Bidenista's are determined to force the green economy on the people of the United States whether they like it or not. They can't take our guns away so why not cripple us with a crashing economy? This is a problem that goes away overnight if we start drilling again here in the United States. What is their end game here, anyway? Is it to force-wean us off of our reliance on carbon based energy so they can fulfill some leftist fantasy they have about climate change? Our enemies abroad would probably like nothing better than to see us move away from a carbon based economy. How many of the tanks, planes, and mobile units now engaged in the Russian invasion of Ukraine are powered by electricity? How many indeed.
The fact that the leftists in our country are effectively aiding and abetting our enemies by working on their behalf to move us away from a carbon based economy should give us pause. If that doesn't give us pause, then consider if you will the effect that higher and higher gas prices have on everything from the cost of a gallon of milk to what it costs the average commuter to go back and forth to work every day. If you drive a SUV, god help you. Moms getting behind the wheels of their vans are thinking twice about those away soccer games and concluding that putting food on the table may be more important than their sons or daughters athletic pursuits. This is not what they had in mind when they decided that voting for Trump was a bridge too far back in 2020.
"Elections have consequences and stolen elections have catastrophic consequences" - Steve Bannon. Is there a more apt expression of what we're experiencing here in our country in 2022? I think not. Trump warned us that voting for Joe Biden was going to be a disaster and he wasn't wrong. These are tumultuous times for our country. When you add the threat of a nuclear disaster to everything else going on it all seems so self inflicted. Seeing what Joe Biden is unwilling to do to change it all up for the better, and kick starting our energy production again is just one thing that could make a difference, you have to wonder where his allegiances lie. It's almost enough to make you forget about the invasion that Joe Biden inititated when he opened our southern border to migrants from across the globe.
I don't begin to understand all of the unfortunate economic undercurrents that Biden and his minions have unleashed on the good people of our country. Maybe the goal at the end of the day is to see to it that the middle class in our country owns nothing. The elite will own all the wealth and the scraps are up for grabs. The value of the dollar will likely go into the ash heap of history and the reserve currency will be god only knows what. Between now and then, or between now and when Trump returns to office in 2024 to save us from another four years of Biden, we'll be scraping by as best we can until we can vote these communists the hell out of office.
The missus and I went to vote in our town elections yesterday. Just so you know what we're up against here in town, one of the ballot measures was to do away with the voting machines. You know, the damn voting machines that have allegedly corrupted counts either by hook or crook to get the people and the votes to go one way or another. I don't know if someone is physically hacking into the machines or whether or not they're accessing the machines through the Internet to change counts after the fact. We certainly know from experiencing these frauds first hand in the 2020 election that nothing is off the table when it comes to the left stealing and manipulating votes. It seems as though we have more leftists in town than I thought. The vote is in and the machines aren't going anywhere. Like I said, by hook or crook.
In case you wondered what other kind of mischief the leftists were up to yesterday as we all went to cast our votes, they put a petition on the ballot to change "Columbus Day" to "Indigenous People's Day." I gather that the thought of good old Christopher Columbus doing whatever he did back in the day was so outrageous that having a holiday in his name is just beyond the pale for the leftists. They are too triggered, too emotionally fragile, too deluded in their leftist wet dreams, and too far gone to allow a grievance of this magnitude to go one more day without waging a war or worse to get his name off the Calendar. Unfortunately, there were more of them than us. Thank the Baby Jesus that we don't have a statute of Christopher Columbus in town. It would be more grist for their mill.
Thank God that nobody in our household has to commute anywhere. With gas prices approaching $5 a gallon, I don't know what the average person who has to commute to work every day does to survive. If you're a minimum wage worker, chances are you're spending more money to fill up your tank than you're receiving in your paycheck every week. It is not a sustainable position. Something has to change. Maybe you change jobs so you're closer to home. You can't afford an electric car so don't even think about it. Maybe you forgo having lunch out at the local diner with your buds every day and bring a bagged lunch instead. How about joining a carpool? Oh, and keeping your thermostat at 50 degrees during the winter months is not an option especially if you have children at home.
With gas prices and the prices of everything else going through the roof it comes as no comfort to know that the stock market is not faring well either. If you've been saving your pennies in the bank for years and have recently moved those same monies into the stock market hoping for a better return, god help you if you need to redeem those shares. The NASDAQ is off some 20% just this year and it could get markedly worse if China invades Taiwan. Maybe you take some comfort in the fact that the NASDAQ was off some 75% back in 2010. Yes, Olive, what goes up also goes down. The converse is true as well. You just need to have the time and patience to let the market do what markets do. Not everyone has that luxury. Retiring soon? Think again.
I try very hard to stay away from Main Street media these days. You'd think our country was at war given the breathless coverage. Truth be told, it's almost was though the media is pushing for war on behalf of the Bidenista's. Just yesterday, the media was in a kerfuffle about the Russians bombing a children's hospital in one of the cities in Ukraine. The day before, it was all about the Russians bombing a nuclear facility and the imminency of a meltdown that would be ten times worse than Chernobyl. Today, I suspect it will be all about the biological weapons lab that, were the Russians to get hold of it, god only knows what might happen. See how that works? Their ratings have never been better. War is good for the Main Street media. It's even better for the Military Industrial Complex who would like nothing better than to kick off a conflict in Eastern Europe.
Here's the dirty little secret: Nobody died in the children's hospital despite the spasmodic coverage and the nuclear facility was really never at risk. That didn't stop the media from showing video of screaming moms against the backdrop of crumbling buildings and fires erupting in and around the nuclear power plant on a continuous loop for the better part of two or three days. Oh, and I almost forgot. There was the whole thing about the US giving fighter jets to Poland to replace fighter jets that they were planning to give to the Ukrainians. And then, Bumbling Biden stepped in and put a stop to that deal much to the consternation of the Ukrainians. You can't make this stuff up.
I heard one guy on the radio last night talking about the fact that maybe the US doesn't want the Ukrainians to win this war. Were that to happen, it might increase the likelihood of Putin doing something beyond the pale like launching a tactical nuclear weapon across their border into Ukraine. Do they fear that something like that would escalate the whole kit and caboodle into the proverbial and long dreaded world war three? Honestly, I just don't know who or what to believe anymore. We see what the media and the government want us to see and hear and the truth is probably somewhere in between. Maybe I need to include radio in my list of things that I'm better off tuning out.
I wholeheartedly believe that the US has no dog in this fight in Ukraine. I take issue with the president of Ukraine going on national television and lecturing the west for not doing more to support the war in his country. It feels personal when he shows up on camera in some undisclosed location wearing his camouflage colored vest and going on and on about needing this and that from the US and our allies. There is no doubt in my mind that the supply chains are not moving as fast as they might like in terms of getting the weaponry that they've been promised. All that said, Ukraine is surrounded by countries in Europe who have a vested interest in what Russia does and does not do in Ukraine. Is it not in their best interest to step in and help their neighbors in Ukraine? I know, I know. It's complicated.
One minute it's Covid-19 around the clock. You can't escape it. Now, if you can forget about our problems with raging inflation and an open southern border, it's all about Ukraine. It's funny how Covid just disappeared overnight. I don't even see Tony Fauci on television anymore. The media has bigger fish to fry. The part I worry about is that Biden's people don't want this Ukraine thing to get resolved. It's good for his ratings and it takes the shit show that is our economy off the front pages. The question is, how far is Biden willing to go to keep the war in Ukraine on the front pages? That is the part that keeps me up at night. I put nothing past the democrats when it comes to doing what they can to stay in power. As an aside, or maybe not, how far are the Europeans willing to go to aid and abet Biden's skullduggery?
Did you see that nitwit, Kamala Harris, on the telly? As Vice President, she was dispatched to Poland to reassure them of our country's steadfast support as a NATO ally. She really is a sorry excuse for a politician much less a Vice President. One has to ask themselves how she ever became Attorney General for the state of California realizing as we all do after seeing her in action these past many months that she is a complete idiot. I've heard all the rumors about her and Wille Brown and it's all starting to make sense now that we're getting a better look at her as she stumbles from one fiasco to the other in her role as VP.
So, she's doing a press conference with the Polish President, Duda, and she takes a question from a journalist about what the US is willing to do to assist with the Ukrainian refugees. She starts to cackle like a fool before making a ridiculous comment like, "with friends like this, who needs enemies," and it was completely inappropriate and just a real WTF moment for American diplomacy. The Duda guy just looked over at her in abject horror as she made a fool of herself and, by extension, the country that she was there to represent. It's the very Kamala that we know so well here in America but the very Kamala that one would hope they would have the good sense to not send anywhere for this very reason. Why did the Biden people send her to Poland knowing what they do about her inability to project power and gravitas in the moment? It isn't enough that we have a senile old fuck as President?
One last thing about Kamala Harris. Y'all know that she was put on the ticket with Biden because they figured that it would be a cold day in hell before they did anything to get rid of Biden knowing that Harris was the one who would step into the fray. Right? It's a scary thought to be sure but maybe a good strategy when all is said and done. If they can keep propping demented Joe up at the teleprompter or with the language appropriate cue cards then the people really running out government can continue to work their "magic" behind the scenes. It's a political shell game the likes of which we've never seen. One of these days here's hoping that the real puppeteer or puppeteers are identified and prosecuted as appropriate. It's more likely that he or she will be disappeared and that will be that.
Do I know everything I need to know about this "Don't Say Gay Bill" that Governor DeSantis is planning to sign into law in Florida? My understanding is that it will prevent or head off the grooming of first and second graders on subjects like sexual orientation and transgenderism. That seems reasonable to me. Is this something that these children need exposure to at that age? Hardly. This bill isn't sitting well with the leftists who want first crack at these fertile minds when it comes to introducing ideologies and social mores. Maybe more importantly, this is an issue which, if properly positioned, will solidify constituencies along lines that could prove beneficial to democrats in upcoming elections. In addition, if they can take DeSantis down a notch or two, that might well nix his presidential prospects in 2024 and beyond.
My guess is that there are more people that agree with DeSantis than there are people who disagree with him. Isn't that always the political calculus? The cool thing about DeSantis is that he rarely seems to care which way the political winds are blowing when it comes to making decisions. Seeing as how he just tends to dig in his heels when confronted by the opposition, the leftists do what they can in the social media space to garner support and bring in the big dogs to do their bidding. In this case, the CEO from Disney is on board with the cause so we'll see where it goes. DeSantis is likely tell him to fuck off which would be the appropriate response. Let's see how Disney likes operating out of Georgia instead of Florida. Now try to imagine Mickey Mouse speaking with a southern drawl.
I was telling the missus last night that I was feeling a little bad about how the whole Wordle thing was playing out. You know, the Worldle game that we both play each day. It's the online word game where you have just so many chances to guess the word after certain letters are revealed. The missus dragged me kicking and screaming before I decided to jump in with both feet myself. I was getting tired of seeing her have all the fun. Having to look over her shoulder while she played wasn't much fun either. I don't know if it was the angle at which I was taking in the game or just the fact that I'm wasn't in the driver's seat. Either way, I finally started playing my own games and the rest is history.
The part that I'm feeling bad about is that the missus so loved the game when she and she alone was playing it each day. She was so proud of the fact that she was doing as well as she was. She got a lot of satisfaction out of trying to get other people to play as well. It didn't matter that they decided not to play when they either lost interest or maybe they decided that it wasn't something that they thought they were interested in playing. Some people, like her mum, thought it was a bit too complicated and that was the end of that. In other words, things were going swimmingly for her in this newfound game of hers called Wordle. Not to worry. I'm getting to the "feeling bad" part.
Things started to take a turn for the worse when I started to play. The missus was happy to have me on board when I was just learning the game. She's a tutor at heart and I was a willing student learning at the knee of the master. Well, maybe "mistress" would be the more appropriate term here. Finally, she had someone she could play with and against. Each player plays their own online game but there is only one right answer each day the game is posted. Maybe I'm a better guesser than the missus or maybe I just have a better sense as to what it takes to win the game. Whichever the case, I started doing better than the missus and that wasn't sitting well with her.
What was once a game that she loved to play each day was now becoming a game that she started to lose interest in when she saw what she was up against. If I guessed the word correctly after three tries (words), the missus became miffed if it took her more than three tries. So much so, in fact, that she sometimes just walked away and quit playing before the game was over. I had essentially deprived her of the opportunity to beat me. The fact that I did all of that so effortlessly didn't help matters. Maybe there's a cardinal rule somewhere in the manual for marriages that speaks to the issue of competitive play. You know, like all is fair in love and war (Wordle)?
I've decided that I'll continue to play each day but I'm no longer going to tell her how many words it took me to win. If she does better than expected, or maybe matches my game, I'll congratulate her on her game and move on. Maybe just knowing that I probably did well in playing my game, that will somehow motivate her to try a little harder. There is something to be said for competition. It makes you a better player if it all works out the way it's supposed to work out. This is all about getting the missus to not throw in the towel. I owe her that much as my main squeeze and loving partner. I will no longer steal victory from the jaws of defeat as the inestimable announcer, Howard Cosell, once declared while sitting ringside at an Ali-Frazier bout. No sireee, Bob.
Yesterday was a productive visit with Mrs G after all was said and done. I busied myself installing a phone she had purchased through Amazon and the missus walked her mum through various online accounts she had to ensure that nothing was falling through the cracks. Did I mention that we finally got around to picking up some liver and onions for Mrs G? I mention this previously but the restaurant that we had hoped to visit was closed by the time we got around to placing our order. Mrs G had mentioned that her facility rarely has liver and onions and she was quite fond of the dish so the missus and I planned accordingly. It took a couple of weeks but everything fell into place yesterday and we arrived at the appointed hour with liver and onions in hand. You could smell the stuff from a mile away.
Mrs G was tickled as you might well imagine at receiving the food. She cracked the lid on the to-go container just long enough to take a peek before closing it back up again. The meal was laid out nicely with a heaping side of mashed potatoes and a side of broccoli florets occupying their own space inside the container. The liver was barely visible beneath what appeared to be a very nice portion of grilled onions. Have some liver with your onions, won't you. I was hoping that Mrs G would have a taste or two while the dish was still hot but she thought better of it for whatever reason. If we wanted feedback, it would have to wait. It came later by way of a phone call so that was good. She thoroughly enjoyed her liver and onions and all was well with the world. I think the word she used was "delicious."
I put her phone thing together and if I had to change one thing it would be the voice mail thing. I set it up to use the default voice rather than have Mrs G have to figure out what specific voice mail message she might want to leave. We all know how difficult that can be. Do you want to leave a humorous message? Maybe something less humorous and more to the point? I was thinking too about the fact that having an elderly person's voice on a voice mail message might well be an invitation to disaster if some fraudster decided to take advantage. I should have warned Mrs G to be on the lookout for a caller with a Nigerian accent asking her to send cashier checks to a P.O. Box. Seeing as she was quite pleased with the message that she decided to leave, I was wanting to leave well enough alone. And I did.
The Fog Of War
06/03/22 07:07
What is this I'm hearing about Bumbles Biden sharing intelligence with China in the hopes that China would convince Putin to not invade Ukraine? Where are the fucking republicans? This is treason pure and simple. It gets worse. How about Biden offering to evacuate the President of Ukraine (Zelensky) after the invasion of Ukraine was underway by the Russians? Here is Zelensky's response, and I quote: "I need ammo, I don't need a ride." What kind of coward do we have sitting in our White House? He's the same clown who abandoned the people of Afghanistan when he let that country fall to the Taliban.
Clearly, things are going from bad to worse in Ukraine for the Russians. Putin is now threatening any country that dares to interfere with what amounts to nuclear war. This is what desperate people do. Consequently, country's around the world have now closed their airspace to Russia airplanes and have moved closer to removing Russia from the banking system (SWIFT) that allows them to transact more easily in their currency, the rouble. It is, for all intents and purposes, an attempt by the global forces at large to effectively cancel Vladimir Putin. Vlad is clearly in need of an intervention.
The Ukrainians are fighting back and fighting back hard with weapons being flown in from country's around the world. The Russians have yet to take even one city in Ukraine thanks to the tenacity and fighting spirit of a citizenry and military who are standing strong in the breach to protect their country and their way of life. Meanwhile, that cowardly fuck, Joe Biden, is hiding away in his basement in Delaware. Millions of people gathered in and around in their city's capitols over the weekend in solidarity with the people of Ukraine.
Russia has become a pariah, not that they weren't before, but invading a sovereign country in the 21st century seems to be more than a bridge too far when it comes to defining what we consider to be a civilized society these days. Thanks to people like Elon Musk, who gave the citizens of Ukraine access to the technology that gives them back their internet access, the world is now seeing what the Russians are doing to civilians who want nothing more than to live their lives and they are having none of it. The indiscriminate violence and abject horror of war being waged by a rogue actor sitting in the Kremlin is being captured and catapulted around the world in a nanosecond for all to see.
Bumbles Biden will be giving his State of the Union speech tomorrow night in Washington. That may explain why he's hiding in his bunker in Delaware. Maybe their upping his anti-dementia meds in anticipation of his having to stay awake and alert long enough to get in and out of Washington for the two hours that it takes to make the speech. A few trial runs with this and that medication are probably necessary to make sure that he doesn't collapse of his own weight and incompetence during the time allotted to make the speech. Nobody said that talking about thirteen months in office where every failure is worse than the failure before is going to be easy. It's a heavy lift.
How much time do you think he'll spend talking about the thirteen marines that died because of his hastily engineered departure from Afghanistan? Maybe he'll talk about the family of Afghans he killed by sending in drones to retaliate against those Taliban fighters who killed our thirteen marines. How much time will he give to the disaster that he created by opening up our southern border to the illegal aliens of the world? Will we hear bumbles Biden apologize for the state of our economy that has increased the cost of living for every American from coast to coast? Would it be asking too much to have him restart our domestic energy production? Buying our energy from Russia only enriches and emboldens tyrants like Putin. Maybe that's been the plan all along.
I thought I heard something this morning about Biden's FEMA agency offering guidance to Americans in the event of a nuclear attack by Russia. It was something about being in enclosed spaces and, because of the dreaded Covid-19, it was important to stay six feet apart. WAT? Is this where we are in the age of Biden? Covid numbers have been seriously on the decline as of late and countries around the world have relaxed or removed any and all restrictions. Yet, these assholes in the Biden Administration continue with their hysterics and nonsense about the "dreaded" virus. It's a fucking clown show if I've ever seen one and I've seen a few. I don't know what's more laughable: the threat of a nuclear holocaust or the fear porn being peddled by Biden and his minions. Maybe both.
I'm playing this word game online called "Wordle." It's become pretty popular I hear and it was recently purchased by the New York Times. I'm playing it every day and it seems harmless enough in the sense that it doesn't drive me crazy but it does challenge me so I'm good with it thus far. Did I mention that the missus introduced the game to me? I resisted for the longest time because I was busy with another word game and didn't need one more word game to play. I'm in with both feet now for better or worse. Sometimes I find the words quickly and other times not so quickly. The missus? About the same is what I would say. Today's word was "rupee." An odd choice, but okay. I found it in four attempts.
I haven't checked my Twitter feed this morning so I'm not sure where we are with the whole invasion thing. Last I heard, the Russians were advancing on the city of Kiev with a 40-mile transport and were probably some forty miles out. Countries around the world are universal in their condemnation but the Russian army is persisting as armies are want to do. You would think that knowing or having the coordinates of this forty mile transport that some creative sort would find a way to bomb them to smithereens. The threat of a nuclear whatever by Russia is keeping them all at bay and that is not helping the situation. I'm not sure what the endgame looks like but it can't be pretty.
I heard rumors yesterday about some special teams group that the Russians were sending in to Kiev to assassinate the president of Ukraine and his associates. Do they really think that making a martyr of the man is a good thing? Putin is a ruthless thug so I wouldn't put it past him. That said, I think he also understands the dynamics of war and killing Zelensky, who has literally become a folk hero in this tragedy, would not sit well with the populace once the dust settles. Maybe none of that matters to Putin. Killing their president will perpetuate his legacy as a man who will go to any length to get what he wants. Not that the citizens of Ukraine are under any other illusion, mind you.
I watched Biden's State of the Union speech last night so you didn't have to. It was a disgrace. What the hell was going on with his pupils? Whatever drugs they're giving this old fool are no longer doing the trick. It was an hour of mumbling, fumbling, whispering, yelling, finger pointing, lying, gesticulating, and down right balderdash. You'd think he beat the Russians in Ukraine given all of his bombast in the first half hour of the speech. The ambassador to Ukraine who was in the audience, must have been aghast. She was there to hear something hopeful, something material, something that she could bring back to the good people of Ukraine. It was all about Joey and his "conquests."
As Joey was going on and on about how he was bringing Putin to his knees, the Russians were in the process of encircling two major cities in Ukraine. But, Joey was oblivious. He was there to read his speech from the teleprompter and he was going to get it done come hell or high water. His speech was so well rehearsed that he seemed to be rushing through it at points and it had me wondering if he was trying to get it done so he could retire early and have his customary bowl of oatmeal and cup of warm milk back in the White House before retiring for the night. That said, he was seen lingering in the hall after the speech taking selfies, signing autographs, and canoodling with members of his political party.
There was nothing in the speech about restarting our domestic energy production. He spoke about funding the police when we all know that the democrats are famously known for doing just the opposite. He made statements about certain segments of the population who would never pay a penny more in taxes when we all know that inflation under Biden is a tax burden if there ever was one. There were the usual faux pas that we've all come to expect from Biden and no one ever even mentions them anymore since they're so commonplace. To mention them would be to highlight what we all know: Joey Biden is a senile old fuck and he has no business being the President of the United States.
The missus kept asking me who the people were in the audience as the camera panned in and out when people were applauding or, as the case might be, not applauding. I knew some but not all of the people and it was notable that one person, in particular, Joe Manchin, a democrat, was sitting with members of the opposite party. I mean just wow! That would be something if he were to switch parties and join the republicans. With a 50-50 senate, that would be the death knell for the democrats in terms of pushing through any more legislation prior to the 2022 midterms. Joe has been voting with the republicans lately so he might as well jump ship while the jumping is good. C'mon, man!
It struck me that the speech was a rehash of prior stump speeches and speeches given when he was trying to get his legislation pushed through the Congress in 2021. All of which failed because members of his own party, namely Manchin and Sinema, took issue with the bills and doomed them to failure when they announced that they could not and would not be supporting the legislation. He even mentioned the Voting Rights bill that went down in flames in 2021 because it essentially took state legislatures out of the business of legislating. That bill was doomed to failure and it's not likely to be resuscitated anytime soon. So, why even mention it? The answer is simple. He has nothing else to point to so, when that happens, you make shit up and you rehash your wish list. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
The speech aside, I'm feeling pretty good about the steps that various countries across the globe are putting in place to put a stranglehold on Putin's economy due to Putin's aggression towards the sovereign nation of Ukraine. They're actually going after yachts and villas of the oligarchs which is just outstanding. Company's like Apple and Visa and so many others are pulling out of Russia in solidarity with the freedom loving nations who find Russia's aggression towards Ukraine intolerable and are willing to do what they can. Biden did mention that the US was shutting down airspace to deny incoming flights from Russia but he came to this decision only after several other countries did the same thing. Again, the US should be leading and not, as they are under Biden, from behind.
It wasn't lost on me that there were maybe one or two people at the State of the Union speech who wore masks. You'd think that this Covid thing never happened by looking at the mulling of the people in the chamber at the State of the Union speech. Biden was pumping fists and giving hugs as though he had not a worry in the world about contracting the dreaded Covid-19. This was in contrast to video of Biden just the night before walking across the lawn at the White House after exiting the helicopter and he was alone and masked. I can only conclude that this covid thing was a sham from day one and the democrats attempted, and did so successfully, to weaponize it for political purposes. We all know that it's only ever been a threat to the elderly and the vulnerable amongst us. Bastards.
I'm waking up to a coating of snow on the ground and I'm wondering what that means for my bike ride today. Will I be able to ride or not? Will it warm up enough to melt the snow off the road so I can get out and do my thing? Just when I'm getting up a head of steam after riding two days in a row and when I'm looking forward to getting in three days in a row I'm thinking that that may not happen. I'll have to look at the forecast to see if the temperatures are going to warm up and maybe by how much. Springtime isn't far away so I should be thinking good things about the weather. If it doesn't work out then there is always tomorrow. Tell that to my peeps in Ukraine.
I don't know why but I'm at a bit at a loss of words this morning. There are no particular themes running thorough my head one way or another. I'm not feeling particularly annoyed at anything or anybody so I can't go there wherever that might be. I have no burrs in my saddle that I need to get rid of although I am watching this western on television entitled "1883" which is pretty good. I like a western now and then if for no other reason that to be reminded that it wasn't all that long when we got from point A to point B on a fucking horse. I'm a Sam Elliot fan but I think he's a little too old for this role. The women are predictably good looking and the cinematography is outstanding.
The missus was trying to drag me into watching this "Worst Roommates" thing on Netflix. It struck me as a suburban comedy genre of sorts and just the kind of show that I like to avoid. "That's okay, honey." "You can watch it yourself and fill me in later." She went on to tell me that it was nothing of the kind and, knowing as she does about my penchant for cold case shows, she thought I might like this one. She brought me up to speed on the first episode which she was half way through and it was enough for me to want to know, at a minimum, if and when it got resolved. They always get resolved, don't they? Isn't that the point of these shows? The cops got their man as they always do.
She asked me this morning about the show called "Dropout." It's an upcoming series on HULU about the woman (Elizabeth Holmes - Theranos) who ran the scam about blood testing kits. She was convicted of fraud this past summer and she is expected to be sentenced this coming September. It's good as good as it gets when you're looking for a good swindler flick. I've read the book so I know the story well. I'm convinced that Ms Holmes never started out to defraud investors and I do believe she had every intention to bring her newfangled product to market. When thing started going from bad to worse, little lies turned into big lies and, before she knew it, Ms Holmes had created a monster. There was no turning back. "Yes, little darlings." "I'll add this one to the queue."
The media was in a bit of kerfuffle last evening when I tuned in a little after 8pm. The Ruskies had shelled a nuclear plant in Ukraine and a fire had erupted which had the whole of the media on high alert to report out on what they thought, or even hoped would be, Chernobyl 2.0. On a scale of one to ten in the eyes of the media, a Chernobyl-like event beats a garden variety war each and every time. The coverage was breathless. It was hard to imagine why Russia would choose to do such a thing but, at the same time, it might have passed for something that a bad actor does when things aren't going particularly well for them. In other words, it's not something that I was willing to put past Putin.
Then there were reports that the Russians were shooting at people trying to put out the fire. That's a whole new level of craziness but, again, all is fair in love and war. You could tell that the media had brushed off their Chernobyl notebook and they started giving detailed accounts of what happens when things go from bad to worse when nuclear power plants start to break down. Other media outlets were reporting that various monitors had reported increased levels of radiation coming from the facility. Just when you thought that things couldn't get worse, the media started piling on to their own stories with wild-eyed chyrons and equally wild-eyed talking heads.
You had to wonder if all of this hyperbole wasn't being pushed by one side or the other for one reason or another. Was this Ukraine wanting to lure in the rest of the world on a devious lark of its own making? It was one thing for NATO members to not want their soldiers on the ground in Ukraine since Ukraine isn't a NATO member but what nation could resist the temptation to call for all hands on deck in the event of a potential nuclear disaster? Surely, a bad actor like Russia couldn't be allowed to get away with doing what they appeared to be doing. Someone had to step in and give someone a heavy handed spanking the likes of which might well deter them from doing such things in the future.
It was a ruse that was destined for failure. No sooner had the story been elevated to Defcon 5 than it started to fade with reports that the fire was in one of the administration buildings and not anywhere near one or more of the 5 reactors on the site. They even started to backpedal on the story about Russians firing their weapons at people trying to extinguish the fire. People were indeed on site and doing their level best to put out the fire. By all accounts, the news media should have cut their losses and let the story die a natural death before the top of the hour when the 9pm show started. Let's just say that they could have done a better job than they did when they transitioned to the 9 o'clock hour.
The fact that the Russians allowed the Ukrainians in to put out the fire suggested to me that the shelling was errant in nature and not at all intentional. In fact, the initial news reports were of a "bomb" going off at the nuclear power plant. Someone in the newsroom thought better of it and promptly changed the chyron from "bomb" to "shelling." Confirmation soon followed from the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) that there was no radiation emanating from the site so those reports in the media were erroneous as well. Stock markets around the world reacted with violent drops in their indices at the prospects of a nuclear disaster and the resulting fallout which, reportedly, would make Chernobyl look like child's play. As I sit here this morning reporting after the fact, and I haven't looked, but I have to believe that markets are now back to where they were before the shit hit the fan.
Good old Lindsey Graham, the Senator from South Carolina, went on the Hannity show on FOX at nine last night and said something about someone going in and taking Putin out. You heard me right. He was suggesting that were someone to go in and eliminate Putin that that would be a good thing. I don't disagree with that but you have to wonder if that's something we want our political leaders going on television during prime time to talk about. It's incendiary and probably not something that other people in the highest levels of government here and around the world haven't thought about or maybe considered. If that would solve this Ukraine invasion problem then it might be the proverbial path of least resistance. Or, as they say, the fastest way to get from point A to point B.
The point is, there is no guarantee that the person replacing Putin would be any better. He or she might be even more bloodthirsty and perhaps even more desirous than Putin to expand their war beyond the borders of Ukraine. Surely, our 17 Intelligence Agencies have files on each of the people they see as replacements if and when Putin relinquishes power voluntarily or otherwise. Maybe Lindsey was just saying the quiet part out loud. I'm not sure what inures to Lindsey's political party one way or another when he makes comments like this but it's little hard to believe that he's just out there being a loose canon. One thing is for sure. It's a far cry from the milquetoast-like bullshit we're getting from Sleepy Joe. That mutha continues to bend over for his puppeteers in both Russia and China.
I do like what I'm hearing from the president of Ukraine. He's issued a request for the lovers of democracy across the globe to come to Ukraine and help them fight the war against the dastardly Russians. If NATO won't grow a pair then Ukraine is left to its own devices to find another way to win. When you think about all of the soldiers of fortune around the world who are just itching to get back into the fight, any fight, the prospects of being able to step into an ongoing conflict is a dream come true. It puts food on their table, notches on their belts, a fire in their belly, and it gives them a cause which promises to put their training to good use. Hell, if you can get a few Russian scalps in the process, all the better.
I drove by my oil dealer yesterday and noticed that the price of oil had gone up. They post the price on a sign outside their front gate and I usually take a bit of a peek when I'm driving by just to keep tabs on where the price of oil is going. Do you know that the price of oil went from $3.79 per gallon to $4.34 per gallon in the space of two days? That is unheard of if you want the unvarnished truth. I said to the missus, "maybe we should consider having them take us off automatic delivery for now." "There is no guarantee that the prices won't continue to go up," she replied. "If we buy it now we're getting it on the cheap." How about we jump start our domestic energy production again? Fuck these green energy asshats in the Biden Administration and the clown cars they came in on. Why should we be paying more for oil just because there's a war going on half way around the world?
Clearly, things are going from bad to worse in Ukraine for the Russians. Putin is now threatening any country that dares to interfere with what amounts to nuclear war. This is what desperate people do. Consequently, country's around the world have now closed their airspace to Russia airplanes and have moved closer to removing Russia from the banking system (SWIFT) that allows them to transact more easily in their currency, the rouble. It is, for all intents and purposes, an attempt by the global forces at large to effectively cancel Vladimir Putin. Vlad is clearly in need of an intervention.
The Ukrainians are fighting back and fighting back hard with weapons being flown in from country's around the world. The Russians have yet to take even one city in Ukraine thanks to the tenacity and fighting spirit of a citizenry and military who are standing strong in the breach to protect their country and their way of life. Meanwhile, that cowardly fuck, Joe Biden, is hiding away in his basement in Delaware. Millions of people gathered in and around in their city's capitols over the weekend in solidarity with the people of Ukraine.
Russia has become a pariah, not that they weren't before, but invading a sovereign country in the 21st century seems to be more than a bridge too far when it comes to defining what we consider to be a civilized society these days. Thanks to people like Elon Musk, who gave the citizens of Ukraine access to the technology that gives them back their internet access, the world is now seeing what the Russians are doing to civilians who want nothing more than to live their lives and they are having none of it. The indiscriminate violence and abject horror of war being waged by a rogue actor sitting in the Kremlin is being captured and catapulted around the world in a nanosecond for all to see.
Bumbles Biden will be giving his State of the Union speech tomorrow night in Washington. That may explain why he's hiding in his bunker in Delaware. Maybe their upping his anti-dementia meds in anticipation of his having to stay awake and alert long enough to get in and out of Washington for the two hours that it takes to make the speech. A few trial runs with this and that medication are probably necessary to make sure that he doesn't collapse of his own weight and incompetence during the time allotted to make the speech. Nobody said that talking about thirteen months in office where every failure is worse than the failure before is going to be easy. It's a heavy lift.
How much time do you think he'll spend talking about the thirteen marines that died because of his hastily engineered departure from Afghanistan? Maybe he'll talk about the family of Afghans he killed by sending in drones to retaliate against those Taliban fighters who killed our thirteen marines. How much time will he give to the disaster that he created by opening up our southern border to the illegal aliens of the world? Will we hear bumbles Biden apologize for the state of our economy that has increased the cost of living for every American from coast to coast? Would it be asking too much to have him restart our domestic energy production? Buying our energy from Russia only enriches and emboldens tyrants like Putin. Maybe that's been the plan all along.
I thought I heard something this morning about Biden's FEMA agency offering guidance to Americans in the event of a nuclear attack by Russia. It was something about being in enclosed spaces and, because of the dreaded Covid-19, it was important to stay six feet apart. WAT? Is this where we are in the age of Biden? Covid numbers have been seriously on the decline as of late and countries around the world have relaxed or removed any and all restrictions. Yet, these assholes in the Biden Administration continue with their hysterics and nonsense about the "dreaded" virus. It's a fucking clown show if I've ever seen one and I've seen a few. I don't know what's more laughable: the threat of a nuclear holocaust or the fear porn being peddled by Biden and his minions. Maybe both.
I'm playing this word game online called "Wordle." It's become pretty popular I hear and it was recently purchased by the New York Times. I'm playing it every day and it seems harmless enough in the sense that it doesn't drive me crazy but it does challenge me so I'm good with it thus far. Did I mention that the missus introduced the game to me? I resisted for the longest time because I was busy with another word game and didn't need one more word game to play. I'm in with both feet now for better or worse. Sometimes I find the words quickly and other times not so quickly. The missus? About the same is what I would say. Today's word was "rupee." An odd choice, but okay. I found it in four attempts.
I haven't checked my Twitter feed this morning so I'm not sure where we are with the whole invasion thing. Last I heard, the Russians were advancing on the city of Kiev with a 40-mile transport and were probably some forty miles out. Countries around the world are universal in their condemnation but the Russian army is persisting as armies are want to do. You would think that knowing or having the coordinates of this forty mile transport that some creative sort would find a way to bomb them to smithereens. The threat of a nuclear whatever by Russia is keeping them all at bay and that is not helping the situation. I'm not sure what the endgame looks like but it can't be pretty.
I heard rumors yesterday about some special teams group that the Russians were sending in to Kiev to assassinate the president of Ukraine and his associates. Do they really think that making a martyr of the man is a good thing? Putin is a ruthless thug so I wouldn't put it past him. That said, I think he also understands the dynamics of war and killing Zelensky, who has literally become a folk hero in this tragedy, would not sit well with the populace once the dust settles. Maybe none of that matters to Putin. Killing their president will perpetuate his legacy as a man who will go to any length to get what he wants. Not that the citizens of Ukraine are under any other illusion, mind you.
I watched Biden's State of the Union speech last night so you didn't have to. It was a disgrace. What the hell was going on with his pupils? Whatever drugs they're giving this old fool are no longer doing the trick. It was an hour of mumbling, fumbling, whispering, yelling, finger pointing, lying, gesticulating, and down right balderdash. You'd think he beat the Russians in Ukraine given all of his bombast in the first half hour of the speech. The ambassador to Ukraine who was in the audience, must have been aghast. She was there to hear something hopeful, something material, something that she could bring back to the good people of Ukraine. It was all about Joey and his "conquests."
As Joey was going on and on about how he was bringing Putin to his knees, the Russians were in the process of encircling two major cities in Ukraine. But, Joey was oblivious. He was there to read his speech from the teleprompter and he was going to get it done come hell or high water. His speech was so well rehearsed that he seemed to be rushing through it at points and it had me wondering if he was trying to get it done so he could retire early and have his customary bowl of oatmeal and cup of warm milk back in the White House before retiring for the night. That said, he was seen lingering in the hall after the speech taking selfies, signing autographs, and canoodling with members of his political party.
There was nothing in the speech about restarting our domestic energy production. He spoke about funding the police when we all know that the democrats are famously known for doing just the opposite. He made statements about certain segments of the population who would never pay a penny more in taxes when we all know that inflation under Biden is a tax burden if there ever was one. There were the usual faux pas that we've all come to expect from Biden and no one ever even mentions them anymore since they're so commonplace. To mention them would be to highlight what we all know: Joey Biden is a senile old fuck and he has no business being the President of the United States.
The missus kept asking me who the people were in the audience as the camera panned in and out when people were applauding or, as the case might be, not applauding. I knew some but not all of the people and it was notable that one person, in particular, Joe Manchin, a democrat, was sitting with members of the opposite party. I mean just wow! That would be something if he were to switch parties and join the republicans. With a 50-50 senate, that would be the death knell for the democrats in terms of pushing through any more legislation prior to the 2022 midterms. Joe has been voting with the republicans lately so he might as well jump ship while the jumping is good. C'mon, man!
It struck me that the speech was a rehash of prior stump speeches and speeches given when he was trying to get his legislation pushed through the Congress in 2021. All of which failed because members of his own party, namely Manchin and Sinema, took issue with the bills and doomed them to failure when they announced that they could not and would not be supporting the legislation. He even mentioned the Voting Rights bill that went down in flames in 2021 because it essentially took state legislatures out of the business of legislating. That bill was doomed to failure and it's not likely to be resuscitated anytime soon. So, why even mention it? The answer is simple. He has nothing else to point to so, when that happens, you make shit up and you rehash your wish list. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
The speech aside, I'm feeling pretty good about the steps that various countries across the globe are putting in place to put a stranglehold on Putin's economy due to Putin's aggression towards the sovereign nation of Ukraine. They're actually going after yachts and villas of the oligarchs which is just outstanding. Company's like Apple and Visa and so many others are pulling out of Russia in solidarity with the freedom loving nations who find Russia's aggression towards Ukraine intolerable and are willing to do what they can. Biden did mention that the US was shutting down airspace to deny incoming flights from Russia but he came to this decision only after several other countries did the same thing. Again, the US should be leading and not, as they are under Biden, from behind.
It wasn't lost on me that there were maybe one or two people at the State of the Union speech who wore masks. You'd think that this Covid thing never happened by looking at the mulling of the people in the chamber at the State of the Union speech. Biden was pumping fists and giving hugs as though he had not a worry in the world about contracting the dreaded Covid-19. This was in contrast to video of Biden just the night before walking across the lawn at the White House after exiting the helicopter and he was alone and masked. I can only conclude that this covid thing was a sham from day one and the democrats attempted, and did so successfully, to weaponize it for political purposes. We all know that it's only ever been a threat to the elderly and the vulnerable amongst us. Bastards.
I'm waking up to a coating of snow on the ground and I'm wondering what that means for my bike ride today. Will I be able to ride or not? Will it warm up enough to melt the snow off the road so I can get out and do my thing? Just when I'm getting up a head of steam after riding two days in a row and when I'm looking forward to getting in three days in a row I'm thinking that that may not happen. I'll have to look at the forecast to see if the temperatures are going to warm up and maybe by how much. Springtime isn't far away so I should be thinking good things about the weather. If it doesn't work out then there is always tomorrow. Tell that to my peeps in Ukraine.
I don't know why but I'm at a bit at a loss of words this morning. There are no particular themes running thorough my head one way or another. I'm not feeling particularly annoyed at anything or anybody so I can't go there wherever that might be. I have no burrs in my saddle that I need to get rid of although I am watching this western on television entitled "1883" which is pretty good. I like a western now and then if for no other reason that to be reminded that it wasn't all that long when we got from point A to point B on a fucking horse. I'm a Sam Elliot fan but I think he's a little too old for this role. The women are predictably good looking and the cinematography is outstanding.
The missus was trying to drag me into watching this "Worst Roommates" thing on Netflix. It struck me as a suburban comedy genre of sorts and just the kind of show that I like to avoid. "That's okay, honey." "You can watch it yourself and fill me in later." She went on to tell me that it was nothing of the kind and, knowing as she does about my penchant for cold case shows, she thought I might like this one. She brought me up to speed on the first episode which she was half way through and it was enough for me to want to know, at a minimum, if and when it got resolved. They always get resolved, don't they? Isn't that the point of these shows? The cops got their man as they always do.
She asked me this morning about the show called "Dropout." It's an upcoming series on HULU about the woman (Elizabeth Holmes - Theranos) who ran the scam about blood testing kits. She was convicted of fraud this past summer and she is expected to be sentenced this coming September. It's good as good as it gets when you're looking for a good swindler flick. I've read the book so I know the story well. I'm convinced that Ms Holmes never started out to defraud investors and I do believe she had every intention to bring her newfangled product to market. When thing started going from bad to worse, little lies turned into big lies and, before she knew it, Ms Holmes had created a monster. There was no turning back. "Yes, little darlings." "I'll add this one to the queue."
The media was in a bit of kerfuffle last evening when I tuned in a little after 8pm. The Ruskies had shelled a nuclear plant in Ukraine and a fire had erupted which had the whole of the media on high alert to report out on what they thought, or even hoped would be, Chernobyl 2.0. On a scale of one to ten in the eyes of the media, a Chernobyl-like event beats a garden variety war each and every time. The coverage was breathless. It was hard to imagine why Russia would choose to do such a thing but, at the same time, it might have passed for something that a bad actor does when things aren't going particularly well for them. In other words, it's not something that I was willing to put past Putin.
Then there were reports that the Russians were shooting at people trying to put out the fire. That's a whole new level of craziness but, again, all is fair in love and war. You could tell that the media had brushed off their Chernobyl notebook and they started giving detailed accounts of what happens when things go from bad to worse when nuclear power plants start to break down. Other media outlets were reporting that various monitors had reported increased levels of radiation coming from the facility. Just when you thought that things couldn't get worse, the media started piling on to their own stories with wild-eyed chyrons and equally wild-eyed talking heads.
You had to wonder if all of this hyperbole wasn't being pushed by one side or the other for one reason or another. Was this Ukraine wanting to lure in the rest of the world on a devious lark of its own making? It was one thing for NATO members to not want their soldiers on the ground in Ukraine since Ukraine isn't a NATO member but what nation could resist the temptation to call for all hands on deck in the event of a potential nuclear disaster? Surely, a bad actor like Russia couldn't be allowed to get away with doing what they appeared to be doing. Someone had to step in and give someone a heavy handed spanking the likes of which might well deter them from doing such things in the future.
It was a ruse that was destined for failure. No sooner had the story been elevated to Defcon 5 than it started to fade with reports that the fire was in one of the administration buildings and not anywhere near one or more of the 5 reactors on the site. They even started to backpedal on the story about Russians firing their weapons at people trying to extinguish the fire. People were indeed on site and doing their level best to put out the fire. By all accounts, the news media should have cut their losses and let the story die a natural death before the top of the hour when the 9pm show started. Let's just say that they could have done a better job than they did when they transitioned to the 9 o'clock hour.
The fact that the Russians allowed the Ukrainians in to put out the fire suggested to me that the shelling was errant in nature and not at all intentional. In fact, the initial news reports were of a "bomb" going off at the nuclear power plant. Someone in the newsroom thought better of it and promptly changed the chyron from "bomb" to "shelling." Confirmation soon followed from the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) that there was no radiation emanating from the site so those reports in the media were erroneous as well. Stock markets around the world reacted with violent drops in their indices at the prospects of a nuclear disaster and the resulting fallout which, reportedly, would make Chernobyl look like child's play. As I sit here this morning reporting after the fact, and I haven't looked, but I have to believe that markets are now back to where they were before the shit hit the fan.
Good old Lindsey Graham, the Senator from South Carolina, went on the Hannity show on FOX at nine last night and said something about someone going in and taking Putin out. You heard me right. He was suggesting that were someone to go in and eliminate Putin that that would be a good thing. I don't disagree with that but you have to wonder if that's something we want our political leaders going on television during prime time to talk about. It's incendiary and probably not something that other people in the highest levels of government here and around the world haven't thought about or maybe considered. If that would solve this Ukraine invasion problem then it might be the proverbial path of least resistance. Or, as they say, the fastest way to get from point A to point B.
The point is, there is no guarantee that the person replacing Putin would be any better. He or she might be even more bloodthirsty and perhaps even more desirous than Putin to expand their war beyond the borders of Ukraine. Surely, our 17 Intelligence Agencies have files on each of the people they see as replacements if and when Putin relinquishes power voluntarily or otherwise. Maybe Lindsey was just saying the quiet part out loud. I'm not sure what inures to Lindsey's political party one way or another when he makes comments like this but it's little hard to believe that he's just out there being a loose canon. One thing is for sure. It's a far cry from the milquetoast-like bullshit we're getting from Sleepy Joe. That mutha continues to bend over for his puppeteers in both Russia and China.
I do like what I'm hearing from the president of Ukraine. He's issued a request for the lovers of democracy across the globe to come to Ukraine and help them fight the war against the dastardly Russians. If NATO won't grow a pair then Ukraine is left to its own devices to find another way to win. When you think about all of the soldiers of fortune around the world who are just itching to get back into the fight, any fight, the prospects of being able to step into an ongoing conflict is a dream come true. It puts food on their table, notches on their belts, a fire in their belly, and it gives them a cause which promises to put their training to good use. Hell, if you can get a few Russian scalps in the process, all the better.
I drove by my oil dealer yesterday and noticed that the price of oil had gone up. They post the price on a sign outside their front gate and I usually take a bit of a peek when I'm driving by just to keep tabs on where the price of oil is going. Do you know that the price of oil went from $3.79 per gallon to $4.34 per gallon in the space of two days? That is unheard of if you want the unvarnished truth. I said to the missus, "maybe we should consider having them take us off automatic delivery for now." "There is no guarantee that the prices won't continue to go up," she replied. "If we buy it now we're getting it on the cheap." How about we jump start our domestic energy production again? Fuck these green energy asshats in the Biden Administration and the clown cars they came in on. Why should we be paying more for oil just because there's a war going on half way around the world?
Shock And Awe
27/02/22 07:08
That's what we'll do then. I'll order up some liver and onions for Mrs G before we pay her a visit next week. I was expecting to have a more difficult time of finding liver and onions on a take-out basis but I found at least two places that will do the trick. Mrs G will be tickled. You may recall that had she one wish for her facility, it would be that they serve liver and onions more often. Imagine her surprise when we walk through her door with a nice hot take-out meal of liver and onions. I wonder if we said nothing, how long would it take her to pick up the scent. This is no time for games, Johnny Boy.
I don't know what kind of world I'm waking up to this morning. It's a holiday (President's Day) so my usual talk show guy is off and his fill-in is not someone I care to listen to. I'd rather listen to some nice music if it's all the same to you. Does the fact that my radio guy isn't in say anything about what may or may not be going on in Ukraine? Surely, if the Ruskies invaded over night, the proverbial shit would have hit the fan by now and my guy would want to be front and center with all the fact for his faithful listeners.
Bumbles Biden, according to everything I was seeing on Twitter yesterday, was planing to go to his home in Delaware. There were some last minute changes and he abandoned those plans and decided not to go back to Delaware. What the hell is he going to Delaware on a Sunday anyway when the weekend is practically over and we have a full blown international crisis going on involving Ukraine and Russia on our hands? In my humble opinion, every minute that Biden is sitting in the White House, it's an existential crisis. It might as well be the Cuban missile crisis all over again. The world is sitting on pins and fucking needles wondering what demented Joey is going to fuck up next.
What the hell does he have to say anyway when it comes to the Ukraine and what may or may not happen if and when Russia invades? He's not the president of Ukraine. He's barely the president of our bloody country truth be told. He'd tell you that he's been the most transparent president since Abraham Lincoln when it comes to this Ukraine thing. I suppose he's referring to his daily trips to the podium to declare that either Putin hasn't made up his mind yet or, alternatively, the invasion is imminent. If I hear that the invasion is "imminent" one more time I think I'm going to puke. He's been saying that for weeks. Ever heard the story about the boy who cried wold, asshole?
You can tell that I'm in a mood this morning. Or, maybe you can't. Maybe this is what it looks like when I'm not getting my morning fix of news and opinion. Would Biden be staying in Washington because he's on the precipice of something and he doesn't want to be out of the mix if something breaks either good or bad? It should come as no surprise to anyone that a lot of people think that this whole Russian thing is a distraction created out of whole cloth by Biden and his minions. What better to distract from a failing and flailing presidency if not a world crisis? Don't think for a moment that it isn't one of many plans that Biden had on the drawing board if and when push came to shove.
He's got that dip shit Boris Johnson, the PM of the UK, playing right along. He was out there yesterday saying that this Russian thing could lead to an all-out war in Europe the likes of which they'd not seen since World War 2. Is that the role of a world leader? To be out there spreading doom and gloom to the masses? How about a little something uplifting and lot less perilous? That is not to say that my sympathies are not with the good people of Ukraine whose lives have been upended since this Russian thing began. What do you think they think of what Johnson is saying? Can their predicament be any more frightful?
Maybe Bumbles Biden staying behind in Washington means that there's a solution in the making and he didn't want to be getting a diaper change in Delaware when he could be standing at the teleprompter at the White House taking credit for the breakthrough. Wouldn't that be the fucking bees knees. The only question that I would have is, what did he give away or whose goose got cooked so Biden could stand tall in the breach like John Wayne at the Alamo? What did he agree to that he had no right to agree to? I know the sycophantic media here in the US was chomping at the bit to cover a war in a faraway land so they wanted this war not only to lift their dismal ratings but for those ratings of their dear leader, Bumbling Joey Biden. It's all very pathetic.
So much for high hopes. Putin has now effectively annexed a portion of Ukraine without firing a shot. He gave some speech to the Russian people that was dark if it was anything. Dark in the sense that it sounded a lot like a speech that someone gives when he's not done taking what he wants to take. He won't be satisfied nor will he stop with the two territories he's now agree to call part of Russia. I don't pretend to know what this represents in terms of land mass or population but the fact that he took it without firing a shot should tell us something about where the sympathies of those citizens lie. Would it help if I told you that many or most of them were Russian speaking?
Maybe I've said this before but I'll say it again. I think Ukraine is, for all intents and purposes, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Biden Crime Family. The only context that I'm familiar with when it comes to Ukraine is how much they paid Hunter Biden for his expertise in the energy industry. He had none, of course, so therein lies the criminal part of the equation. Knowing that, it should come as no surprise to learn that any number of Washington democrats who are now sounding somewhat full throated about Ukraine and their so-called sovereignty, are now sounding more like a bunch of money launderers who see their golden goose getting cooked. In other words, it ain't just Hunter.
Oh, and then there was the video of Joey Biden back in the day when he was Vice President threatening to withhold funds from Ukraine if they didn't fire a prosecutor who was looking into the company that had hired Hunter. This is what thugs do. This is what criminals do when they feel that they are untouchable. He's gone on to become president of our country, if one is to overlook for a moment on just how he managed to pull that one off, so there must be something to my contention that some people are just above the law. It's sad that it's all come to this but this is where we are.
I have a very nice quiche baking in the oven and I think the missus is going to be very pleased when she gets up and about this morning. I have a short window of opportunity after looking at the morning headlines and before I sit down to put my thoughts on "paper." It was just enough time to sauté some mushrooms, steam up some broccoli, make a nice egg white and egg concoction, and throw it all together before putting it in the oven at 350 degrees for about an hour. I don't use a crust so there's that. No one in this family needs the unnecessary carbohydrates on top of everything else in the quiche. Its quiche a quiche without a crust? I'll serve it up with a dollop of mustard, grapefruit chunks, and toast with strawberry jam. It's definitely not for the faint of heart. Or, is it?
Mrs G sent us an e-mail that she had received from that Ryan guy about why we should care about Ukraine. Maybe the e-mail that she received got her to thinking about Ukraine in a way that she had heretofore not given much consideration. Not that Mrs G has any vested interest in what happens to Ukraine because she does not. All I've heard is that Ukraine is responsible for a good share of the wheat production in the world. What does that mean for us if the Russians now control the world's wheat production? Mrs G's e-mail was more about minerals and such so that should give us pause? I'm not sure how to respond to Mrs G if at all. Maybe like so many other e-mails from this Ryan guy that she passes along, we'll just ignore it. Good idea.
We got us another snow storm coming down the pike. I put my neighbor on notice that I'll be over to make a pass or two or three at her place before all is said and done. It's hard to say just how much snow we're going to get but it looks like maybe a foot give or take. It's one of those storms whose paths is as yet uncertain so the accumulations have yet to be nailed down by the professionals who do such things. I have the added responsibility to dig out our mailboxes this time around because my other neighbors are on sabbatical somewhere out west. Not a big deal but it is down the street a way so I guess I'm hoping we don't get too much snow since that means multiple trips to do the job.
The Ev man will be coming for the duration of the storm as well. I think he really likes putting his car in the garage when we have these storms. It's possible that he prefers to have it here at the house rather than in the parking lot over at his place where they want the tenants to move their cars from one lot to another so they can clear the snow away one lot at a time. The drill is always the same when the Ev man comes to visit. We need to make sure that he has something to eat while he's here. We can't have him getting up in the middle of the night only to find that there's nothing for him to eat if that is what he is so inclined to do. I just wish the missus would pick up that ball and run with it more often than she does. I'm happy to do it but wouldn't mind a helping hand here and there. There, I said it.
I'm looking at the months of January and February here as we are on the twenty-third of February. Thus far, I'm on track to get in about 14 bike rides each of the past two months. It might be more by the end of February but that remains to be seen. That's not bad considering the obstacles one faces while riding during the winter months here in New England. I think having milder winters helps although I've had rides while the temps were in the twenties so cold has not been an issue. More often than not, I've waited for the recent snowfall to recede on the bike paths before riding. When I say bike path, I'm referring to the sliver of a path that runs parallel with the highway. The snow plows push it back a bit and the sun does the rest. That can take a day or two before I have enough of a path to ride on.
I really need to pay closer attention to the tires on my bike. My rear tire is worn down to the thread but I can't quite see the thread just yet. It's smooth as a baby's bottom so that's an accident just waiting to happen. I think I like living on the edge just a bit in the sense that I know my tire poses a danger but I'm throwing caution to the wind and taking it day by day. Who doesn't like a good cliche'? Right? Is it possible that I can get a flat while riding on any particular day of the week? You betcha. Is it possible that I'll be all sweaty and drenched to the bone when that happens? You betcha. Will I run the risk of getting hypothermia if I'm far enough away from home such that I'll have to walk home? Damn straight.
Should any or all of these things play out the plan is always the same. I'll walk home with my bike in tow and I'll not accept a ride should one or more be offered. I don't care how cold it gets or how windy or inclement the weather is. I'll keep on keeping on as they say. I've made my own bed and I fully intend to sleep in it. I worry about that part of me that won't accept any help, or is maybe too proud to accept any help. I'm fully aware that it could lead to bad things. Fatal even. It's tantamount to self flagellation in a perverted sport of way. Just call me "mr tough guy." I'm not opposed to accepting lifelines but certainly not before paying the piper for making such bad decisions. A little personal comeuppance can be restorative. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
I'm waking up this morning, or maybe I should say that I went to sleep last night, while bombs were falling on the good people of Ukraine. The annexation of those two territories apparently wasn't enough to satisfy the appetite of one Vlad Putin. It's hard to say where it's all going but it's got the world's news outlets in a bit of a tizzy this morning. You know they love this stuff. Counting body bags and echoing terse exchanges of world leaders is as good as it gets for a media that has probably tired a bit of following Biden around hoping to hear a complete sentence come out of his mouth. Speaking of which, whatever happened to that tough guy? You know, the guy who took on Corn Pop with a chain in one hand and a switchblade in the other?
I think it was the fool on the hill, Biden himself, who said something to the effect that Putin would meet his match were he to be elected president. Putin would rue the day when he dared to threaten the United States and Eastern Europe while Joey "switchblade" Biden was in office. Well, now Putin has called Biden's bluff and Biden is away in a corner somewhere cowering at the prospect of having to take to the podium to explain to the American people how things went so very wrong in Ukraine on his watch. Any and all red lines Biden put out there for Putin to cross, Putin crossed. Can you blame him after what he's seen of Biden's bumbling incompetence on the world stage in faraway places like Afghanistan?
It's unclear how much of Ukraine Putin plans to take into the Soviet orbit after all is said and done. He said something to the effect that he was looking to demilitarize Ukraine and that "denaziization" was also in the cards. Not sure what the Nazi reference is all about. The Ukrainians worked hand-in-hand with the Nazi's in World War 2 so there's that. Putin also warned the world at large that should anyone interfere with his actions in Ukraine that they would meet with unimaginable consequences. I suspect that was a veiled threat to unleash a nuclear war with any nation taking up arms against Russia in their bid to win over the "hearts and minds" of the Ukrainian people.
What is clear is that Joey Biden has now notched his belt with one more failure in a line of spectacular failures while only in his first year as president of the United States. With energy markets further roiled as a result of the invasion of Ukraine, you would think that Joey might reverse his policies when and where it comes to domestic energy production. As a nation, we were energy independent under Trump and Biden wasted no time when he entered office shutting down pipelines and closing down oil fields on federal lands. It's all about reducing our carbon footprint doncha know. So, he's starting up the pipelines again, right? Not on your fucking life.
My sympathies are certainly with the Ukrainian people this morning. They have to be living through a special kind of hell with bombs falling and Russian soldiers running through their backyards. Putin said something in his speech last night about the Ukrainian people laying down their arms and going home. My guess is that the Ukrainian people are not going to take this laying down. They do have an army albeit not one that compares to Russia's armed forces. Listen to me. Who made me the Supreme Allied Commander of Eastern Europe? Where do they come up with these titles, anyway? It sounds like something out of Marvel comics. I know, I know. Eisenhower was the first to hold that title. It just makes me laugh every time I hear it. It sounds so, well, stupid.
I'm a little surprised that the missus has the radio on this morning. She's tuned into Jeff Kuhner on WRKO. He's about as astute an observer as you'll find about these types of events especially when it comes to happenings in Eastern Europe and environs. The missus has a bit of a frail psyche so I would expect her to steer clear of conversations around war and the consequences of same. Maybe the fact that it's so far away makes it seem somehow less real. Kuhner spends most of his time taking Biden to task for his sheer incompetence so she may be enjoying that aspect of the on-air banter. I guess we're going day-to-day now until the smoke clears. Let's hope it stays between Russia and Ukraine.
All of this geopolitical news is not helping the financial markets. I figured that the old axiom, sell the rumor and buy the news (or is it the other way around)?, would give us a clue as to how this might play out once the bombs started falling. Well, the US markets were down big time yesterday with the news that the invasion was finally under way. I think the S&P was down roughly 2.6% at the low of the day. By the close of the market, the NASDAQ was up some 3%. For those worried about seeing the bottom falling out of their portfolios, this had to be one hell of a feel good moment. It was overdue, truth be told. The other axiom that is true about financial markets is, nothing goes straight up and nothing goes straight down.
I received man e-mail from Mrs G yesterday. It was essentially an update from Schwab on the goings-on in the financial markets given the latest turmoil we've been seeing. It wasn't more than a paragraph or two but it was energy-centric and, in my humble opinion, short of the mark. This is the pablum that they send to their investors to do what? Shed a little light when the light at the end the tunnel looks more like a freight train coming down the pike than a ray of sunshine? I was shocked that there was not a word in the Schwab article about restarting our domestic energy production. Have they forgotten that we were energy dependent when Trump was President? Or, was Schwab one of many woke institutions who thought bumbling Joey Biden was the better of the two candidates running for the presidency in 2020?
Has it occurred to Schwab that we are now hard pressed to level sanctions or other retaliatory measures against bad actors on the world stage precisely because we need the energy (oil) that they produce? Have they any idea on how hobbled that makes us as a leader of the free world and a defender of democracy in shit holes around the globe? Is Schwab too proud or too woke to admit that supporting Joey Biden in as President was the biggest mistake we've made as a country in the last 100 years? No, what we're seeing, at least in the e-mail that Mrs G sent, is that they are doubling and tripling down on their stupidity. I replied to Mrs G as one might guess if you're keeping up with my thinking as laid out here. Sometimes you need to call a spade a spade.
I think we're now in day two of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and news reports state that the Russians are closing in on the capital, Kiev. Nobody seems to know how far the Russians are going to go. Will they be satisfied with maybe half of the country or do they want the whole enchilada? I get the impression that since the Ukrainians are not rolling over that the Russians are going whole hog here. That increases the likelihood that civilians are now on the menu and it's no longer sufficient to just take out military installations and the so-called hard assets. The Ukrainians will pay heavy price for their decision to resist at every turn. Maybe that all changes when they get their hands on the Ukrainian president and his family members. Or, maybe the Ukrainians have just begun to fight.
The snow is falling now, and has been since around 7am this morning, at the rate of about an inch an hour. I don't think we've ever had as much food in our refrigerator as we have now. I like to stock up when we get these storms so that the Ev man isn't caught flat footed when he goes to the refrigerator in the middle of the night to refuel. I'm embarrassed to say that we're getting maybe a foot of snow. Certainly not enough to warrant the amount of food that we have on hand. The good news is that the Ev man will take most of it with him when he leaves after the storm is over. That is how the latest storms have played out anyway. If past storms are any indication, you get my drift.
I'm waking up this morning only to hear that the Capital of Kiev is still in the hands of the Ukrainians. That is not what I or anyone else expected to hear after the Russians stepped up their offense over the last 24 hours. The president of Kiev has declined an offer by the US to evacuate before the capital falls into Russian hands. Leave it to the weak twat of a president like Joey Biden to run for the hills when the going gets tough. Well, if his advice to Zelensky is any indication, that is precisely what that cheap suit of a president, Biden, would do under similar circumstances. Zelensky has chosen to stay and fight for his country. That's what we call in the hood, a "stand-up" guy!
And what the hell am I hearing this morning about the French seizing a Russian cargo ship? It seems that this invasion for Vladimir isn't working out the way he'd planned. It's all hands on deck as far as the international community is concerned when it comes to aiding and assisting the Ukrainians without having boots on the ground in Ukraine. Russia, and Putin more specifically, is now personna non grata in the eyes of most democratic bastions across the globe. Even China is calling for a stop to the violence. Xi probably gave Putin 24 hours to achieve his goals in Ukraine and if he failed in his efforts, the Chinese would step in and join the chorus of voices calling for a stop to the violence. Viva Ukraine!
I don't know what kind of world I'm waking up to this morning. It's a holiday (President's Day) so my usual talk show guy is off and his fill-in is not someone I care to listen to. I'd rather listen to some nice music if it's all the same to you. Does the fact that my radio guy isn't in say anything about what may or may not be going on in Ukraine? Surely, if the Ruskies invaded over night, the proverbial shit would have hit the fan by now and my guy would want to be front and center with all the fact for his faithful listeners.
Bumbles Biden, according to everything I was seeing on Twitter yesterday, was planing to go to his home in Delaware. There were some last minute changes and he abandoned those plans and decided not to go back to Delaware. What the hell is he going to Delaware on a Sunday anyway when the weekend is practically over and we have a full blown international crisis going on involving Ukraine and Russia on our hands? In my humble opinion, every minute that Biden is sitting in the White House, it's an existential crisis. It might as well be the Cuban missile crisis all over again. The world is sitting on pins and fucking needles wondering what demented Joey is going to fuck up next.
What the hell does he have to say anyway when it comes to the Ukraine and what may or may not happen if and when Russia invades? He's not the president of Ukraine. He's barely the president of our bloody country truth be told. He'd tell you that he's been the most transparent president since Abraham Lincoln when it comes to this Ukraine thing. I suppose he's referring to his daily trips to the podium to declare that either Putin hasn't made up his mind yet or, alternatively, the invasion is imminent. If I hear that the invasion is "imminent" one more time I think I'm going to puke. He's been saying that for weeks. Ever heard the story about the boy who cried wold, asshole?
You can tell that I'm in a mood this morning. Or, maybe you can't. Maybe this is what it looks like when I'm not getting my morning fix of news and opinion. Would Biden be staying in Washington because he's on the precipice of something and he doesn't want to be out of the mix if something breaks either good or bad? It should come as no surprise to anyone that a lot of people think that this whole Russian thing is a distraction created out of whole cloth by Biden and his minions. What better to distract from a failing and flailing presidency if not a world crisis? Don't think for a moment that it isn't one of many plans that Biden had on the drawing board if and when push came to shove.
He's got that dip shit Boris Johnson, the PM of the UK, playing right along. He was out there yesterday saying that this Russian thing could lead to an all-out war in Europe the likes of which they'd not seen since World War 2. Is that the role of a world leader? To be out there spreading doom and gloom to the masses? How about a little something uplifting and lot less perilous? That is not to say that my sympathies are not with the good people of Ukraine whose lives have been upended since this Russian thing began. What do you think they think of what Johnson is saying? Can their predicament be any more frightful?
Maybe Bumbles Biden staying behind in Washington means that there's a solution in the making and he didn't want to be getting a diaper change in Delaware when he could be standing at the teleprompter at the White House taking credit for the breakthrough. Wouldn't that be the fucking bees knees. The only question that I would have is, what did he give away or whose goose got cooked so Biden could stand tall in the breach like John Wayne at the Alamo? What did he agree to that he had no right to agree to? I know the sycophantic media here in the US was chomping at the bit to cover a war in a faraway land so they wanted this war not only to lift their dismal ratings but for those ratings of their dear leader, Bumbling Joey Biden. It's all very pathetic.
So much for high hopes. Putin has now effectively annexed a portion of Ukraine without firing a shot. He gave some speech to the Russian people that was dark if it was anything. Dark in the sense that it sounded a lot like a speech that someone gives when he's not done taking what he wants to take. He won't be satisfied nor will he stop with the two territories he's now agree to call part of Russia. I don't pretend to know what this represents in terms of land mass or population but the fact that he took it without firing a shot should tell us something about where the sympathies of those citizens lie. Would it help if I told you that many or most of them were Russian speaking?
Maybe I've said this before but I'll say it again. I think Ukraine is, for all intents and purposes, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Biden Crime Family. The only context that I'm familiar with when it comes to Ukraine is how much they paid Hunter Biden for his expertise in the energy industry. He had none, of course, so therein lies the criminal part of the equation. Knowing that, it should come as no surprise to learn that any number of Washington democrats who are now sounding somewhat full throated about Ukraine and their so-called sovereignty, are now sounding more like a bunch of money launderers who see their golden goose getting cooked. In other words, it ain't just Hunter.
Oh, and then there was the video of Joey Biden back in the day when he was Vice President threatening to withhold funds from Ukraine if they didn't fire a prosecutor who was looking into the company that had hired Hunter. This is what thugs do. This is what criminals do when they feel that they are untouchable. He's gone on to become president of our country, if one is to overlook for a moment on just how he managed to pull that one off, so there must be something to my contention that some people are just above the law. It's sad that it's all come to this but this is where we are.
I have a very nice quiche baking in the oven and I think the missus is going to be very pleased when she gets up and about this morning. I have a short window of opportunity after looking at the morning headlines and before I sit down to put my thoughts on "paper." It was just enough time to sauté some mushrooms, steam up some broccoli, make a nice egg white and egg concoction, and throw it all together before putting it in the oven at 350 degrees for about an hour. I don't use a crust so there's that. No one in this family needs the unnecessary carbohydrates on top of everything else in the quiche. Its quiche a quiche without a crust? I'll serve it up with a dollop of mustard, grapefruit chunks, and toast with strawberry jam. It's definitely not for the faint of heart. Or, is it?
Mrs G sent us an e-mail that she had received from that Ryan guy about why we should care about Ukraine. Maybe the e-mail that she received got her to thinking about Ukraine in a way that she had heretofore not given much consideration. Not that Mrs G has any vested interest in what happens to Ukraine because she does not. All I've heard is that Ukraine is responsible for a good share of the wheat production in the world. What does that mean for us if the Russians now control the world's wheat production? Mrs G's e-mail was more about minerals and such so that should give us pause? I'm not sure how to respond to Mrs G if at all. Maybe like so many other e-mails from this Ryan guy that she passes along, we'll just ignore it. Good idea.
We got us another snow storm coming down the pike. I put my neighbor on notice that I'll be over to make a pass or two or three at her place before all is said and done. It's hard to say just how much snow we're going to get but it looks like maybe a foot give or take. It's one of those storms whose paths is as yet uncertain so the accumulations have yet to be nailed down by the professionals who do such things. I have the added responsibility to dig out our mailboxes this time around because my other neighbors are on sabbatical somewhere out west. Not a big deal but it is down the street a way so I guess I'm hoping we don't get too much snow since that means multiple trips to do the job.
The Ev man will be coming for the duration of the storm as well. I think he really likes putting his car in the garage when we have these storms. It's possible that he prefers to have it here at the house rather than in the parking lot over at his place where they want the tenants to move their cars from one lot to another so they can clear the snow away one lot at a time. The drill is always the same when the Ev man comes to visit. We need to make sure that he has something to eat while he's here. We can't have him getting up in the middle of the night only to find that there's nothing for him to eat if that is what he is so inclined to do. I just wish the missus would pick up that ball and run with it more often than she does. I'm happy to do it but wouldn't mind a helping hand here and there. There, I said it.
I'm looking at the months of January and February here as we are on the twenty-third of February. Thus far, I'm on track to get in about 14 bike rides each of the past two months. It might be more by the end of February but that remains to be seen. That's not bad considering the obstacles one faces while riding during the winter months here in New England. I think having milder winters helps although I've had rides while the temps were in the twenties so cold has not been an issue. More often than not, I've waited for the recent snowfall to recede on the bike paths before riding. When I say bike path, I'm referring to the sliver of a path that runs parallel with the highway. The snow plows push it back a bit and the sun does the rest. That can take a day or two before I have enough of a path to ride on.
I really need to pay closer attention to the tires on my bike. My rear tire is worn down to the thread but I can't quite see the thread just yet. It's smooth as a baby's bottom so that's an accident just waiting to happen. I think I like living on the edge just a bit in the sense that I know my tire poses a danger but I'm throwing caution to the wind and taking it day by day. Who doesn't like a good cliche'? Right? Is it possible that I can get a flat while riding on any particular day of the week? You betcha. Is it possible that I'll be all sweaty and drenched to the bone when that happens? You betcha. Will I run the risk of getting hypothermia if I'm far enough away from home such that I'll have to walk home? Damn straight.
Should any or all of these things play out the plan is always the same. I'll walk home with my bike in tow and I'll not accept a ride should one or more be offered. I don't care how cold it gets or how windy or inclement the weather is. I'll keep on keeping on as they say. I've made my own bed and I fully intend to sleep in it. I worry about that part of me that won't accept any help, or is maybe too proud to accept any help. I'm fully aware that it could lead to bad things. Fatal even. It's tantamount to self flagellation in a perverted sport of way. Just call me "mr tough guy." I'm not opposed to accepting lifelines but certainly not before paying the piper for making such bad decisions. A little personal comeuppance can be restorative. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
I'm waking up this morning, or maybe I should say that I went to sleep last night, while bombs were falling on the good people of Ukraine. The annexation of those two territories apparently wasn't enough to satisfy the appetite of one Vlad Putin. It's hard to say where it's all going but it's got the world's news outlets in a bit of a tizzy this morning. You know they love this stuff. Counting body bags and echoing terse exchanges of world leaders is as good as it gets for a media that has probably tired a bit of following Biden around hoping to hear a complete sentence come out of his mouth. Speaking of which, whatever happened to that tough guy? You know, the guy who took on Corn Pop with a chain in one hand and a switchblade in the other?
I think it was the fool on the hill, Biden himself, who said something to the effect that Putin would meet his match were he to be elected president. Putin would rue the day when he dared to threaten the United States and Eastern Europe while Joey "switchblade" Biden was in office. Well, now Putin has called Biden's bluff and Biden is away in a corner somewhere cowering at the prospect of having to take to the podium to explain to the American people how things went so very wrong in Ukraine on his watch. Any and all red lines Biden put out there for Putin to cross, Putin crossed. Can you blame him after what he's seen of Biden's bumbling incompetence on the world stage in faraway places like Afghanistan?
It's unclear how much of Ukraine Putin plans to take into the Soviet orbit after all is said and done. He said something to the effect that he was looking to demilitarize Ukraine and that "denaziization" was also in the cards. Not sure what the Nazi reference is all about. The Ukrainians worked hand-in-hand with the Nazi's in World War 2 so there's that. Putin also warned the world at large that should anyone interfere with his actions in Ukraine that they would meet with unimaginable consequences. I suspect that was a veiled threat to unleash a nuclear war with any nation taking up arms against Russia in their bid to win over the "hearts and minds" of the Ukrainian people.
What is clear is that Joey Biden has now notched his belt with one more failure in a line of spectacular failures while only in his first year as president of the United States. With energy markets further roiled as a result of the invasion of Ukraine, you would think that Joey might reverse his policies when and where it comes to domestic energy production. As a nation, we were energy independent under Trump and Biden wasted no time when he entered office shutting down pipelines and closing down oil fields on federal lands. It's all about reducing our carbon footprint doncha know. So, he's starting up the pipelines again, right? Not on your fucking life.
My sympathies are certainly with the Ukrainian people this morning. They have to be living through a special kind of hell with bombs falling and Russian soldiers running through their backyards. Putin said something in his speech last night about the Ukrainian people laying down their arms and going home. My guess is that the Ukrainian people are not going to take this laying down. They do have an army albeit not one that compares to Russia's armed forces. Listen to me. Who made me the Supreme Allied Commander of Eastern Europe? Where do they come up with these titles, anyway? It sounds like something out of Marvel comics. I know, I know. Eisenhower was the first to hold that title. It just makes me laugh every time I hear it. It sounds so, well, stupid.
I'm a little surprised that the missus has the radio on this morning. She's tuned into Jeff Kuhner on WRKO. He's about as astute an observer as you'll find about these types of events especially when it comes to happenings in Eastern Europe and environs. The missus has a bit of a frail psyche so I would expect her to steer clear of conversations around war and the consequences of same. Maybe the fact that it's so far away makes it seem somehow less real. Kuhner spends most of his time taking Biden to task for his sheer incompetence so she may be enjoying that aspect of the on-air banter. I guess we're going day-to-day now until the smoke clears. Let's hope it stays between Russia and Ukraine.
All of this geopolitical news is not helping the financial markets. I figured that the old axiom, sell the rumor and buy the news (or is it the other way around)?, would give us a clue as to how this might play out once the bombs started falling. Well, the US markets were down big time yesterday with the news that the invasion was finally under way. I think the S&P was down roughly 2.6% at the low of the day. By the close of the market, the NASDAQ was up some 3%. For those worried about seeing the bottom falling out of their portfolios, this had to be one hell of a feel good moment. It was overdue, truth be told. The other axiom that is true about financial markets is, nothing goes straight up and nothing goes straight down.
I received man e-mail from Mrs G yesterday. It was essentially an update from Schwab on the goings-on in the financial markets given the latest turmoil we've been seeing. It wasn't more than a paragraph or two but it was energy-centric and, in my humble opinion, short of the mark. This is the pablum that they send to their investors to do what? Shed a little light when the light at the end the tunnel looks more like a freight train coming down the pike than a ray of sunshine? I was shocked that there was not a word in the Schwab article about restarting our domestic energy production. Have they forgotten that we were energy dependent when Trump was President? Or, was Schwab one of many woke institutions who thought bumbling Joey Biden was the better of the two candidates running for the presidency in 2020?
Has it occurred to Schwab that we are now hard pressed to level sanctions or other retaliatory measures against bad actors on the world stage precisely because we need the energy (oil) that they produce? Have they any idea on how hobbled that makes us as a leader of the free world and a defender of democracy in shit holes around the globe? Is Schwab too proud or too woke to admit that supporting Joey Biden in as President was the biggest mistake we've made as a country in the last 100 years? No, what we're seeing, at least in the e-mail that Mrs G sent, is that they are doubling and tripling down on their stupidity. I replied to Mrs G as one might guess if you're keeping up with my thinking as laid out here. Sometimes you need to call a spade a spade.
I think we're now in day two of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and news reports state that the Russians are closing in on the capital, Kiev. Nobody seems to know how far the Russians are going to go. Will they be satisfied with maybe half of the country or do they want the whole enchilada? I get the impression that since the Ukrainians are not rolling over that the Russians are going whole hog here. That increases the likelihood that civilians are now on the menu and it's no longer sufficient to just take out military installations and the so-called hard assets. The Ukrainians will pay heavy price for their decision to resist at every turn. Maybe that all changes when they get their hands on the Ukrainian president and his family members. Or, maybe the Ukrainians have just begun to fight.
The snow is falling now, and has been since around 7am this morning, at the rate of about an inch an hour. I don't think we've ever had as much food in our refrigerator as we have now. I like to stock up when we get these storms so that the Ev man isn't caught flat footed when he goes to the refrigerator in the middle of the night to refuel. I'm embarrassed to say that we're getting maybe a foot of snow. Certainly not enough to warrant the amount of food that we have on hand. The good news is that the Ev man will take most of it with him when he leaves after the storm is over. That is how the latest storms have played out anyway. If past storms are any indication, you get my drift.
I'm waking up this morning only to hear that the Capital of Kiev is still in the hands of the Ukrainians. That is not what I or anyone else expected to hear after the Russians stepped up their offense over the last 24 hours. The president of Kiev has declined an offer by the US to evacuate before the capital falls into Russian hands. Leave it to the weak twat of a president like Joey Biden to run for the hills when the going gets tough. Well, if his advice to Zelensky is any indication, that is precisely what that cheap suit of a president, Biden, would do under similar circumstances. Zelensky has chosen to stay and fight for his country. That's what we call in the hood, a "stand-up" guy!
And what the hell am I hearing this morning about the French seizing a Russian cargo ship? It seems that this invasion for Vladimir isn't working out the way he'd planned. It's all hands on deck as far as the international community is concerned when it comes to aiding and assisting the Ukrainians without having boots on the ground in Ukraine. Russia, and Putin more specifically, is now personna non grata in the eyes of most democratic bastions across the globe. Even China is calling for a stop to the violence. Xi probably gave Putin 24 hours to achieve his goals in Ukraine and if he failed in his efforts, the Chinese would step in and join the chorus of voices calling for a stop to the violence. Viva Ukraine!
Grist For The Mill
20/02/22 07:07
There is more Hillary Clinton bullshit in the news. You know how the deep state loves to coordinate the release of bad news with weekends or other big stories in order to dilute and distract. Well, it seems like they've hit the mother load here with not only a weekend but a so-called imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine to boot. It sounds like they've finally got the goods on Clinton and her wiretapping of the Trump White House. Will we see charges filed? Will we see the Hildabeast hogtied and hauled before the courts in chains? How soon before this wet dream of ours to lock her up becomes a reality?
I didn't watch the Superbowl but I did stay at the Holiday Inn Express last night. Only kidding. I'm just not that into football so giving it a pass wasn't a big deal. The missus bought into a pool of sorts with her co-workers so she half watched the game while doing other things. You know how that works. You put down a few dollars and you get a handful of squares on a grid. Depending on what the score looks like at the end of any given quarter, you win or you don't. He or she who gets the final score wins the most. The missus won two quarters and the final. Who's your daddy?
That reminds me. The missus and I have always agreed, at least in theory, that if and when either of us ever plays the lottery and wins that the first thing we would do is go to see an attorney. It's hard to win the lottery when you don't play but that's a story for another day. Seeing the attorney is more about making sure that we have something in writing to rely on should something go south when and where it comes to splitting the pot. Not that she doesn't trust me, or I her, but money has a funny way of muddying the waters in relationships that have lost their center so to speak.
Just so we understand each other, wining a football pool or a few quarters in said pool, is not the same as winning the lottery. That is not to say that I'm not thinking, as any better half should or would, about collecting my half of the proceeds won by the missus. I've not discussed this with her, of course, since I want her to experience the fullness of her win before reminding her of her familial obligations. Left to her own devices, I'm not sure that I'd be party to any plans she might otherwise have for her windfall. Well, windfall might be a bit of a stretch. You know what I mean.
I guess we'll see. I'm prepared to watch her stash all of her winnings away in her purse without offering me so much as a pittance. Even though we have nothing in writing, nor should we have given the value of her winnings, it only seems right that she should offer me something. It's not about the money. Right? It's about doing the right thing. Maybe I have this all wrong. Maybe what's mine is hers and what's hers is hers. If she says nothing then I'll have my answer. I may not like the answer but it will be an answer. What then?
Do I say something to her and risk her thinking less of me for it? I don't think she'd turn on me like a rabid dog but we're not talking about a lot of money here so maybe it's not at all worth even bringing it up. Now that I think of it, taking even one dollar of her winnings would likely detract from the thrill that she's feeling about her win. I wouldn't want to do that. She very seldom wins anything so letting her wallow in her win seems to be about as selfless a thing that I can do under the circumstances. That's the ticket. I'll suck it up.
I got to thinking about this Ukraine thing a little bit. Russia has all 100k+ troops lined up up and down the eastern border of Ukraine and the democracies around the world are asking, begging really, that Putin and his forces not invade Ukraine. I'm sitting here in one of those so-called bastions of democracy thinking to myself, what if Ukraine isn't really a democracy in the truest sense of the word? I know the current president had the opposition party put in jail so there's that. That alone doesn't make a government a dictatorship but I think there's more to it including violations of basic human rights according to organizations that track such things.
It's funny how the media portrays places like Ukraine. Is it a corrupt cesspool the likes of which Joey Biden and his son, Hunter, have enjoyed doing "business" with all these past years? Or, is it a bastion of democracy the likes of which our founding fathers would heartily endorse? If the former, should we really care whether or not Putin and his thugs invade the damn place? Is Ukraine the kind of country that we should expend any effort in protecting or maybe even propping up? Is it worth the blood and treasure of our young men should their blood be spilled in the process of resisting Putin's forces?
I should say at the outset that the invasion, or the alleged invasion, has been largely the creation of the western media. Putin would tell you that he's exercising his forces as he always does at this time of the year and that he has no intention of invading Ukraine. By western accounts, the invasion is scheduled for tomorrow (Wednesday) so I guess we'll know soon enough. I have to say though, I'm caring less about losing Ukraine to Russia knowing what I now know about Ukraine. It's also important to keep in mind that our U.S. forces are not supposed to be fighting in Ukraine so there should be little to no risk of an all out escalation between U.S, forces and Russian forces.
If the invasion that the western media has been pushing and maybe even wishing for does not come to pass, who wins and who loses? Putin may be praised for his exercising restraint and good judgement but he is likely to remind everyone that he never had any intention to invade Ukraine and now the proof is in the pudding. Biden and certain allies in the West are likely to be praised for their willingness to marshal forces to resist this so-called alleged invasion. I'm guessing that the media would take one on the chin were this war not come to fruition but that alone, in my mind, is reason for celebration.
Is it possible that this was nothing more than a dry run to see how NATO forces might react in an emergency? Does any of this have anything to do with China and their desire to invade Taiwan? Is it an understatement to say that the West fell for this hook, line, and sinker? It's Wednesday now and it looks as though this invasion is not as imminent as the White House wanted it to be. It's kind of hard to wag the dog when the dog won't cooperate. Or, as they say down south, this dog won't hunt. It's looking like the president of Ukraine was right all along. He wasn't worried about an invasion but he was worried about Biden and his allies hyping up an invasion. Bastards.
The financial markets took a particularly dim view of the impending invasion and it didn't help the stock market to have Biden and his minions out there creating an invasion out of whole cloth day in and day out. Biden gave a speech yesterday and slurred his way through a speech where, at least in one portion of the speech, he directed his comments to the Russian people. He went on babbling something to the effect that nobody wants war with the Russian people or some such diddly squat. He was clearly still holding out hope that his "the invasion is imminent" mantra would come to fruition. Not sure what he was thinking since it's likely that not a word of his tired rant got to his intended audience inside Russia.
There was a rumor out in the ether yesterday about some pullback of forces by the Russians although it was nothing that anyone could verify. Let me see if I have this right. We have satellites that can read license plates from the surface of the moon but we can't confirm that one or more Russian vehicles has moved away from the border of Ukraine? It was enough to trigger a relief rally on Wall Street so that was a good thing. Biden's speech was scheduled for 3:30 pm and all I could think of was that he was going to say something stupid that would derail the rally in the remaining minutes leading up to the market close at 4 pm. Thankfully, he didn't. With no invasion as yet, we'll see what today brings.
I do wish that this Durham investigation would pick up the pace a little bit. It seems like we see one court filing or maybe an indictment of a low level government type every two to three years. This latest filing by Durham was vague enough such that both sides of the aisle could make the case that it was either the most serious case of corruption on the part of the Clintons since Watergate or, conversely, it was a nothing burger. What are the chances that we can get Durham to step up to the microphone to disabuse those who would dare mischaracterize his work product just once? Instead, he says nothing and the dueling narratives persist until they drift off into nothingness. It's tiring.
Biden did say something in his speech about our country experiencing pain at the pump should Russia invade Ukraine. Explain to me why we should have skin in this game again? Don't we already have enough pain "at the pump" thanks to Biden's shutting down our oil pipelines the minute he took office? Not a fucking word out of his mouth about jump starting domestic energy related projects that he has shut down or perhaps those that never got started because of his preferences and those on the left for so-called green projects. The answer to our energy problems is staring us in the fucking face. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times. Elections have consequences and stolen elections have catastrophic consequences.
I'm getting a little tired of the ever widening net that the January 6th committee investigating the "insurrection" at our country's capitol on January 6th, 2021 seems to want to throw out there. Now, they want the visitor logs from the time that Trump was in office. Is nothing fucking sacred anymore? You know that every damn thing they get they leak out to the media. Anything and everything is fair game when it comes to destroying Trump and anyone associated with either him or his movement. Oh, I can't wait until we conservatives take back the House this coming November. You ain't seen nothing yet, baby cakes. We're going to haul every last one of the Bidenista's in front of a committee and then we'll put the lot of them behind bars. It's a process. Let's get this damn party started!
Temperatures are going to be in the sixties today so that will be nice. I'll have to seriously dress down when I take my bike ride. Will I put on some shorts? Maybe. Will I put away the winter gloves? Probably. The days are getting longer hereabouts this time of the year and the sun is noticeably higher in the sky day in and day out. It has a coming-out-of-hibernation feel to it and that is to be celebrated. I'm reminded that we are still in the month of February so I'll need to temper whatever it is that seems to be bubbling up beneath the surface. I'm the surfer who has caught a wave just right but I also know that it won't last so I gird myself appropriately. Baby steps, Johnny Boy.
Maybe we'll stop by Trader Joe's today when the missus and I are out and about. We visited the store last week and I think I commented on how some of the shelves looked noticeably less well stocked than on previous visits. It reminded us that all of those supply chain issues that we'd been hearing so much about were maybe finally coming to the stores in our neighborhood. Funny thing is, I've not noticed it in other stores hereabouts. Is it the proverbial canary in the coal mine or does it have something to do specifically with Trader Joe's? Does it have anything to do with the Canadian trucker thing up Canada way? Is Trader Joe's a Canadian company?
Every time I see depleted stocks on grocery store shelves, all I can think about is how I can go about stocking up so we'll have what we need if things go south. I'm not to the point where I'm willing to consider buying survival kits with dried foodstuffs but it's certainly not out of the question. Truth be told, I'm always behind the eight ball when these kinds of things happen. I'm just a day late and a dollar short. The damage has been done, the orders have been placed, my order is one of ten thousand which may or may not get filled, and I'm left holding the fucking bag. I don't think that will ever change. You know, the leopard and the spots thing.
The missus and I did agree that we'll stop in to Trader Joe's from time to time to see what, if anything, changes for the better. If things go from bad to worse, then we can start to think about stocking up on some things. Today, we'll be looking for walnuts. They were on my list the last time I was at Trader Joe's. They usually have quite a good assortment of nuts so when they had few to none that got my attention. It will be one of many errands we run today. It wouldn't hurt to see if there isn't something there for Mrs G. Maybe a nice potted plant. They usually have a nice selection of flowers so anything that might brighten up Mrs G's day will suffice.
Did I mention that the state to the south of us, Massachusetts, is working on making it possible for illegal aliens to get driver's license? We know those mother fuckers are already out and about on our roads and highways driving with either no license or maybe a fake license. Making it all legal ain't the answer. If you were an illegal alien swimming across the Rio Grande in an attempt to get into the United States, where would you head when you reached our shores? Would you go to a state that puts illegal aliens in jail? Or, would you head for a state that gives you a drivers license, free housing, food stamps, free health care and education for your bambino's, and encourages you to send for your extended family still mired in abject poverty back in the barrios? It's a no-brainer.
You have to ask yourself, what the hell is some politician thinking putting a bill like this on the damn roster? What benefit to the state and their constituencies does a bill like this serve? Who in their fucking right mind thinks that increasing or encouraging the increase in the number of illegal aliens in their state is a good thing? I understand that the insurance companies like it. It means more customers and a larger pool of monies from which to pay claims. Like everything else in our country today, the devil is in the details. It helps to cement the democrat's hold on power in the state when you also pass laws enabling "citizens" with driver's licenses to vote. What gringo or gring-ess is going to vote for a Republican when the Democrats are bending over backwards giving them everything for free? It's the very definition of a welfare state and, yes, the democrats have figured that out.
I'm still trying to get in a bit of a groove here some four days into this upcoming Sunday's blog post. It looks like this trucker thing in Canada is coming to a head. Trudeau is moving ahead with his martial law nonsense and arrests and confiscations are in the news. He's a real Castro boy, don't you think? A soy boy that you never thought had the intestinal fortitude to go ahead with his marital law thing. The picture that stands out in my mind when it comes to this thug is his taking a knee with the Black Lives Matter rioters and protestors a couple of years back. So, when he agrees with the protestors, he's joining their ranks in the streets. When he doesn't, he's going full totalitarian. Is there a Tiananmen Square in Ottawa? Siri, how can I contribute to the truckers?
Trudeau is confiscating bank accounts, intimidating anyone and everyone who contributed so much as a dime to the truckers, rounding up and arresting the so-called leaders of this protect movement, and doing all of it without the consent of what might be their parliament for lack of a better term. I'm not a Canadian so forgive me if I get some of these labels and terms wrong. He's going fucking rogue. There's no other way to say it. The part that is gnawing away at me, forgetting for a moment that protesting this and that in the public square used to be acceptable in a civilized society, is that bumbling Joey Biden put him up to all of this. That makes Joey complicit. Just add it to the growing list of grievances that we the American people have against this illegitimate president.
If I understand what's really happening up there in Canada, a number of provinces are removing, or have removed, any and all restrictions when it comes to Covid-19. None of that matters to the Trudeau government. He's doubling and tripling down. You need to understand. These are tactics that you might see in China where the Chinese Communists roll over any and all protestors. If the Canadian people don't rise up and push back against this tyranny being imposed by Trudeau then it's all over. The truckers are protesting the mandates that have already been lifted in many provinces so it shouldn't be a heavy lift for the soy boy to do the right thing. Maybe he enjoys welding power too much. When that happens, it's high time for he and his minions to be shown the door. Right this way, sir.
Maybe I should be more concerned with the fact that there are people in Canada who agree with Trudeau. The ends justify the means. They want government to be the final arbitor. The government can do no wrong. The pissants protesting in the public square deserve to be rounded up and flogged or maybe sent away to a reeducation camp until they come around to the government's way of thinking. It's a special form of despotism that has no place in a modern day democracy. These very same people fail to understand that giving over their rights to a tyrant has an erosive effect on the very democracy that they purport to support and encourage. Sorry, don't mean to go all founding fathers on you here. It's just me being me again.
"I don't think I'll be cooking liver and onions for you any time soon, but I certainly could", I was telling Mrs G during our visit yesterday. She was telling us that her facility never serves liver and onions and the next time she gets a chance to put in a request for same she will be doing so. I'm paraphrasing, of course. She also lamented the fact that they only served lobster twice a year during the summer months and that too didn't seem to be often enough for her tastes. I was astounded to hear Mrs G say that in her five years, going on six years now, at her facility she never once cooked a meal in her kitchen. You know, using the oven and not the microwave. Her microwave gets plenty of use.
"Oh, and Johnny Boy, would you be good enough to pick me up another case of root beer", Mrs G asked. "Of course, Mrs G", I responded. "I'd be happy to." "Will you remind me again, am I looking for caffeine free or is it the sugar free variety?" I can never remember. Honestly. I need to write this stuff down. Taking pictures helps too. I mentioned to the missus after our visit that it wouldn't kill us to stop by now and then with maybe a lobster roll in tow. The liver and onions thing would be more complicated. We could take her out to a restaurant if we could find one that serves liver and onions but that too could be a challenge. Who goes out to dinner these days anyway with Covid still just a sneeze away? Quite frankly, it's asking for trouble.
We got on to the subject somehow of one of her neighbors at her facility who has trouble reading the names on the meals delivered to the main area right down the hall from her apartment. With the scarcity of help being what it is these days, the facility prepares the pre-ordered meals and bags them up before delivering them to the pick-up spot where the residents can stop by starting around the hour of five in the afternoon. This particular friend of Mrs G's has trouble reading the names on the bags so, consequently, runs the risk of walking off with someone else's meal. Well, as you can imagine, we kicked around a few ideas on how to solve that problem. More grist for the mill as they say.
I didn't watch the Superbowl but I did stay at the Holiday Inn Express last night. Only kidding. I'm just not that into football so giving it a pass wasn't a big deal. The missus bought into a pool of sorts with her co-workers so she half watched the game while doing other things. You know how that works. You put down a few dollars and you get a handful of squares on a grid. Depending on what the score looks like at the end of any given quarter, you win or you don't. He or she who gets the final score wins the most. The missus won two quarters and the final. Who's your daddy?
That reminds me. The missus and I have always agreed, at least in theory, that if and when either of us ever plays the lottery and wins that the first thing we would do is go to see an attorney. It's hard to win the lottery when you don't play but that's a story for another day. Seeing the attorney is more about making sure that we have something in writing to rely on should something go south when and where it comes to splitting the pot. Not that she doesn't trust me, or I her, but money has a funny way of muddying the waters in relationships that have lost their center so to speak.
Just so we understand each other, wining a football pool or a few quarters in said pool, is not the same as winning the lottery. That is not to say that I'm not thinking, as any better half should or would, about collecting my half of the proceeds won by the missus. I've not discussed this with her, of course, since I want her to experience the fullness of her win before reminding her of her familial obligations. Left to her own devices, I'm not sure that I'd be party to any plans she might otherwise have for her windfall. Well, windfall might be a bit of a stretch. You know what I mean.
I guess we'll see. I'm prepared to watch her stash all of her winnings away in her purse without offering me so much as a pittance. Even though we have nothing in writing, nor should we have given the value of her winnings, it only seems right that she should offer me something. It's not about the money. Right? It's about doing the right thing. Maybe I have this all wrong. Maybe what's mine is hers and what's hers is hers. If she says nothing then I'll have my answer. I may not like the answer but it will be an answer. What then?
Do I say something to her and risk her thinking less of me for it? I don't think she'd turn on me like a rabid dog but we're not talking about a lot of money here so maybe it's not at all worth even bringing it up. Now that I think of it, taking even one dollar of her winnings would likely detract from the thrill that she's feeling about her win. I wouldn't want to do that. She very seldom wins anything so letting her wallow in her win seems to be about as selfless a thing that I can do under the circumstances. That's the ticket. I'll suck it up.
I got to thinking about this Ukraine thing a little bit. Russia has all 100k+ troops lined up up and down the eastern border of Ukraine and the democracies around the world are asking, begging really, that Putin and his forces not invade Ukraine. I'm sitting here in one of those so-called bastions of democracy thinking to myself, what if Ukraine isn't really a democracy in the truest sense of the word? I know the current president had the opposition party put in jail so there's that. That alone doesn't make a government a dictatorship but I think there's more to it including violations of basic human rights according to organizations that track such things.
It's funny how the media portrays places like Ukraine. Is it a corrupt cesspool the likes of which Joey Biden and his son, Hunter, have enjoyed doing "business" with all these past years? Or, is it a bastion of democracy the likes of which our founding fathers would heartily endorse? If the former, should we really care whether or not Putin and his thugs invade the damn place? Is Ukraine the kind of country that we should expend any effort in protecting or maybe even propping up? Is it worth the blood and treasure of our young men should their blood be spilled in the process of resisting Putin's forces?
I should say at the outset that the invasion, or the alleged invasion, has been largely the creation of the western media. Putin would tell you that he's exercising his forces as he always does at this time of the year and that he has no intention of invading Ukraine. By western accounts, the invasion is scheduled for tomorrow (Wednesday) so I guess we'll know soon enough. I have to say though, I'm caring less about losing Ukraine to Russia knowing what I now know about Ukraine. It's also important to keep in mind that our U.S. forces are not supposed to be fighting in Ukraine so there should be little to no risk of an all out escalation between U.S, forces and Russian forces.
If the invasion that the western media has been pushing and maybe even wishing for does not come to pass, who wins and who loses? Putin may be praised for his exercising restraint and good judgement but he is likely to remind everyone that he never had any intention to invade Ukraine and now the proof is in the pudding. Biden and certain allies in the West are likely to be praised for their willingness to marshal forces to resist this so-called alleged invasion. I'm guessing that the media would take one on the chin were this war not come to fruition but that alone, in my mind, is reason for celebration.
Is it possible that this was nothing more than a dry run to see how NATO forces might react in an emergency? Does any of this have anything to do with China and their desire to invade Taiwan? Is it an understatement to say that the West fell for this hook, line, and sinker? It's Wednesday now and it looks as though this invasion is not as imminent as the White House wanted it to be. It's kind of hard to wag the dog when the dog won't cooperate. Or, as they say down south, this dog won't hunt. It's looking like the president of Ukraine was right all along. He wasn't worried about an invasion but he was worried about Biden and his allies hyping up an invasion. Bastards.
The financial markets took a particularly dim view of the impending invasion and it didn't help the stock market to have Biden and his minions out there creating an invasion out of whole cloth day in and day out. Biden gave a speech yesterday and slurred his way through a speech where, at least in one portion of the speech, he directed his comments to the Russian people. He went on babbling something to the effect that nobody wants war with the Russian people or some such diddly squat. He was clearly still holding out hope that his "the invasion is imminent" mantra would come to fruition. Not sure what he was thinking since it's likely that not a word of his tired rant got to his intended audience inside Russia.
There was a rumor out in the ether yesterday about some pullback of forces by the Russians although it was nothing that anyone could verify. Let me see if I have this right. We have satellites that can read license plates from the surface of the moon but we can't confirm that one or more Russian vehicles has moved away from the border of Ukraine? It was enough to trigger a relief rally on Wall Street so that was a good thing. Biden's speech was scheduled for 3:30 pm and all I could think of was that he was going to say something stupid that would derail the rally in the remaining minutes leading up to the market close at 4 pm. Thankfully, he didn't. With no invasion as yet, we'll see what today brings.
I do wish that this Durham investigation would pick up the pace a little bit. It seems like we see one court filing or maybe an indictment of a low level government type every two to three years. This latest filing by Durham was vague enough such that both sides of the aisle could make the case that it was either the most serious case of corruption on the part of the Clintons since Watergate or, conversely, it was a nothing burger. What are the chances that we can get Durham to step up to the microphone to disabuse those who would dare mischaracterize his work product just once? Instead, he says nothing and the dueling narratives persist until they drift off into nothingness. It's tiring.
Biden did say something in his speech about our country experiencing pain at the pump should Russia invade Ukraine. Explain to me why we should have skin in this game again? Don't we already have enough pain "at the pump" thanks to Biden's shutting down our oil pipelines the minute he took office? Not a fucking word out of his mouth about jump starting domestic energy related projects that he has shut down or perhaps those that never got started because of his preferences and those on the left for so-called green projects. The answer to our energy problems is staring us in the fucking face. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times. Elections have consequences and stolen elections have catastrophic consequences.
I'm getting a little tired of the ever widening net that the January 6th committee investigating the "insurrection" at our country's capitol on January 6th, 2021 seems to want to throw out there. Now, they want the visitor logs from the time that Trump was in office. Is nothing fucking sacred anymore? You know that every damn thing they get they leak out to the media. Anything and everything is fair game when it comes to destroying Trump and anyone associated with either him or his movement. Oh, I can't wait until we conservatives take back the House this coming November. You ain't seen nothing yet, baby cakes. We're going to haul every last one of the Bidenista's in front of a committee and then we'll put the lot of them behind bars. It's a process. Let's get this damn party started!
Temperatures are going to be in the sixties today so that will be nice. I'll have to seriously dress down when I take my bike ride. Will I put on some shorts? Maybe. Will I put away the winter gloves? Probably. The days are getting longer hereabouts this time of the year and the sun is noticeably higher in the sky day in and day out. It has a coming-out-of-hibernation feel to it and that is to be celebrated. I'm reminded that we are still in the month of February so I'll need to temper whatever it is that seems to be bubbling up beneath the surface. I'm the surfer who has caught a wave just right but I also know that it won't last so I gird myself appropriately. Baby steps, Johnny Boy.
Maybe we'll stop by Trader Joe's today when the missus and I are out and about. We visited the store last week and I think I commented on how some of the shelves looked noticeably less well stocked than on previous visits. It reminded us that all of those supply chain issues that we'd been hearing so much about were maybe finally coming to the stores in our neighborhood. Funny thing is, I've not noticed it in other stores hereabouts. Is it the proverbial canary in the coal mine or does it have something to do specifically with Trader Joe's? Does it have anything to do with the Canadian trucker thing up Canada way? Is Trader Joe's a Canadian company?
Every time I see depleted stocks on grocery store shelves, all I can think about is how I can go about stocking up so we'll have what we need if things go south. I'm not to the point where I'm willing to consider buying survival kits with dried foodstuffs but it's certainly not out of the question. Truth be told, I'm always behind the eight ball when these kinds of things happen. I'm just a day late and a dollar short. The damage has been done, the orders have been placed, my order is one of ten thousand which may or may not get filled, and I'm left holding the fucking bag. I don't think that will ever change. You know, the leopard and the spots thing.
The missus and I did agree that we'll stop in to Trader Joe's from time to time to see what, if anything, changes for the better. If things go from bad to worse, then we can start to think about stocking up on some things. Today, we'll be looking for walnuts. They were on my list the last time I was at Trader Joe's. They usually have quite a good assortment of nuts so when they had few to none that got my attention. It will be one of many errands we run today. It wouldn't hurt to see if there isn't something there for Mrs G. Maybe a nice potted plant. They usually have a nice selection of flowers so anything that might brighten up Mrs G's day will suffice.
Did I mention that the state to the south of us, Massachusetts, is working on making it possible for illegal aliens to get driver's license? We know those mother fuckers are already out and about on our roads and highways driving with either no license or maybe a fake license. Making it all legal ain't the answer. If you were an illegal alien swimming across the Rio Grande in an attempt to get into the United States, where would you head when you reached our shores? Would you go to a state that puts illegal aliens in jail? Or, would you head for a state that gives you a drivers license, free housing, food stamps, free health care and education for your bambino's, and encourages you to send for your extended family still mired in abject poverty back in the barrios? It's a no-brainer.
You have to ask yourself, what the hell is some politician thinking putting a bill like this on the damn roster? What benefit to the state and their constituencies does a bill like this serve? Who in their fucking right mind thinks that increasing or encouraging the increase in the number of illegal aliens in their state is a good thing? I understand that the insurance companies like it. It means more customers and a larger pool of monies from which to pay claims. Like everything else in our country today, the devil is in the details. It helps to cement the democrat's hold on power in the state when you also pass laws enabling "citizens" with driver's licenses to vote. What gringo or gring-ess is going to vote for a Republican when the Democrats are bending over backwards giving them everything for free? It's the very definition of a welfare state and, yes, the democrats have figured that out.
I'm still trying to get in a bit of a groove here some four days into this upcoming Sunday's blog post. It looks like this trucker thing in Canada is coming to a head. Trudeau is moving ahead with his martial law nonsense and arrests and confiscations are in the news. He's a real Castro boy, don't you think? A soy boy that you never thought had the intestinal fortitude to go ahead with his marital law thing. The picture that stands out in my mind when it comes to this thug is his taking a knee with the Black Lives Matter rioters and protestors a couple of years back. So, when he agrees with the protestors, he's joining their ranks in the streets. When he doesn't, he's going full totalitarian. Is there a Tiananmen Square in Ottawa? Siri, how can I contribute to the truckers?
Trudeau is confiscating bank accounts, intimidating anyone and everyone who contributed so much as a dime to the truckers, rounding up and arresting the so-called leaders of this protect movement, and doing all of it without the consent of what might be their parliament for lack of a better term. I'm not a Canadian so forgive me if I get some of these labels and terms wrong. He's going fucking rogue. There's no other way to say it. The part that is gnawing away at me, forgetting for a moment that protesting this and that in the public square used to be acceptable in a civilized society, is that bumbling Joey Biden put him up to all of this. That makes Joey complicit. Just add it to the growing list of grievances that we the American people have against this illegitimate president.
If I understand what's really happening up there in Canada, a number of provinces are removing, or have removed, any and all restrictions when it comes to Covid-19. None of that matters to the Trudeau government. He's doubling and tripling down. You need to understand. These are tactics that you might see in China where the Chinese Communists roll over any and all protestors. If the Canadian people don't rise up and push back against this tyranny being imposed by Trudeau then it's all over. The truckers are protesting the mandates that have already been lifted in many provinces so it shouldn't be a heavy lift for the soy boy to do the right thing. Maybe he enjoys welding power too much. When that happens, it's high time for he and his minions to be shown the door. Right this way, sir.
Maybe I should be more concerned with the fact that there are people in Canada who agree with Trudeau. The ends justify the means. They want government to be the final arbitor. The government can do no wrong. The pissants protesting in the public square deserve to be rounded up and flogged or maybe sent away to a reeducation camp until they come around to the government's way of thinking. It's a special form of despotism that has no place in a modern day democracy. These very same people fail to understand that giving over their rights to a tyrant has an erosive effect on the very democracy that they purport to support and encourage. Sorry, don't mean to go all founding fathers on you here. It's just me being me again.
"I don't think I'll be cooking liver and onions for you any time soon, but I certainly could", I was telling Mrs G during our visit yesterday. She was telling us that her facility never serves liver and onions and the next time she gets a chance to put in a request for same she will be doing so. I'm paraphrasing, of course. She also lamented the fact that they only served lobster twice a year during the summer months and that too didn't seem to be often enough for her tastes. I was astounded to hear Mrs G say that in her five years, going on six years now, at her facility she never once cooked a meal in her kitchen. You know, using the oven and not the microwave. Her microwave gets plenty of use.
"Oh, and Johnny Boy, would you be good enough to pick me up another case of root beer", Mrs G asked. "Of course, Mrs G", I responded. "I'd be happy to." "Will you remind me again, am I looking for caffeine free or is it the sugar free variety?" I can never remember. Honestly. I need to write this stuff down. Taking pictures helps too. I mentioned to the missus after our visit that it wouldn't kill us to stop by now and then with maybe a lobster roll in tow. The liver and onions thing would be more complicated. We could take her out to a restaurant if we could find one that serves liver and onions but that too could be a challenge. Who goes out to dinner these days anyway with Covid still just a sneeze away? Quite frankly, it's asking for trouble.
We got on to the subject somehow of one of her neighbors at her facility who has trouble reading the names on the meals delivered to the main area right down the hall from her apartment. With the scarcity of help being what it is these days, the facility prepares the pre-ordered meals and bags them up before delivering them to the pick-up spot where the residents can stop by starting around the hour of five in the afternoon. This particular friend of Mrs G's has trouble reading the names on the bags so, consequently, runs the risk of walking off with someone else's meal. Well, as you can imagine, we kicked around a few ideas on how to solve that problem. More grist for the mill as they say.
On The Brink
13/02/22 07:06
I'm trying to reconcile this Russia business. Russia has mobilized troops up and down their eastern border in what most fear is a pre-planned invasion of Ukraine. It seems to me that NATO is sending some very mixed messages when it comes to what they intend to do if Russia goes forward with an invasion of their neighbor. On one hand, the individual nations of NATO are threatening to impose sanctions designed to cripple the Russian economy. One the other hand, each of the NATO countries is sending troops and equipment to the area. So, which is it? Sanctions? Or, a ground war with Russia?
Is the beefing up of troops and equipment in the adjoining NATO countries supposed to be a deterrent of sorts? Putin knows that NATO is unlikely to engage his country in a ground war so he should feel somewhat emboldened to go ahead with his invasion. I think not a day goes by when Putin isn't doing something to continue with his buildup be it positioning of naval ships in the Black Sea or sending sorties over the area. Putin would tell you that the buildup is in response to the buildup of NATO forces. Is it any wonder that Putin sat down with Xi of China this past week? Alliances matter.
I don't know how it's all going to turn out but it seems odd that in this day and age we would see one nation invade another sovereign nation in a bid to add to its territory. I suppose it's just a matter of time now before China makes a move on Taiwan. With social media being what it is, I wonder what we'll be exposed to day in and day out with either of these skirmishes. War is ugly and the people waging the wars are likely to not want any of it hitting the nightly news. Would it surprise anyone to know that the high tech titans are already planning to black-out the nastiness of it all?
I'm finding a number of people posting on Twitter who are reporting from in and around the area. They are posting videos, maps, and pictures of military equipment and placement of same. It's hard to know how much of what I'm looking at is true or just plain poppycock. Some of these posts may be nothing more than an effort to deceive rather than educate. It does leave me feeling more connected so there's that. It's also giving me more than the pablum dished out on the nightly news media here in the United States although the drums of war beat loudly on behalf of the Industrial Military Complex on those very same networks. For now, I can only characterize the coverage as schizophrenic since Putin has yet to "decide" what he's going to do. To invade or not to invade. That is the question.
Does anyone really believe that Putin is just waiting for the Winter Olympics to end in Beijing before he starts his invasion? That's the rumor anyway. Chairman Xi wants all eyes on his country's hosting of these games and Putin's waging war would likely upset that apple cart. That would not make Xi and the Communist Chinese Party (CCP) happy. They have far too much invested in these games to allow something as egregiously distracting as a hot ground war to get in the way. I would imagine that Xi wants the same consideration from Putin when he decides to invade Taiwan. I can hear him now. "Wrap up that damn war and do it now." "We need to get this done before Trump gets back into office."
The Ev man left his car here last week and he's showing no particular inclination to come and pick it up. We have it stored in the garage so I think he feels good about that fact. He also mentioned to me that he has enough food in the house to get by for a while. In other words he doesn't need his car to frequent his usual fast food restaurants. Is there a more concerning issue with his not wanting to have his car at his home? The missus is just as curious as I about this latest development but it all goes away the minute he returns to pick up his car. And yes, I mentioned to him that his WeatherTec mats arrived in the mail. His response (text)? "Nice!"
It occurred to me that if he was looking out his fourth floor window at his parking lot below that was iced over that he might assume that the roads out and about would be similarly icy and difficult. He would be wrong, of course. Just as we would be wrong were we to look out our window onto our little side street and assume, wrongly again, that the main roads in town were just as nasty. I never had this conversation with him since he's probably not so insulated that he buys into what I'm thinking when I'm looking for reasons as to why he might not want his car sitting in his own parking lot. I don't think any of this has anything to do with his not wanting to drive anymore or maybe less. That would be a horse of an entirely different color.
I'm happy to have my talk radio guy back on the morning talk show circuit after his bad bout with Covid. I do wish that he would talk less about Covid, mask mandates, Canadian Truckers, etc. and maybe get into the Russian invasion thing a little more. I think he was born in Canada but he's of Croatian heritage so I'm surprised he's not carrying a torch for his fellow Europeans in this dangerous gambit by the Russians. He's no fan of Biden and God only knows that Biden is not the leader the world needs at a time like this. Leaving the diplomacy to "leaders" like Macron of France and other European miscreants is a recipe for disaster. Putin has respect for none of them (Biden included.)
I'm listening to the melifluous voice of Jonathan Antoine this morning. I saw this fella for the first time on Youtube when he was a contestant on Britain's Got Talent in 2012. He was seventeen at the time and he came on stage with "Charlotte" as the "Charlotte and Jonathan" duo. I can't even describe the impact that he had on the judges and the audience after completing their song. I was an instant fan. Simon Cowell's response was a "wow! wow! wow!." You could tell that not even he was expecting to hear what he heard. "You are a future star", Cowell continued. I'm not a touchy feely kinda guy, but his music touches me. "Charlotte was good", according to Simon, but "Jonathan was "unbelievable." Indeed.
Acoustics aside, Jonathan Antoine showed up on the stage of Britain's Got Talent sporting a Jimi Hendrix tee shirt and looking every bit of the maybe three hundred pound basement dweller that he was. The only reason he showed up on stage, according to Jonathan, was because his friends Charlotte talked him into going with her. Simon Cowell even made a disparaging remark to one of his fellow judges in a bit of a sidebar after seeing Jonathan walk on stage ostensibly due to his size and his somewhat unkempt appearance. Expectations couldn't have been lower. And then the music started. The rest is history.
What the heck is going on north of the border up there in Canada with the truckers? I'm only catching bits and pieces of the news but it seems to have something to do with the Covid restrictions and the public's yearning or maybe demanding that they be curtailed or done away with all together. I should be interested in it for no other reason than it is the perfect David and Goliath tale. I don't have any sense as to what any of it looks like or what the net impact of a miles-long truck convoy stalled inconveniently in and around the city streets of Canada's might produce. Is it safe to say that it has the attention of the constabulary and the government officials thereabouts? You betcha.
I see very little of it on my Twitter feed and that should tell me something. It tells me that someone doesn't want me to see what's going on and, perhaps more to the point, they don't want people like me piling on and maybe giving these truckers support or words or encouragement. All of which, I would hasten to add, I would be more than willing to do. Like anyone else I like a good David vs Goliath story. The fact that Goliath in this instance is a far left government who maybe could use a bitch slap now and then, I say the more the merrier. If they can effectively neutralize or oust the Trudeau fella they would be doing the citizenry in that country a favor. It would be yuge!
Is it any coincidence that I'm now starting to hear and see stories about the relaxation of Covid related restrictions in blue states here in the United States? Are they trying to avert the same shit show with the truckers that has brought Canada to its knees? This is a mid term election year here in the United States and I'm quite sure that this is the last thing Bumbles Biden and his party of leftists need. With the pandemic seemingly now in the rear view mirror, the usual purveyors of panic porn (CNN, MSNBC) have sensed a change in the public's perception of the virus and are stepping back from their role as cheerleaders for the CDC. Nobody's buying their bullshit any more.
I do think that Biden and his minions would like nothing more than to have a war to take the public's eyes off the usual array of problems that they have in fact themselves created. You know, a conflict of sorts that allows the Commander-in-Chief to beat his chest and something that all American's will get behind if history is any example. Well, Vietnam might have been an exception. Generally speaking, the public is supposed to have their President's back when it comes to fighting a good fight and defending our values in faraway lands. Just reading the tea leaves here, but Biden might just get that war he wants. The bloom likely comes off the rose the minute the caskets start flying into Dover, Delaware.
I signed up for a month of free music from Apple. After a months time Apple charges $9.99 a month for the service. I have plenty of music to listen to without paying Apple a ten-spot for gaining access to their music libraries. I've never liked these "pay a nominal fee every month" kind of deals. The next thing you know you're racking up some serious charges every month without realizing it. It's the old nickel and diming you scheme. It's just pennies a day, they say. Well, that adds up, doesn't it. How about those Tunnels to Towers ads on the telly where they bring out the war heroes with missing limbs? It's just $19.99 a month, Mark Wahlberg tells you. It's pathetic.
I don't mind making the missus her latte every day but I'm getting to the point where I need her to make her own latte. What am I anyway? Her personal barista? She tells me that she wants to have it at 2 o'clock. She tells me that she wants it not a minute sooner and not a minute later. Well, maybe I'd rather be doing something else at 2 o'clock. Maybe I'd rather not feel as though my afternoon is not my own when I have to be brewing her beverage of choice at the time of her choosing. I'm not so resentful that I've stopped offering my services but I have started to give her a lesson or two on what to do if and when she wants a nice latte and I'm not around to make it for her. One lesson does not a barista make. C'mon now, it's easy peasy.
This mid-term election thing is coming down the pike and it's coming down the pike fast. It's almost March now and time it running out for the democrats. Biden's poll numbers in the average of all polls has now dipped into the 30's. That spells disaster for the democrats in the mid-term elections coming in November. I think the number of democrats who are retiring after this term is now maybe 30 or more compared to a much lesser number of candidates on the republican side of the aisle. I don't know that this January 6th insurrection bullshit is going to turn republicans away from the voting booth and I don't know that calling republicans racists really works any more. Is referring to republicans who dare to speak their mind as "domestic terrorists" really the hill they want to die on?
Their latest line of attack, and it's a coordinated effort by the democrats, is to spin the narrative that the Republican Party is "imploding." If the republicans are eating their own then the democrats simply need to step aside and let that happen. Fact of the matter is, the Republican Party is on the same page when it comes to ousting the weakest president in the history of our great republic. Ousting this mother is more of necessity than anything else considering the damage he's doing with every passing day in office. There is only one republican candidate who can take on that task and turn it all around. That would be, wait for it, one Donald J Trump. In November of this year, we (republicans) take back the House. Come November 2024, we take back the presidency.
I'm really astounded at how often the liberal media open their nightly newscasts and shows with something on Donald J Trump. Do they know how ridiculous and repetitive they sound? When I see that, I'm clicking around until I get to a channel that isn't talking about Donald J Trump. I think I'm not alone. I wonder if they think that spinning their Trump theories and conspiracies day in and day out will somehow convince those hard core Trumpists to leave the cult (their word, not mine) of Trump. It's more likely that the leftists who hang on every word coming out of the mouths of these talking heads will, god willing, be more energized than ever come Election Day to come out and vote. With their president's poll number in the thirties, you need to pull out every stop if you're a leftist.
Come to think of it, I'm thinking that this whole January 6th Committee thing going on in our nation's capitol is designed to provide a drip-drip-drip of everything Trump to the news media night in and night out between now and the mid term elections. Yes, it's designed to paint Trump as a cult leader and not worthy of ever being the president of the United States again but the hope on the part of the leftists is that some of the Trump stench will rub off on the people he is supporting in the upcoming midterm elections. It's the old kill-two-birds-with-one-stone trick. These mother fuckers are devious.
I have to laugh. Netflix has this show on the telly about serial murderers. It's not bad but the focus of the 30 minute shows is more about how they catch the killers than it is how or why the killers do what they do. I guess there's only so much you can cover in 30 minutes. Anyway, the missus isn't all that much into cold case shows the way I am so she didn't want to watch that particular show last night. "Oh, okay", I said. "Let's watch the Nordic thriller that involves time travel, Jack the Ripper, and a terrific cast of detectives who are trying to make sense of it all." Its makes perfect sense. The show is called "beforeigners" and we're on season two. Yes, it's about serial killers. Well, one in particular anyway. As Larry David says, "it's pretty, pretty, pretty good." I think the missus agrees.
Did I mention that the missus and I went into our local Trader Joe's store yesterday to pick up a few things? I was looking for walnuts, in particular. I haven't been able to find them anywhere. What the bejesus is that all about? I know we have supply chain issues but do walnuts come from China? Maybe not all supply chain issues are related to China. Anyway, we noticed that there were a whole lot of shelves that were scarcely stocked or not stocked at all. It seemed product specific. Packaged nuts were in short supply but fresh produce and dairy products were plentiful. Their frozen foods were in pretty good shape while their canned goods, not so much. All I could think of is that this isn't going to end well. If the run on toilet paper during the Covid crisis is any indication, we'll need to saddle up. This is going to get worse before it gets better. A lot worse.
Maybe the defining issue for the democrats in the upcoming mid term elections won't be what Trump did or didn't do while he sat in the White House during the January 6th riots in our nation's capitol. It won't be the raging crime that we see on the streets in our major cities and towns across the fruited plains. It won't be the fact that Biden and his minions opened up our borders to 3 plus million of the world's migrants to infest our cities and lay waste to our nation's resources. It won't have anything to do with the fact that Biden turned our energy dependent nation into a nation dependent on the goodwill of tyrannical energy power houses in faraway lands. It will be all about, wait for it, inflation.
The price of everything is going up. People are feeling the pinch wherever they go. When you have to pay $10 for a pound of hamburger that cost $5-$6 a pound just a month ago, that's a problem. Maybe it forces people to go shopping sooner than they otherwise would just to avoid the escalating prices at the register. How do families with children cope? Do they have less to eat? The prices of used cars are up some 40% so that has to hurt. Never mind what the Fed will now have to do when it comes to dealing with the 7.5% inflation. Quite simply, they will have to stop printing money and start raising interest rates. That will bring a whole new level of pain to people who are already in pain. Oh, and if you just got a 5% raise, you're still behind the eight ball by 2 percentage points.
Maybe now we're starting to understand why Biden and his Administration need this war with Russia. It's truly a wag-the-dog situation. Look over there, not over here. His sycophants in the media will gladly replace bad headlines about Biden's sheer incompetence when it comes to dealing with inflation, drugs, crime, illegal aliens, etc with news from the front lines wherever the war is being waged. The sooner, the better as far as the Bidenista's are concerned. Russia's conflict with Ukraine couldn't have come along at a more providential time. Bailing Biden out of his political woes may not have been in the cards when Vlad cooked this all up, but Biden owes Vlad a solid for providing just the right distraction at just the right time. And you thought Bumbling Joe would be too demented to take advantage of this opportunity. Think again.
Is the beefing up of troops and equipment in the adjoining NATO countries supposed to be a deterrent of sorts? Putin knows that NATO is unlikely to engage his country in a ground war so he should feel somewhat emboldened to go ahead with his invasion. I think not a day goes by when Putin isn't doing something to continue with his buildup be it positioning of naval ships in the Black Sea or sending sorties over the area. Putin would tell you that the buildup is in response to the buildup of NATO forces. Is it any wonder that Putin sat down with Xi of China this past week? Alliances matter.
I don't know how it's all going to turn out but it seems odd that in this day and age we would see one nation invade another sovereign nation in a bid to add to its territory. I suppose it's just a matter of time now before China makes a move on Taiwan. With social media being what it is, I wonder what we'll be exposed to day in and day out with either of these skirmishes. War is ugly and the people waging the wars are likely to not want any of it hitting the nightly news. Would it surprise anyone to know that the high tech titans are already planning to black-out the nastiness of it all?
I'm finding a number of people posting on Twitter who are reporting from in and around the area. They are posting videos, maps, and pictures of military equipment and placement of same. It's hard to know how much of what I'm looking at is true or just plain poppycock. Some of these posts may be nothing more than an effort to deceive rather than educate. It does leave me feeling more connected so there's that. It's also giving me more than the pablum dished out on the nightly news media here in the United States although the drums of war beat loudly on behalf of the Industrial Military Complex on those very same networks. For now, I can only characterize the coverage as schizophrenic since Putin has yet to "decide" what he's going to do. To invade or not to invade. That is the question.
Does anyone really believe that Putin is just waiting for the Winter Olympics to end in Beijing before he starts his invasion? That's the rumor anyway. Chairman Xi wants all eyes on his country's hosting of these games and Putin's waging war would likely upset that apple cart. That would not make Xi and the Communist Chinese Party (CCP) happy. They have far too much invested in these games to allow something as egregiously distracting as a hot ground war to get in the way. I would imagine that Xi wants the same consideration from Putin when he decides to invade Taiwan. I can hear him now. "Wrap up that damn war and do it now." "We need to get this done before Trump gets back into office."
The Ev man left his car here last week and he's showing no particular inclination to come and pick it up. We have it stored in the garage so I think he feels good about that fact. He also mentioned to me that he has enough food in the house to get by for a while. In other words he doesn't need his car to frequent his usual fast food restaurants. Is there a more concerning issue with his not wanting to have his car at his home? The missus is just as curious as I about this latest development but it all goes away the minute he returns to pick up his car. And yes, I mentioned to him that his WeatherTec mats arrived in the mail. His response (text)? "Nice!"
It occurred to me that if he was looking out his fourth floor window at his parking lot below that was iced over that he might assume that the roads out and about would be similarly icy and difficult. He would be wrong, of course. Just as we would be wrong were we to look out our window onto our little side street and assume, wrongly again, that the main roads in town were just as nasty. I never had this conversation with him since he's probably not so insulated that he buys into what I'm thinking when I'm looking for reasons as to why he might not want his car sitting in his own parking lot. I don't think any of this has anything to do with his not wanting to drive anymore or maybe less. That would be a horse of an entirely different color.
I'm happy to have my talk radio guy back on the morning talk show circuit after his bad bout with Covid. I do wish that he would talk less about Covid, mask mandates, Canadian Truckers, etc. and maybe get into the Russian invasion thing a little more. I think he was born in Canada but he's of Croatian heritage so I'm surprised he's not carrying a torch for his fellow Europeans in this dangerous gambit by the Russians. He's no fan of Biden and God only knows that Biden is not the leader the world needs at a time like this. Leaving the diplomacy to "leaders" like Macron of France and other European miscreants is a recipe for disaster. Putin has respect for none of them (Biden included.)
I'm listening to the melifluous voice of Jonathan Antoine this morning. I saw this fella for the first time on Youtube when he was a contestant on Britain's Got Talent in 2012. He was seventeen at the time and he came on stage with "Charlotte" as the "Charlotte and Jonathan" duo. I can't even describe the impact that he had on the judges and the audience after completing their song. I was an instant fan. Simon Cowell's response was a "wow! wow! wow!." You could tell that not even he was expecting to hear what he heard. "You are a future star", Cowell continued. I'm not a touchy feely kinda guy, but his music touches me. "Charlotte was good", according to Simon, but "Jonathan was "unbelievable." Indeed.
Acoustics aside, Jonathan Antoine showed up on the stage of Britain's Got Talent sporting a Jimi Hendrix tee shirt and looking every bit of the maybe three hundred pound basement dweller that he was. The only reason he showed up on stage, according to Jonathan, was because his friends Charlotte talked him into going with her. Simon Cowell even made a disparaging remark to one of his fellow judges in a bit of a sidebar after seeing Jonathan walk on stage ostensibly due to his size and his somewhat unkempt appearance. Expectations couldn't have been lower. And then the music started. The rest is history.
What the heck is going on north of the border up there in Canada with the truckers? I'm only catching bits and pieces of the news but it seems to have something to do with the Covid restrictions and the public's yearning or maybe demanding that they be curtailed or done away with all together. I should be interested in it for no other reason than it is the perfect David and Goliath tale. I don't have any sense as to what any of it looks like or what the net impact of a miles-long truck convoy stalled inconveniently in and around the city streets of Canada's might produce. Is it safe to say that it has the attention of the constabulary and the government officials thereabouts? You betcha.
I see very little of it on my Twitter feed and that should tell me something. It tells me that someone doesn't want me to see what's going on and, perhaps more to the point, they don't want people like me piling on and maybe giving these truckers support or words or encouragement. All of which, I would hasten to add, I would be more than willing to do. Like anyone else I like a good David vs Goliath story. The fact that Goliath in this instance is a far left government who maybe could use a bitch slap now and then, I say the more the merrier. If they can effectively neutralize or oust the Trudeau fella they would be doing the citizenry in that country a favor. It would be yuge!
Is it any coincidence that I'm now starting to hear and see stories about the relaxation of Covid related restrictions in blue states here in the United States? Are they trying to avert the same shit show with the truckers that has brought Canada to its knees? This is a mid term election year here in the United States and I'm quite sure that this is the last thing Bumbles Biden and his party of leftists need. With the pandemic seemingly now in the rear view mirror, the usual purveyors of panic porn (CNN, MSNBC) have sensed a change in the public's perception of the virus and are stepping back from their role as cheerleaders for the CDC. Nobody's buying their bullshit any more.
I do think that Biden and his minions would like nothing more than to have a war to take the public's eyes off the usual array of problems that they have in fact themselves created. You know, a conflict of sorts that allows the Commander-in-Chief to beat his chest and something that all American's will get behind if history is any example. Well, Vietnam might have been an exception. Generally speaking, the public is supposed to have their President's back when it comes to fighting a good fight and defending our values in faraway lands. Just reading the tea leaves here, but Biden might just get that war he wants. The bloom likely comes off the rose the minute the caskets start flying into Dover, Delaware.
I signed up for a month of free music from Apple. After a months time Apple charges $9.99 a month for the service. I have plenty of music to listen to without paying Apple a ten-spot for gaining access to their music libraries. I've never liked these "pay a nominal fee every month" kind of deals. The next thing you know you're racking up some serious charges every month without realizing it. It's the old nickel and diming you scheme. It's just pennies a day, they say. Well, that adds up, doesn't it. How about those Tunnels to Towers ads on the telly where they bring out the war heroes with missing limbs? It's just $19.99 a month, Mark Wahlberg tells you. It's pathetic.
I don't mind making the missus her latte every day but I'm getting to the point where I need her to make her own latte. What am I anyway? Her personal barista? She tells me that she wants to have it at 2 o'clock. She tells me that she wants it not a minute sooner and not a minute later. Well, maybe I'd rather be doing something else at 2 o'clock. Maybe I'd rather not feel as though my afternoon is not my own when I have to be brewing her beverage of choice at the time of her choosing. I'm not so resentful that I've stopped offering my services but I have started to give her a lesson or two on what to do if and when she wants a nice latte and I'm not around to make it for her. One lesson does not a barista make. C'mon now, it's easy peasy.
This mid-term election thing is coming down the pike and it's coming down the pike fast. It's almost March now and time it running out for the democrats. Biden's poll numbers in the average of all polls has now dipped into the 30's. That spells disaster for the democrats in the mid-term elections coming in November. I think the number of democrats who are retiring after this term is now maybe 30 or more compared to a much lesser number of candidates on the republican side of the aisle. I don't know that this January 6th insurrection bullshit is going to turn republicans away from the voting booth and I don't know that calling republicans racists really works any more. Is referring to republicans who dare to speak their mind as "domestic terrorists" really the hill they want to die on?
Their latest line of attack, and it's a coordinated effort by the democrats, is to spin the narrative that the Republican Party is "imploding." If the republicans are eating their own then the democrats simply need to step aside and let that happen. Fact of the matter is, the Republican Party is on the same page when it comes to ousting the weakest president in the history of our great republic. Ousting this mother is more of necessity than anything else considering the damage he's doing with every passing day in office. There is only one republican candidate who can take on that task and turn it all around. That would be, wait for it, one Donald J Trump. In November of this year, we (republicans) take back the House. Come November 2024, we take back the presidency.
I'm really astounded at how often the liberal media open their nightly newscasts and shows with something on Donald J Trump. Do they know how ridiculous and repetitive they sound? When I see that, I'm clicking around until I get to a channel that isn't talking about Donald J Trump. I think I'm not alone. I wonder if they think that spinning their Trump theories and conspiracies day in and day out will somehow convince those hard core Trumpists to leave the cult (their word, not mine) of Trump. It's more likely that the leftists who hang on every word coming out of the mouths of these talking heads will, god willing, be more energized than ever come Election Day to come out and vote. With their president's poll number in the thirties, you need to pull out every stop if you're a leftist.
Come to think of it, I'm thinking that this whole January 6th Committee thing going on in our nation's capitol is designed to provide a drip-drip-drip of everything Trump to the news media night in and night out between now and the mid term elections. Yes, it's designed to paint Trump as a cult leader and not worthy of ever being the president of the United States again but the hope on the part of the leftists is that some of the Trump stench will rub off on the people he is supporting in the upcoming midterm elections. It's the old kill-two-birds-with-one-stone trick. These mother fuckers are devious.
I have to laugh. Netflix has this show on the telly about serial murderers. It's not bad but the focus of the 30 minute shows is more about how they catch the killers than it is how or why the killers do what they do. I guess there's only so much you can cover in 30 minutes. Anyway, the missus isn't all that much into cold case shows the way I am so she didn't want to watch that particular show last night. "Oh, okay", I said. "Let's watch the Nordic thriller that involves time travel, Jack the Ripper, and a terrific cast of detectives who are trying to make sense of it all." Its makes perfect sense. The show is called "beforeigners" and we're on season two. Yes, it's about serial killers. Well, one in particular anyway. As Larry David says, "it's pretty, pretty, pretty good." I think the missus agrees.
Did I mention that the missus and I went into our local Trader Joe's store yesterday to pick up a few things? I was looking for walnuts, in particular. I haven't been able to find them anywhere. What the bejesus is that all about? I know we have supply chain issues but do walnuts come from China? Maybe not all supply chain issues are related to China. Anyway, we noticed that there were a whole lot of shelves that were scarcely stocked or not stocked at all. It seemed product specific. Packaged nuts were in short supply but fresh produce and dairy products were plentiful. Their frozen foods were in pretty good shape while their canned goods, not so much. All I could think of is that this isn't going to end well. If the run on toilet paper during the Covid crisis is any indication, we'll need to saddle up. This is going to get worse before it gets better. A lot worse.
Maybe the defining issue for the democrats in the upcoming mid term elections won't be what Trump did or didn't do while he sat in the White House during the January 6th riots in our nation's capitol. It won't be the raging crime that we see on the streets in our major cities and towns across the fruited plains. It won't be the fact that Biden and his minions opened up our borders to 3 plus million of the world's migrants to infest our cities and lay waste to our nation's resources. It won't have anything to do with the fact that Biden turned our energy dependent nation into a nation dependent on the goodwill of tyrannical energy power houses in faraway lands. It will be all about, wait for it, inflation.
The price of everything is going up. People are feeling the pinch wherever they go. When you have to pay $10 for a pound of hamburger that cost $5-$6 a pound just a month ago, that's a problem. Maybe it forces people to go shopping sooner than they otherwise would just to avoid the escalating prices at the register. How do families with children cope? Do they have less to eat? The prices of used cars are up some 40% so that has to hurt. Never mind what the Fed will now have to do when it comes to dealing with the 7.5% inflation. Quite simply, they will have to stop printing money and start raising interest rates. That will bring a whole new level of pain to people who are already in pain. Oh, and if you just got a 5% raise, you're still behind the eight ball by 2 percentage points.
Maybe now we're starting to understand why Biden and his Administration need this war with Russia. It's truly a wag-the-dog situation. Look over there, not over here. His sycophants in the media will gladly replace bad headlines about Biden's sheer incompetence when it comes to dealing with inflation, drugs, crime, illegal aliens, etc with news from the front lines wherever the war is being waged. The sooner, the better as far as the Bidenista's are concerned. Russia's conflict with Ukraine couldn't have come along at a more providential time. Bailing Biden out of his political woes may not have been in the cards when Vlad cooked this all up, but Biden owes Vlad a solid for providing just the right distraction at just the right time. And you thought Bumbling Joe would be too demented to take advantage of this opportunity. Think again.
Ray of Sunshine
06/02/22 07:13
We've had a few cold mornings here along the coast. It's around zero degrees this morning. I don't think it got out of the teens yesterday. That's a good thing because it made for an easier time in dealing with the cleanup of the 13.5 inches of snow that fell on Saturday. Once the temperatures warm up, the snow starts to get a bit dense, heavier, and harder to move around. I have a little more work to do today to get snow off of our roof but then I'll be done. Until the next storm moves in, that is.
I've got a little Neil Young on tap this morning. I don't much care for his politics but his music is pretty good. I have fond memories of his album back in the day entitled "Harvest." Maybe it was "Harvest Moon." I love these musicians who profit handsomely in our capitalist society but otherwise decry the very same capitalist system that makes them rich beyond their wildest dreams. In case you're keeping track, that's a fucking hypocrite by any other definition. And what is this latest kerfuffle or row that he has with Joe Rogan and Spotify?
I'm not a podcast guy so I just want to get that on the record. This Rogan fella apparently has a podcast that gets a lot of buzz because of his positions on covid and maybe some other hot topics of the day. Spotify, which I also have nothing to do with and know nothing about, is maybe an online music repository available to the masses for a price? I do know that Rogan is anti-vaccine, or maybe just anti-vaccine mandate, and when he came down with the dreaded Covid-19 he fought it off with some well known therapeutics such as Ivermectin, etc. Much to the chagrin of the left wing media, he survived and lived to talk about it.
So, I guess that these pro-vaccine freaks like Neil Young and others of his ilk who also have their music libraries on Spotify, want Spotify to ban Rogan for his anti-whatever stance. It's just more cancel culture bullshit by the leftists. I don't know what this means or doesn't mean to Rogan. Is he only on Spotify? If it doesn't kill him, does it make him stronger? Maybe it's just another high tech lynching. You know how they love to silence voices that they don't agree with. I still have no plans to listen to any of his podcasts since I don't do podcasts. Maybe I'm just old fashion but I'll take a good book over a podcast any day of the week. That's just me.
Trump had a rally in Texas over the weekend. By all accounts, it was a massive rally. I watched a few minutes of it but not much more. I've heard it all before. He's a bit repetitive and that's probably to be expected since we're all very familiar with the many themes that have dominated both his campaign and the body politic since he came down the escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president. He did say something about were he to win the presidency again that he would consider pardoning the January 6th "rioters." I only know this because it triggered the media like nobody's business. Trump would tell you that bad press is better than no press at all so there's that.
To be honest, I think I just tuned in to the rally to lay eyes on him. How does he look? Is he in fighting shape? Does he look like he's up to the task of running again? How does he sound? Are his old themes sounding old and maybe a little tired? He was a breath of fresh air back when he ran in 2016. Is he still a breath of fresh air? Judging by the size of the crowds in attendance, he still has it whatever "it" is. Maybe it's just the ability to draw a crowd on a cold Saturday night in Texas. Maybe that's just enough to get him over the finish line in 2024. It seems likes an eternity between now and then.
The missus and I were talking about the fella on the game show "Jeopardy" the other night. You know, the one who thinks he's a woman. He dresses up as a woman and maybe even prefers to be addressed by his pronoun of choice. Maybe I'm old fashioned but when I see a man sporting a stubble and built like a linebacker, I'm inclined to refer to him as buddy, fella, or maybe mister. The pearl necklace draped around his neckline didn't fool me for a minute. I was doing fine until the missus referred to him as a "she." It was a defining moment. I told her in no uncertain terms that were she to continue to refer to him as a "she", that I would just as soon end the conversation. That's just how I roll.
I'm keeping an eye on this Ukrainian thing as best I can. I'm amused to hear the idiots in the left wing media say time and time again that they don't think that Putin has made up his mind yet when it comes to invading or not invading Ukraine. Here's a guy who has put 150k of his finest troops on the border of Ukraine and you're telling me that he hasn't yet decided what he wants to do? What sort of tomfoolery is that? What idiot came up with those talking points? Yes, I've heard seasoned analysts, including retired generals and soothsayer wannabes, saying it on more than one occasion and on more than one channel. It sounds like something that was cooked up in the West Wing of the White House. It's just wishful thinking. Or, maybe just some garden variety poppycock.
Truth be told, it's right out of the Ron Klain ( Biden's Chief of Staff) cookbook for morons. Designed to elicit what, I don't know. It remains to be seen how far any of the western powers are willing to go if Putin does invade Ukraine. I'm not hearing any country, or NATO for that matter, say that they are willing to put troops in Ukraine to assist in their defense. Most are indicating that they are selling Ukraine weapon systems that they can use to defend themselves but, quite honestly, they are outmanned and outgunned by the superior forces and weaponry of Russia. The only question remaining is just how much blood and treasure Ukraine is willing to expend before bending the knee.
It's all very reminiscent of what transpired in the 1940s when Hitler started his campaign to invade and dominate neighboring countries in Europe. The willingness of some of Europe's leaders back in the day to accede to Hitler's demands only made matters worse for those countries he was looking to invade. One doesn't get the impression that Putin plans to go beyond Ukraine when all is said and done but that may well depend on how hard other European nations push back on the Ukraine issue. If he is looking to reimagine the old U.S.S.R., then Putin may just be getting started. It's a European problem. Right?
I have to laugh. I was watching some coverage of a Saudi official who was paying Biden a visit in the room that the President of the United States always uses when these types come to town. There he was, bumbling Joe in all of his glory looking every bit the demented fool that he is sitting side by side with his guest. It gets worse. Not a word came out of Biden's mouth that he didn't read off a cue card that he held in his hands and looked down at when it was his turn to speak. You can't make this shit up. I was trying to imagine what the Saudi guy must have been thinking of this unbelievable and nonsensical sleight of hand. Who the fuck does Biden think he's fooling?
I don't know how much longer they're going to be able to prop Biden up before he collapses under his own weight. He looks feeble and he sounds feeble minded. I don't think this is what the American people signed up for when they "elected" him to be our president. Is it too much to expect our President to speak in complete sentences and not to take his cues from cards that he carries in his jacket pocket? And then there was the scene in the White House yesterday when he went to take questions from the press in the room and you could hear his handlers telling everyone that it was time to leave. Biden just sat there looking dumbfounded with that stupid Joker-like toothy grin of his probably unaware of what was going on around him.
Are we now supposed to believe the latest polling that shows Biden beating every republican contender come 2024 by a good margin? Say what? He's even beating the generic republican by a good margin? Are you telling me that the majority of the American people would prefer this senile old fuck to a republican who can speak in complete sentences and who wouldn't need a stack of cue cards in his or her coat pocket to get through a question and answer session? I don't believe it. I'm guessing that the American people don't believe it either. They want Biden gone. The sooner, the better.
I'm starting to wonder what the process of getting rid of Biden before his term ends will look like. I think there's a remedy in the Constitution when a president is no longer able to fulfill his duties. I suppose he could just resign. He's lucky in a way that his Vice President, Harris, is viewed even less favorably than he. I think she was put on the ticket for that very reason. Be careful what we wish for. Right? It could work if they were somehow able to get rid of Harris without leaving her so-called constituency high and dry. I can hear them now. You want to do what to the first black female Vice President? Keep in mind that not a day goes by when she doesn't think that this might be her lucky day. Just sayin'.
I got a call from Mrs G yesterday. She was calling from her car. She was apparently on her way over to see Ray, or something like that, and she was having trouble getting her passenger side window to roll up. She said that she had driven into town with the window halfway down and I thought that was a bit strange. She must have really needed to go into town to do whatever it was that she wanted to do. I mean, we're talking February here, folks. I think the temperatures had never gotten out of the 20's when she called. Oh, and then there's that whole "Ray" thing.
Who is this guy? What is going on with the two of them? It's none of my business but he seems to be more important to her with each passing month so maybe we should know more about him? I was telling the missus that it's probably just a matter of time before Mrs G invites him to join the lot of us when we go to pay a visit. The more the merrier, I suppose. He's one of her fellow residents at her independent living facility so what else do we need to know about him? Does it matter one way or another if the two of them are getting on like a couple of teenage lovebirds? It might be more of an adjustment for the missus but I'm more of a go-with-the-flow kinda guy so I'm just throwing that out there. Live and let live?
I remember the time when the missus and I were over to visit Mrs G for our weekly visit and she insisted that we listen to a message that he (Ray) had left on her phone. He sounded a bit intemperate and gruff, and maybe a little rough around the edges, but all in all I can't recall that it made an impression one way or another on the missus and me. I do think that Mrs G is making more of an effort at a minimum to mention his name more frequently so we get used to the idea that he's not going away any time soon. Like I said, it's probably only a matter of time before they'll be sitting side by side on her couch when we go for our visit. If Mrs G is happy, we're happy. That's the bottom line.
As for her passenger-side car window that wouldn't go up, I suggested that she leave the car running and walk around to the other side of the car and try rolling up the window using the controls on the passenger side of the car. It worked like a charm. She had been contemplating having to bring the car back to the station where she had her annual inspection done to have this fixed and that is now no longer necessary thanks to my sage advice. Does it matter that she cannot now control the passenger side window from the drivers side of the car? Probably not, in the scheme of things. That is to say, she can carry on and forget about having to get it fixed.
Johns Hopkin's Hospital released a report the other day on the Covid crap that we've been mired in for the last two years. It was a shot across the bow of the medical establishment. Everything that people have been saying about how useless and ineffective measures like cloth masks, lockdowns, school and business closures, and governmental mandates have proven to be true according to the report.
The medical establishment, and this is me speaking, has been working in concert with governments far and wide to impose tyrannical restrictions from day one back in early 2020. Using the virus as a justification for their governmental over reach when they knew that it was all unnecessary is criminal. Who will be held accountable? It also proves the point that government, left to its own devices, cannot be trusted to have the best interests of its citizenry when push come to shove. One only has to look at the actions of the governments across the planet as they beat their citizens in the streets or lock them down in their efforts to exercise their now complete and tyrannical control over their citizenry.
For those leftist fucks in the media who pushed the vaccines that don't work, and the very same media outlets who used the daily and weekly mortality stats to run people like Donald Trump out of office, maybe it was a "mission accomplished" moment for them. The ends justify the means. And now, those very same outlets have taken down their daily deaths chyrons but continue to call out anyone and everyone with an opposing view as spewing misinformation or, worse yet, disinformation. More revealing is the fact that not one of them, CNN or MSNBC being the main culprits, have said one word about the John's Hopkin's report. And they wonder why vaccination rates are falling like a rock.
What do you make of theirs Facebook fiasco? Facebook (aka Meta) stock plunged 26% the other day. There was something about their earnings that caught the attention of investors and their forward guidance didn't help. This may well be the largest loss of its kind in the annals of the stock market for any one particular stock in the course of a day's trading. I hear that Mark Zuckerberg took a hit to his personal wealth to the tune of some 29 billion dollars. I don't do Facebook but I hear that they are losing subscribers hand over fist. Advertising revenues are drying up and young people have plenty of other options available to them. Can they come back from the abyss? Only time will tell.
It's a sleet-fest out there this morning. I've had a bike ride the last two days so taking a break due to the weather today is not a big deal. In fact, I pushed myself yesterday to get a ride in since I knew today would not be a good day to ride. The rain started in earnest in the late afternoon yesterday and its all turned to sleet now that the temperatures are hovering around zero. It's hard to imagine that we'll see any accumulating snows but we're supposed to get a few inches so we'll see how that goes.
The Ev man left his car in our garage for the duration of the storm. The missus and I dropped him back at his place across town so he could be home when an old friend came to visit. I think he likes the idea of keeping his car out of harms way when storms are in the forecast. He's thrilled that the dealership did such a good job when it came fixing the water leak in his windshield and he's seemingly now more protective than ever when it comes to taking care of his car. He understands only too well the freedom that owning and operating a car represents and it isn't something that he is willing to put in jeopardy if he can help it.
Did I mention that he thinks that they did something else at the dealership that resulted in the car running better than ever? I've gotten behind the wheel a couple of times and although I can't put my finger on it I think I tend to agree with him. Maybe they went ahead and fixed that motor mount thing that they said was broken. I wasn't convinced that it needed fixing based on my conversation with them when they had the car in the shop so I told them not to bother with the fix. Anyhoo, he couldn't happier with the car at the moment. "She'll be here when the storm is over", we assured him.
I'm not sure what to make of it but I've got a bunch of turkeys squabbling in my backyard this morning. It's not unusual to see turkeys around but I've never seen them fighting amongst themselves if that is indeed what I'm seeing. I think "squabbling" is the right word. It was an up tempo gobble-gobble that caught my attention and when I looked out the window they were all chasing each other around in a circle of sorts. They might have been ganging up on one or more of their own but it was a bit difficult to decipher. It was anything but friendly. And then they were gone.
I think it all started a couple of weeks back when I stood outside our garage with the fella who had come over to fix our dryer vent. We were looking at some tracks in the snow that looked suspiciously like tracks that a large cat or a small coyote might make. Yesterday, the missus called me outside to show me the remains in the snow of a half eaten squirrel that a hawk had made a quick meal out of and had maybe been scared off by a passing car before he or she was able to finish its meal.
There was the telltale scattering of fur and blood in concentric circles around the kill site and the half eaten carcass laid some two or three feet away. I suspect that the hawk attempted to fly off with the carcass and dropped it in his or her frenzied flight away from the scene. I'm guessing the bird had had his or her fill since it never did return to finish eating the squirrel. I regret having missed the take-down of the squirrel by the hawk since it was in clear sight of our house. And, how about the deer we're seeing hereabouts as of late? That's a bit unusual and I don't think that the weather has been a factor since we don't have that much snow on the ground. Interesting stuff.
I've got a little Neil Young on tap this morning. I don't much care for his politics but his music is pretty good. I have fond memories of his album back in the day entitled "Harvest." Maybe it was "Harvest Moon." I love these musicians who profit handsomely in our capitalist society but otherwise decry the very same capitalist system that makes them rich beyond their wildest dreams. In case you're keeping track, that's a fucking hypocrite by any other definition. And what is this latest kerfuffle or row that he has with Joe Rogan and Spotify?
I'm not a podcast guy so I just want to get that on the record. This Rogan fella apparently has a podcast that gets a lot of buzz because of his positions on covid and maybe some other hot topics of the day. Spotify, which I also have nothing to do with and know nothing about, is maybe an online music repository available to the masses for a price? I do know that Rogan is anti-vaccine, or maybe just anti-vaccine mandate, and when he came down with the dreaded Covid-19 he fought it off with some well known therapeutics such as Ivermectin, etc. Much to the chagrin of the left wing media, he survived and lived to talk about it.
So, I guess that these pro-vaccine freaks like Neil Young and others of his ilk who also have their music libraries on Spotify, want Spotify to ban Rogan for his anti-whatever stance. It's just more cancel culture bullshit by the leftists. I don't know what this means or doesn't mean to Rogan. Is he only on Spotify? If it doesn't kill him, does it make him stronger? Maybe it's just another high tech lynching. You know how they love to silence voices that they don't agree with. I still have no plans to listen to any of his podcasts since I don't do podcasts. Maybe I'm just old fashion but I'll take a good book over a podcast any day of the week. That's just me.
Trump had a rally in Texas over the weekend. By all accounts, it was a massive rally. I watched a few minutes of it but not much more. I've heard it all before. He's a bit repetitive and that's probably to be expected since we're all very familiar with the many themes that have dominated both his campaign and the body politic since he came down the escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president. He did say something about were he to win the presidency again that he would consider pardoning the January 6th "rioters." I only know this because it triggered the media like nobody's business. Trump would tell you that bad press is better than no press at all so there's that.
To be honest, I think I just tuned in to the rally to lay eyes on him. How does he look? Is he in fighting shape? Does he look like he's up to the task of running again? How does he sound? Are his old themes sounding old and maybe a little tired? He was a breath of fresh air back when he ran in 2016. Is he still a breath of fresh air? Judging by the size of the crowds in attendance, he still has it whatever "it" is. Maybe it's just the ability to draw a crowd on a cold Saturday night in Texas. Maybe that's just enough to get him over the finish line in 2024. It seems likes an eternity between now and then.
The missus and I were talking about the fella on the game show "Jeopardy" the other night. You know, the one who thinks he's a woman. He dresses up as a woman and maybe even prefers to be addressed by his pronoun of choice. Maybe I'm old fashioned but when I see a man sporting a stubble and built like a linebacker, I'm inclined to refer to him as buddy, fella, or maybe mister. The pearl necklace draped around his neckline didn't fool me for a minute. I was doing fine until the missus referred to him as a "she." It was a defining moment. I told her in no uncertain terms that were she to continue to refer to him as a "she", that I would just as soon end the conversation. That's just how I roll.
I'm keeping an eye on this Ukrainian thing as best I can. I'm amused to hear the idiots in the left wing media say time and time again that they don't think that Putin has made up his mind yet when it comes to invading or not invading Ukraine. Here's a guy who has put 150k of his finest troops on the border of Ukraine and you're telling me that he hasn't yet decided what he wants to do? What sort of tomfoolery is that? What idiot came up with those talking points? Yes, I've heard seasoned analysts, including retired generals and soothsayer wannabes, saying it on more than one occasion and on more than one channel. It sounds like something that was cooked up in the West Wing of the White House. It's just wishful thinking. Or, maybe just some garden variety poppycock.
Truth be told, it's right out of the Ron Klain ( Biden's Chief of Staff) cookbook for morons. Designed to elicit what, I don't know. It remains to be seen how far any of the western powers are willing to go if Putin does invade Ukraine. I'm not hearing any country, or NATO for that matter, say that they are willing to put troops in Ukraine to assist in their defense. Most are indicating that they are selling Ukraine weapon systems that they can use to defend themselves but, quite honestly, they are outmanned and outgunned by the superior forces and weaponry of Russia. The only question remaining is just how much blood and treasure Ukraine is willing to expend before bending the knee.
It's all very reminiscent of what transpired in the 1940s when Hitler started his campaign to invade and dominate neighboring countries in Europe. The willingness of some of Europe's leaders back in the day to accede to Hitler's demands only made matters worse for those countries he was looking to invade. One doesn't get the impression that Putin plans to go beyond Ukraine when all is said and done but that may well depend on how hard other European nations push back on the Ukraine issue. If he is looking to reimagine the old U.S.S.R., then Putin may just be getting started. It's a European problem. Right?
I have to laugh. I was watching some coverage of a Saudi official who was paying Biden a visit in the room that the President of the United States always uses when these types come to town. There he was, bumbling Joe in all of his glory looking every bit the demented fool that he is sitting side by side with his guest. It gets worse. Not a word came out of Biden's mouth that he didn't read off a cue card that he held in his hands and looked down at when it was his turn to speak. You can't make this shit up. I was trying to imagine what the Saudi guy must have been thinking of this unbelievable and nonsensical sleight of hand. Who the fuck does Biden think he's fooling?
I don't know how much longer they're going to be able to prop Biden up before he collapses under his own weight. He looks feeble and he sounds feeble minded. I don't think this is what the American people signed up for when they "elected" him to be our president. Is it too much to expect our President to speak in complete sentences and not to take his cues from cards that he carries in his jacket pocket? And then there was the scene in the White House yesterday when he went to take questions from the press in the room and you could hear his handlers telling everyone that it was time to leave. Biden just sat there looking dumbfounded with that stupid Joker-like toothy grin of his probably unaware of what was going on around him.
Are we now supposed to believe the latest polling that shows Biden beating every republican contender come 2024 by a good margin? Say what? He's even beating the generic republican by a good margin? Are you telling me that the majority of the American people would prefer this senile old fuck to a republican who can speak in complete sentences and who wouldn't need a stack of cue cards in his or her coat pocket to get through a question and answer session? I don't believe it. I'm guessing that the American people don't believe it either. They want Biden gone. The sooner, the better.
I'm starting to wonder what the process of getting rid of Biden before his term ends will look like. I think there's a remedy in the Constitution when a president is no longer able to fulfill his duties. I suppose he could just resign. He's lucky in a way that his Vice President, Harris, is viewed even less favorably than he. I think she was put on the ticket for that very reason. Be careful what we wish for. Right? It could work if they were somehow able to get rid of Harris without leaving her so-called constituency high and dry. I can hear them now. You want to do what to the first black female Vice President? Keep in mind that not a day goes by when she doesn't think that this might be her lucky day. Just sayin'.
I got a call from Mrs G yesterday. She was calling from her car. She was apparently on her way over to see Ray, or something like that, and she was having trouble getting her passenger side window to roll up. She said that she had driven into town with the window halfway down and I thought that was a bit strange. She must have really needed to go into town to do whatever it was that she wanted to do. I mean, we're talking February here, folks. I think the temperatures had never gotten out of the 20's when she called. Oh, and then there's that whole "Ray" thing.
Who is this guy? What is going on with the two of them? It's none of my business but he seems to be more important to her with each passing month so maybe we should know more about him? I was telling the missus that it's probably just a matter of time before Mrs G invites him to join the lot of us when we go to pay a visit. The more the merrier, I suppose. He's one of her fellow residents at her independent living facility so what else do we need to know about him? Does it matter one way or another if the two of them are getting on like a couple of teenage lovebirds? It might be more of an adjustment for the missus but I'm more of a go-with-the-flow kinda guy so I'm just throwing that out there. Live and let live?
I remember the time when the missus and I were over to visit Mrs G for our weekly visit and she insisted that we listen to a message that he (Ray) had left on her phone. He sounded a bit intemperate and gruff, and maybe a little rough around the edges, but all in all I can't recall that it made an impression one way or another on the missus and me. I do think that Mrs G is making more of an effort at a minimum to mention his name more frequently so we get used to the idea that he's not going away any time soon. Like I said, it's probably only a matter of time before they'll be sitting side by side on her couch when we go for our visit. If Mrs G is happy, we're happy. That's the bottom line.
As for her passenger-side car window that wouldn't go up, I suggested that she leave the car running and walk around to the other side of the car and try rolling up the window using the controls on the passenger side of the car. It worked like a charm. She had been contemplating having to bring the car back to the station where she had her annual inspection done to have this fixed and that is now no longer necessary thanks to my sage advice. Does it matter that she cannot now control the passenger side window from the drivers side of the car? Probably not, in the scheme of things. That is to say, she can carry on and forget about having to get it fixed.
Johns Hopkin's Hospital released a report the other day on the Covid crap that we've been mired in for the last two years. It was a shot across the bow of the medical establishment. Everything that people have been saying about how useless and ineffective measures like cloth masks, lockdowns, school and business closures, and governmental mandates have proven to be true according to the report.
The medical establishment, and this is me speaking, has been working in concert with governments far and wide to impose tyrannical restrictions from day one back in early 2020. Using the virus as a justification for their governmental over reach when they knew that it was all unnecessary is criminal. Who will be held accountable? It also proves the point that government, left to its own devices, cannot be trusted to have the best interests of its citizenry when push come to shove. One only has to look at the actions of the governments across the planet as they beat their citizens in the streets or lock them down in their efforts to exercise their now complete and tyrannical control over their citizenry.
For those leftist fucks in the media who pushed the vaccines that don't work, and the very same media outlets who used the daily and weekly mortality stats to run people like Donald Trump out of office, maybe it was a "mission accomplished" moment for them. The ends justify the means. And now, those very same outlets have taken down their daily deaths chyrons but continue to call out anyone and everyone with an opposing view as spewing misinformation or, worse yet, disinformation. More revealing is the fact that not one of them, CNN or MSNBC being the main culprits, have said one word about the John's Hopkin's report. And they wonder why vaccination rates are falling like a rock.
What do you make of theirs Facebook fiasco? Facebook (aka Meta) stock plunged 26% the other day. There was something about their earnings that caught the attention of investors and their forward guidance didn't help. This may well be the largest loss of its kind in the annals of the stock market for any one particular stock in the course of a day's trading. I hear that Mark Zuckerberg took a hit to his personal wealth to the tune of some 29 billion dollars. I don't do Facebook but I hear that they are losing subscribers hand over fist. Advertising revenues are drying up and young people have plenty of other options available to them. Can they come back from the abyss? Only time will tell.
It's a sleet-fest out there this morning. I've had a bike ride the last two days so taking a break due to the weather today is not a big deal. In fact, I pushed myself yesterday to get a ride in since I knew today would not be a good day to ride. The rain started in earnest in the late afternoon yesterday and its all turned to sleet now that the temperatures are hovering around zero. It's hard to imagine that we'll see any accumulating snows but we're supposed to get a few inches so we'll see how that goes.
The Ev man left his car in our garage for the duration of the storm. The missus and I dropped him back at his place across town so he could be home when an old friend came to visit. I think he likes the idea of keeping his car out of harms way when storms are in the forecast. He's thrilled that the dealership did such a good job when it came fixing the water leak in his windshield and he's seemingly now more protective than ever when it comes to taking care of his car. He understands only too well the freedom that owning and operating a car represents and it isn't something that he is willing to put in jeopardy if he can help it.
Did I mention that he thinks that they did something else at the dealership that resulted in the car running better than ever? I've gotten behind the wheel a couple of times and although I can't put my finger on it I think I tend to agree with him. Maybe they went ahead and fixed that motor mount thing that they said was broken. I wasn't convinced that it needed fixing based on my conversation with them when they had the car in the shop so I told them not to bother with the fix. Anyhoo, he couldn't happier with the car at the moment. "She'll be here when the storm is over", we assured him.
I'm not sure what to make of it but I've got a bunch of turkeys squabbling in my backyard this morning. It's not unusual to see turkeys around but I've never seen them fighting amongst themselves if that is indeed what I'm seeing. I think "squabbling" is the right word. It was an up tempo gobble-gobble that caught my attention and when I looked out the window they were all chasing each other around in a circle of sorts. They might have been ganging up on one or more of their own but it was a bit difficult to decipher. It was anything but friendly. And then they were gone.
I think it all started a couple of weeks back when I stood outside our garage with the fella who had come over to fix our dryer vent. We were looking at some tracks in the snow that looked suspiciously like tracks that a large cat or a small coyote might make. Yesterday, the missus called me outside to show me the remains in the snow of a half eaten squirrel that a hawk had made a quick meal out of and had maybe been scared off by a passing car before he or she was able to finish its meal.
There was the telltale scattering of fur and blood in concentric circles around the kill site and the half eaten carcass laid some two or three feet away. I suspect that the hawk attempted to fly off with the carcass and dropped it in his or her frenzied flight away from the scene. I'm guessing the bird had had his or her fill since it never did return to finish eating the squirrel. I regret having missed the take-down of the squirrel by the hawk since it was in clear sight of our house. And, how about the deer we're seeing hereabouts as of late? That's a bit unusual and I don't think that the weather has been a factor since we don't have that much snow on the ground. Interesting stuff.
Incoming
30/01/22 06:59
What the hell is going on with this Ukraine thing? I thought the threat of sanctions was going to be the straw that broke the back of Putin and his soldiers that are sitting 100k strong on the borders of Ukraine just waiting for the word before going in. I'm waking up this morning to newspaper headlines that are more reminiscent of headlines you might have seen during the Battle of the Bulge or Normandy than the present day. NATO countries far and wide, including the United States, are now sending troops, fighter jets, aircraft carriers, and god only knows what else to the area.
Did I miss a fucking memo somewhere? It's not enough to pull our people out of the embassies and call it a day? Don't these damn democrats have enough blood on their hands after the fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq? I mean, are we looking at World War III here? Then again, the democrat party under bumbling and demented Joe Biden is seriously under water, politically speaking. With a mid term election just around the corner, their prospects for keeping the House and the Senate are getting worse by the day. A little distraction in a faraway place might be just what the doctor ordered.
I suppose Vlad has some say in how this all plays out. How much of an appetite do the Russian people have for a protracted war on their border? With NATO forces entering the fray, will China and Iran stand idly by while their ally, Russia, fends for itself in the escalating conflict? Will China take advantage of the conflict to go into Taiwan while NATO is otherwise occupied in another part of the world? Can the US sustain battles on multiple fronts and for how long before something gives? Is conventional war even a thing anymore, here as we are, in the year of the Lord, 2022?
The democrats are so proud of their boy, Joey Biden, for having what it takes to stand up to the Russkies. They couldn't care less how many of our boys and girls come home in body bags. They know that bumbling Joey and his wife with the fishnet stockings will stand side by side with his generals as the coffins are unloaded on the tarmac at the military base in his home state of Delaware. It will be a defining moment for our Commander-in-Chief the likes of which have heretofore escaped him during his first year in office. The media coverage will be unlike anything you've ever seen. Bumbling Joey wouldn't have it any other way.
One thing you never hear the media talking about when they are singing Joey's praises is just how much his dementia plays into everything he is doing and everything he is planning to do. It's the veritable eight hundred pound gorilla in the room. His declining cognitive state is a liability and its likely one of the reasons that the likes of Putin and Xi are moving aggressively to do what they never would have done while Donald J Trump was in office. How can you have a Commander-in-Chief waging a war if he spends 75% of his time at his home in Delaware and calls a lid every day at 1PM?
I can't let the republicans completely off the hook here. They are attached at the hip with the Military Industrial Complex and have been for decades. They've also been taking money from the defense contractors since time immemorial so there's that. If that means supporting a beleaguered and demented old fool like Joey "bumbles" Biden, then that's a small price to pay. You get behind your Commander-in-Chief when the chips are down and our national interests are in play. With everyone on the same page, and like a freight train barreling down the tracks, we're now likely to go down a perilous path the likes of which can only lead to a very bad place for our country.
I do find it a little bit odd that this buildup of Russian troops and equipment has been going on for a while now. Who telegraphs that they are going to wage war? Is the element of surprise no longer an important part of waging war? Maybe they are looking to win the war without firing a shot. You know, intimidate the country into turning over the keys to the capitol in order to avoid bloodshed. I can't even imagine what war would look like if it were it to happen here on US soil. Would I still be able to go to my favorite Starbucks if and when I'm in the mood? Would I have to fear for my life and the lives of my family members?
I don't know. Maybe this is just more of the same for the citizenry of Ukraine. I think I've heard that a third of the population speaks Russian so having a language in common with your conquerors probably helps. They are a sovereign nation but they were once part of the Soviet empire so coming back under the Soviet umbrella as it were may not be as traumatic as one might think. Nonetheless, they are ill equipped to fight off Vlad and all the military might at his disposal. It would be a futile and costly war were they to make a stand but bending over has its costs too. What to do, what to do.
How much, if anything, does the fact that the Biden Crime Family has deep and allegedly criminal ties to government officials in Ukraine matter? Remember the "10% for the big guy" expression? That's demented Joe's cut of Hunter Biden's allegedly criminal exploits in the cauldrons of corruption in places like Ukraine, China, etc. Who doesn't believe for even a minute that exposing or threatening to expose the Biden's criminal enterprises is worth something when push comes to shove? Is it enough to get the most powerful nation on the face of the planet to come to your defense if and when your sovereignty is threatened? It can't hurt.
We got us a good old fashioned nor'easter coming in this weekend. That should be fun. It's hard to say what we'll see in terms of snowfall accumulations. We only have patches of snow here and there and, overall, it's been a fairly benign winter weather-wise thus far in 2022. That means less work all around so I'm okay with it. This storm is a few days off but I'll need to start prepping for it if only to make sure that we have enough things to eat on hand when the shit hits the fan. The Ev man will be joining us and I think he's happy about hunkering down even if that means being under the same roof as his parents.
I think we take his having enough food on hand more seriously than he does. Left to his own devices, I'm not so sure he'd do the appropriate prep work and that could come back to bite him. I'm not looking to sell him short in any way, shape, or form but we do know him well enough to know what he will and won't do in a pinch. Finding food that we think he'll eat is a bigger challenge. That's not to say that he's a fussy eater because that wouldn't be true. We don't want him eating just to eat as funny as that might sound. We want him to enjoy the food that he eats and that means that we get to make choices for him that he may or may not make for himself. Where am I going with this?
I've been thinking lately about these bills that the democrats are wanting to pass in Congress. More specifically, I'm thinking about the bill that will put checks into the pockets of millions of Americans to allegedly "lift families out of poverty." How is that not a standard basic income? This particular bill expired in December after being in effect for some 6 months. It died a slow and natural death when they failed to pass Biden's Build Back Better bill.
These social welfare bills are like heroin for the masses. You can't stop them without incurring the wrath of the citizenry. It is precisely what the democrats had in mind when they first proposed the legislation. More free things means more votes for their party. This is who they are. They couldn't care less about the moral and economic decay that sets in when you give people free things. And now, they want to put through a bill that provides money or credits of some kind that will pay for childcare for the citizenry. Whaaaat? Pay for your own mother fucking childcare for chrissakes. It's a pitch to get back the suburban moms who have been leaving the democrat party in droves. It's shameless.
We tried to ring up Mrs G last night but no one answered the phone. We called both numbers that we have for her and both offered opportunities to leave a message but not much else. We called back a couple of times and stopped trying some time after 8PM. It seemed a little odd to me that she wasn't answering her phone and she wasn't returning any calls. That is not the Mrs G that we know. Not even close. Fast forward some 8 hours and I'm sitting here checking my e-mail just to see if Mrs G might have sent us a note. It's more of the same. Crickets.
The missus didn't think much of it so I guess that was that. It's her mum for chrissakes. If she isn't concerned, why should I be? I can only do so much if she isn't inclined to be concerned enough to rattle a couple of cages to get to the bottom of things. Maybe Mrs G has a new boyfriend and she's off tripping the light fantastic somewhere. Good for her. Was she off in her car somewhere and she never returned? I think it's unlikely that she would have gone off without her cell phone. I'm assuming that she didn't have her phone because she wasn't answered our calls when we dialed up that number.
I suppose we'll sort it all out today one way or another. Her facility has safeguards in place for non-responsive residents so I'm thinking they would be all over any issues related to Mrs G if any issues were to come to the fore. You know, she doesn't come down for breakfast or whatever. Maybe they give her a call and then follow up with a knock on her door? I do think Mrs G is more likely than not to return our phone calls regardless of the hour so as to allay any concerns real or imagined. But, as of this morning she has not. I'm just putting it out there because someone needs to be thinking about it.
I have a good mind to send Debbie Ra-Ra a note to thank her for the gift that she gave me for Christmas. She gave me a pair of gloves that I use for winter bike riding. I'm always happy to have biking gear that I can use when the seasons change so a nice pair of heavy biking gloves were, in a word, the bees knees as gifts go. I will admit to wearing a pair of cotton gloves inside the gifted gloves yesterday since biking in 20-degree weather with wind chills in the single digits called for taking extra precautions. It's not every day that I go riding when it's that cold outside but the sun was shining and I was on a roll after riding for each of the past 2 or 3 days.
I always wonder what passing motorists think when they see me tooling down the highway on my bicycle in sub-freezing temperatures. They probably think I've lost my mind. I'm always dressed for the occasion so it's not like they need to feel sorry for me or be concerned for my welfare one way or another. I seldom see other cyclists while out on my winter rides although there are some but none that I would recognize as regulars like myself. Most days, I have all I can do to focus on my own riding and unless someone passes me by and says something in passing I might not pay them any mind.
There are riders out there who feel the need to acknowledge every other bicyclist that passes them by either across the road or coming up on them from behind. It reminds me of motorcyclists who do this thing with their hands when they pass by another motorcyclist to acknowledge, and I'm guessing here, their membership in a brotherhood of sorts. It's a secret club doncha you know. Maybe it's just a thing with Harley riders. Anyway, I couldn't care less about other cyclists. I keep my head down and keep to myself. If I wanted company on my ride I'd join a riding club. Maybe if I don't look at them they won't feel obligated to wave to me. Whatever floats your boat, Johnny Boy.
I have to laugh. This Supreme Court guy Breyer (liberal) retires and instead of allowing him to announce his own retirement the White House and their minions leak the news to the media. Apparently, the leftist activists couldn't contain their collective glee when their efforts to run the poor guy off the court came to fruition. No one on the left is waiting for the republicans to take back the Senate in November 2022 when, god forbid, Mitch McConnell and his fellow republicans might have an opportunity to nix yet another opportunity for the democrats to put one of their own on the court. They want to get this seat assigned to one of their own while Biden and his slim majority in the Senate still have a say in the process.
The conservatives have a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court so the democrats can put Mickey Mouse on the court and it wouldn't matter. They can even put up a loser like Kamala Harris although I suspect there are plenty of democrats who don't think she has the chops for the position and probably wouldn't vote for her. You can't nominate someone who can't even pass muster within your own party. Right? Joey Biden promised to put a black woman on the court when he was running for the presidency so I suspect they will hold him to that promise.
A promise like that smacks of party politics. For those of us who just want someone competent, that horse has left the barn. It's all about affirmative action and satisfying your progressive and nutty base. If you dare oppose any nominee, well, you're just racist. You should hear some of these progressive talk show hosts these days talking about this nomination process as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get the base riled up and out in massive numbers for the midterm elections in November. Absent that, it's going to be a disaster for the democrats and they know it. It just all seems so desperate.
Update: Mrs G is just fine. The missus said something about a number of her mum's peers who have passed recently and that wasn't sitting well with Mrs G. We're planning to bring her over some greek salad dressing when we visit this afternoon as she requested. Knowing what we now know about these latest developments, perhaps throwing in a cookie or two wouldn't hurt. You know, something to cheer her up. Something to take her mind off the glumness of the bad news about her buds. It's nothing more than a distraction but it may be just what she needs to help get her over the proverbial hump.
The storm heading our way is now just 24 hours away and it promises to bring us a good foot or more of snow. I don't have a strategy as yet when it comes to pacing myself to deal with the storm and the snow accumulations but I'll know one way or another by the end of the day. How much help, if any, will I be able to offer to my neighbors when all is said and done? Will I have the stamina and wherewithal to get out and about during the storm to make a pass or two so as to keep the drifts from getting too high over the course of the day? I want to be careful about making promises that I can't keep.
What help will the Ev man be when the going gets tough? He's generally not much help and I don't spend a lot of time trying to goad him into getting over whatever it is that keeps him from jumping in with both feet. Under the circumstances, I'd settle for him sticking his toes in the water. A little bit of help is better than no help at all. Maybe I'll assign him the task of shoveling off our back deck. I do have a lot of machinery available to help with the snow removal so it's not like that's a two man job. He'll be coming over to the house around noon today so we'll discuss further.
There's a bandwagon going around that is calling for the White House to release the transcript of the call between Bumbles Joey Biden and the president of Ukraine. Apparently, Bumbling Joey and the president of Ukraine are offering differing accounts of what transpired during the call. The White House released a version of the call that did not contain some of the more disturbing aspects of the call as described by the president of Ukraine.
Is this not what the democrats impeached Trump over? You know, according to Trump it was the perfect call when he spoke to the president of Ukraine. According to the democrats, it was far from a perfect call. They alleged all kinds of things including some nonsense about a quid pro quo. Did Biden really say that Ukraine should prepare for a "sacking" of Kiev? Did the president of Ukraine actually ask Biden to "calm down"? Is an invasion imminent or not? Let's see that transcript, Joey. What's good for the fucking goose is good for the fucking gander. We should settle for nothing less.
What else is going on in the world? The Pennsylvania high court threw out the vote-by-mail nonsense that allowed the bad people in Pennsylvania to steal the 2020 election. That's a good thing by any measure. It's all about what their state constitution says about voting. I know a lot of good people like the ease of voting by mail but it is a system fraught with vulnerabilities. You simply can't leave that door open too long without one or more corrupt mother fuckers taking advantage of the opening. We've all heard the stories about the trucks backing up to the voting locations in the middle of the night and unloading box after box of ballots cast by dead people and non-residents.
The storm has finally arrived. It's snowing lightly hereabouts at the hour of 7am. The winds seem to be picking up out of the north. We'll likely see the snow start to come down with greater intensity as the morning picks up. My plan is to get outside with the snowblower when I start to see accumulations of 3-4 inches on the ground. We're expecting 12-18 inches of snow in total. If we start to see blizzard-like conditions it might be more difficult to assess but I can always step outside to better gauge conditions on the ground. My machines are gassed up and ready to go so no worries there. I told my neighbor that I'd be by to help her with her driveway if for no other reason that to keep the accumulations down and maybe make things more manageable when she has a chance to get out of doors. She's no spring chicken so it's the least I can do.
I've sprinkled a generous handful or two of thistle seed on our back deck and a bunch of Junco's are taking full advantage. Good for them is what I say. I was a little worried that the minute I put it down that the snow would cover it up and it would all be for naught. The snow has indeed covered it up but the Junco's aren't about to let a little snow wreak havoc with what has to be a godsend of thistle in the middle of a snow storm. Well, its not a snow "storm" just yet. Besides, birds need to eat regardless of what the weather is doing. They don't have the luxury of doing otherwise.
Did I miss a fucking memo somewhere? It's not enough to pull our people out of the embassies and call it a day? Don't these damn democrats have enough blood on their hands after the fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq? I mean, are we looking at World War III here? Then again, the democrat party under bumbling and demented Joe Biden is seriously under water, politically speaking. With a mid term election just around the corner, their prospects for keeping the House and the Senate are getting worse by the day. A little distraction in a faraway place might be just what the doctor ordered.
I suppose Vlad has some say in how this all plays out. How much of an appetite do the Russian people have for a protracted war on their border? With NATO forces entering the fray, will China and Iran stand idly by while their ally, Russia, fends for itself in the escalating conflict? Will China take advantage of the conflict to go into Taiwan while NATO is otherwise occupied in another part of the world? Can the US sustain battles on multiple fronts and for how long before something gives? Is conventional war even a thing anymore, here as we are, in the year of the Lord, 2022?
The democrats are so proud of their boy, Joey Biden, for having what it takes to stand up to the Russkies. They couldn't care less how many of our boys and girls come home in body bags. They know that bumbling Joey and his wife with the fishnet stockings will stand side by side with his generals as the coffins are unloaded on the tarmac at the military base in his home state of Delaware. It will be a defining moment for our Commander-in-Chief the likes of which have heretofore escaped him during his first year in office. The media coverage will be unlike anything you've ever seen. Bumbling Joey wouldn't have it any other way.
One thing you never hear the media talking about when they are singing Joey's praises is just how much his dementia plays into everything he is doing and everything he is planning to do. It's the veritable eight hundred pound gorilla in the room. His declining cognitive state is a liability and its likely one of the reasons that the likes of Putin and Xi are moving aggressively to do what they never would have done while Donald J Trump was in office. How can you have a Commander-in-Chief waging a war if he spends 75% of his time at his home in Delaware and calls a lid every day at 1PM?
I can't let the republicans completely off the hook here. They are attached at the hip with the Military Industrial Complex and have been for decades. They've also been taking money from the defense contractors since time immemorial so there's that. If that means supporting a beleaguered and demented old fool like Joey "bumbles" Biden, then that's a small price to pay. You get behind your Commander-in-Chief when the chips are down and our national interests are in play. With everyone on the same page, and like a freight train barreling down the tracks, we're now likely to go down a perilous path the likes of which can only lead to a very bad place for our country.
I do find it a little bit odd that this buildup of Russian troops and equipment has been going on for a while now. Who telegraphs that they are going to wage war? Is the element of surprise no longer an important part of waging war? Maybe they are looking to win the war without firing a shot. You know, intimidate the country into turning over the keys to the capitol in order to avoid bloodshed. I can't even imagine what war would look like if it were it to happen here on US soil. Would I still be able to go to my favorite Starbucks if and when I'm in the mood? Would I have to fear for my life and the lives of my family members?
I don't know. Maybe this is just more of the same for the citizenry of Ukraine. I think I've heard that a third of the population speaks Russian so having a language in common with your conquerors probably helps. They are a sovereign nation but they were once part of the Soviet empire so coming back under the Soviet umbrella as it were may not be as traumatic as one might think. Nonetheless, they are ill equipped to fight off Vlad and all the military might at his disposal. It would be a futile and costly war were they to make a stand but bending over has its costs too. What to do, what to do.
How much, if anything, does the fact that the Biden Crime Family has deep and allegedly criminal ties to government officials in Ukraine matter? Remember the "10% for the big guy" expression? That's demented Joe's cut of Hunter Biden's allegedly criminal exploits in the cauldrons of corruption in places like Ukraine, China, etc. Who doesn't believe for even a minute that exposing or threatening to expose the Biden's criminal enterprises is worth something when push comes to shove? Is it enough to get the most powerful nation on the face of the planet to come to your defense if and when your sovereignty is threatened? It can't hurt.
We got us a good old fashioned nor'easter coming in this weekend. That should be fun. It's hard to say what we'll see in terms of snowfall accumulations. We only have patches of snow here and there and, overall, it's been a fairly benign winter weather-wise thus far in 2022. That means less work all around so I'm okay with it. This storm is a few days off but I'll need to start prepping for it if only to make sure that we have enough things to eat on hand when the shit hits the fan. The Ev man will be joining us and I think he's happy about hunkering down even if that means being under the same roof as his parents.
I think we take his having enough food on hand more seriously than he does. Left to his own devices, I'm not so sure he'd do the appropriate prep work and that could come back to bite him. I'm not looking to sell him short in any way, shape, or form but we do know him well enough to know what he will and won't do in a pinch. Finding food that we think he'll eat is a bigger challenge. That's not to say that he's a fussy eater because that wouldn't be true. We don't want him eating just to eat as funny as that might sound. We want him to enjoy the food that he eats and that means that we get to make choices for him that he may or may not make for himself. Where am I going with this?
I've been thinking lately about these bills that the democrats are wanting to pass in Congress. More specifically, I'm thinking about the bill that will put checks into the pockets of millions of Americans to allegedly "lift families out of poverty." How is that not a standard basic income? This particular bill expired in December after being in effect for some 6 months. It died a slow and natural death when they failed to pass Biden's Build Back Better bill.
These social welfare bills are like heroin for the masses. You can't stop them without incurring the wrath of the citizenry. It is precisely what the democrats had in mind when they first proposed the legislation. More free things means more votes for their party. This is who they are. They couldn't care less about the moral and economic decay that sets in when you give people free things. And now, they want to put through a bill that provides money or credits of some kind that will pay for childcare for the citizenry. Whaaaat? Pay for your own mother fucking childcare for chrissakes. It's a pitch to get back the suburban moms who have been leaving the democrat party in droves. It's shameless.
We tried to ring up Mrs G last night but no one answered the phone. We called both numbers that we have for her and both offered opportunities to leave a message but not much else. We called back a couple of times and stopped trying some time after 8PM. It seemed a little odd to me that she wasn't answering her phone and she wasn't returning any calls. That is not the Mrs G that we know. Not even close. Fast forward some 8 hours and I'm sitting here checking my e-mail just to see if Mrs G might have sent us a note. It's more of the same. Crickets.
The missus didn't think much of it so I guess that was that. It's her mum for chrissakes. If she isn't concerned, why should I be? I can only do so much if she isn't inclined to be concerned enough to rattle a couple of cages to get to the bottom of things. Maybe Mrs G has a new boyfriend and she's off tripping the light fantastic somewhere. Good for her. Was she off in her car somewhere and she never returned? I think it's unlikely that she would have gone off without her cell phone. I'm assuming that she didn't have her phone because she wasn't answered our calls when we dialed up that number.
I suppose we'll sort it all out today one way or another. Her facility has safeguards in place for non-responsive residents so I'm thinking they would be all over any issues related to Mrs G if any issues were to come to the fore. You know, she doesn't come down for breakfast or whatever. Maybe they give her a call and then follow up with a knock on her door? I do think Mrs G is more likely than not to return our phone calls regardless of the hour so as to allay any concerns real or imagined. But, as of this morning she has not. I'm just putting it out there because someone needs to be thinking about it.
I have a good mind to send Debbie Ra-Ra a note to thank her for the gift that she gave me for Christmas. She gave me a pair of gloves that I use for winter bike riding. I'm always happy to have biking gear that I can use when the seasons change so a nice pair of heavy biking gloves were, in a word, the bees knees as gifts go. I will admit to wearing a pair of cotton gloves inside the gifted gloves yesterday since biking in 20-degree weather with wind chills in the single digits called for taking extra precautions. It's not every day that I go riding when it's that cold outside but the sun was shining and I was on a roll after riding for each of the past 2 or 3 days.
I always wonder what passing motorists think when they see me tooling down the highway on my bicycle in sub-freezing temperatures. They probably think I've lost my mind. I'm always dressed for the occasion so it's not like they need to feel sorry for me or be concerned for my welfare one way or another. I seldom see other cyclists while out on my winter rides although there are some but none that I would recognize as regulars like myself. Most days, I have all I can do to focus on my own riding and unless someone passes me by and says something in passing I might not pay them any mind.
There are riders out there who feel the need to acknowledge every other bicyclist that passes them by either across the road or coming up on them from behind. It reminds me of motorcyclists who do this thing with their hands when they pass by another motorcyclist to acknowledge, and I'm guessing here, their membership in a brotherhood of sorts. It's a secret club doncha you know. Maybe it's just a thing with Harley riders. Anyway, I couldn't care less about other cyclists. I keep my head down and keep to myself. If I wanted company on my ride I'd join a riding club. Maybe if I don't look at them they won't feel obligated to wave to me. Whatever floats your boat, Johnny Boy.
I have to laugh. This Supreme Court guy Breyer (liberal) retires and instead of allowing him to announce his own retirement the White House and their minions leak the news to the media. Apparently, the leftist activists couldn't contain their collective glee when their efforts to run the poor guy off the court came to fruition. No one on the left is waiting for the republicans to take back the Senate in November 2022 when, god forbid, Mitch McConnell and his fellow republicans might have an opportunity to nix yet another opportunity for the democrats to put one of their own on the court. They want to get this seat assigned to one of their own while Biden and his slim majority in the Senate still have a say in the process.
The conservatives have a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court so the democrats can put Mickey Mouse on the court and it wouldn't matter. They can even put up a loser like Kamala Harris although I suspect there are plenty of democrats who don't think she has the chops for the position and probably wouldn't vote for her. You can't nominate someone who can't even pass muster within your own party. Right? Joey Biden promised to put a black woman on the court when he was running for the presidency so I suspect they will hold him to that promise.
A promise like that smacks of party politics. For those of us who just want someone competent, that horse has left the barn. It's all about affirmative action and satisfying your progressive and nutty base. If you dare oppose any nominee, well, you're just racist. You should hear some of these progressive talk show hosts these days talking about this nomination process as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get the base riled up and out in massive numbers for the midterm elections in November. Absent that, it's going to be a disaster for the democrats and they know it. It just all seems so desperate.
Update: Mrs G is just fine. The missus said something about a number of her mum's peers who have passed recently and that wasn't sitting well with Mrs G. We're planning to bring her over some greek salad dressing when we visit this afternoon as she requested. Knowing what we now know about these latest developments, perhaps throwing in a cookie or two wouldn't hurt. You know, something to cheer her up. Something to take her mind off the glumness of the bad news about her buds. It's nothing more than a distraction but it may be just what she needs to help get her over the proverbial hump.
The storm heading our way is now just 24 hours away and it promises to bring us a good foot or more of snow. I don't have a strategy as yet when it comes to pacing myself to deal with the storm and the snow accumulations but I'll know one way or another by the end of the day. How much help, if any, will I be able to offer to my neighbors when all is said and done? Will I have the stamina and wherewithal to get out and about during the storm to make a pass or two so as to keep the drifts from getting too high over the course of the day? I want to be careful about making promises that I can't keep.
What help will the Ev man be when the going gets tough? He's generally not much help and I don't spend a lot of time trying to goad him into getting over whatever it is that keeps him from jumping in with both feet. Under the circumstances, I'd settle for him sticking his toes in the water. A little bit of help is better than no help at all. Maybe I'll assign him the task of shoveling off our back deck. I do have a lot of machinery available to help with the snow removal so it's not like that's a two man job. He'll be coming over to the house around noon today so we'll discuss further.
There's a bandwagon going around that is calling for the White House to release the transcript of the call between Bumbles Joey Biden and the president of Ukraine. Apparently, Bumbling Joey and the president of Ukraine are offering differing accounts of what transpired during the call. The White House released a version of the call that did not contain some of the more disturbing aspects of the call as described by the president of Ukraine.
Is this not what the democrats impeached Trump over? You know, according to Trump it was the perfect call when he spoke to the president of Ukraine. According to the democrats, it was far from a perfect call. They alleged all kinds of things including some nonsense about a quid pro quo. Did Biden really say that Ukraine should prepare for a "sacking" of Kiev? Did the president of Ukraine actually ask Biden to "calm down"? Is an invasion imminent or not? Let's see that transcript, Joey. What's good for the fucking goose is good for the fucking gander. We should settle for nothing less.
What else is going on in the world? The Pennsylvania high court threw out the vote-by-mail nonsense that allowed the bad people in Pennsylvania to steal the 2020 election. That's a good thing by any measure. It's all about what their state constitution says about voting. I know a lot of good people like the ease of voting by mail but it is a system fraught with vulnerabilities. You simply can't leave that door open too long without one or more corrupt mother fuckers taking advantage of the opening. We've all heard the stories about the trucks backing up to the voting locations in the middle of the night and unloading box after box of ballots cast by dead people and non-residents.
The storm has finally arrived. It's snowing lightly hereabouts at the hour of 7am. The winds seem to be picking up out of the north. We'll likely see the snow start to come down with greater intensity as the morning picks up. My plan is to get outside with the snowblower when I start to see accumulations of 3-4 inches on the ground. We're expecting 12-18 inches of snow in total. If we start to see blizzard-like conditions it might be more difficult to assess but I can always step outside to better gauge conditions on the ground. My machines are gassed up and ready to go so no worries there. I told my neighbor that I'd be by to help her with her driveway if for no other reason that to keep the accumulations down and maybe make things more manageable when she has a chance to get out of doors. She's no spring chicken so it's the least I can do.
I've sprinkled a generous handful or two of thistle seed on our back deck and a bunch of Junco's are taking full advantage. Good for them is what I say. I was a little worried that the minute I put it down that the snow would cover it up and it would all be for naught. The snow has indeed covered it up but the Junco's aren't about to let a little snow wreak havoc with what has to be a godsend of thistle in the middle of a snow storm. Well, its not a snow "storm" just yet. Besides, birds need to eat regardless of what the weather is doing. They don't have the luxury of doing otherwise.
FJB
23/01/22 07:18
Winds are whipping and the rain is coming down in sheets but there is no snow in sight. Of course, it's barely daylight hereabouts so I'm prepared to tell a different story should things take a change for the worse. For now, if we're able to keep our electricity on during what's expected to be a day long wind event, I'm good with that. We do have a generator so I can roll that out if the weather goes from bad to worse. If I had to do it all over again, I would have had the generator installed properly instead of having to wheel the damn thing out of my garage in the midst of a storm still swirling.
I'll have to remind myself to save this here document after each paragraph so I don't lose anything if we do lose electricity. Our refrigerator is full of food so no worries there. All of this business about empty store shelves in the midst of a pandemic is not something we've experienced here along the coast. The Ev man is here riding out the storm with us so we made sure that we had plenty of things for him eat and then some. Is a rain and wind storm something that you actually have to ride out? I think he's more comfortable being here than not so we'll leave it at that.
It's funny to think that just 24 hours ago it was zero degrees here along the coast. Now, temperatures are in the upper thirties and they are expected to stay there for the duration of the storm. Inland and points north, maybe 30 miles or so, I think the snow is probably piling up in earnest. You know you have an epic storm on your hands when they give it a name. I don't know if that has more to do with the width and breadth of the storm or maybe the intensity of said storm. Come to think of it, I can't ever remember a rain storm being named. Is that a thing?
Today is Martin Luther King Day. Had I my druthers, I would have never put him on the calendar as a holiday or anything of the sort. He was reportedly a womanizer extraordinaire and an FBI informant. I suppose he gave lip service to this, that, and the other civil rights cause so I suppose you could say he was a cause celeb of sorts. Maybe he came along at a time when the racial climate in America was overdue for a ministerial man of the so-called cloth to rise up and give a voice to the faithful in his community. I'm still not convinced he's deserving of a holiday named in his honor. With the bar being so low, I have to ask the question. Who's next? George Floyd? Al Sharpton? Jesse Jackson?
If the leftists can come after Christopher Columbus and George Washington by renaming their holidays to Indigenous People's Day and President's Day respectively, certainly Martin Luther King can be taken down a peg or two. How about "People Of Color" Day? As much as I hate that expression, I think it's something that I can live with. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Right? When I see Martin Luther King's spawn out and about on the breakfast circuit telling Americans what Marty might or might not approve of given the social and racial injustices in America today, all I see are a handful of grifters still looking to cash in on their grandfather's legacy. Can you blame them?
Is this story coming out of New York City true? You know, the story about how healthcare facilities that are now doling out health care based on skin color. It's no longer first come, first serve. That's a special kind of reparations is what I would say. If you're white, get to the back of line. Maybe they'll hang a "honky" or "cracker" sign around your neck the way they put yellow stars on the overcoats of the Jewish people back in the day before sending them off to the concentration camps. Whatever happened to "We the People"? These are death panels plain and simple. What else do you call it when your skin color dictates whether you live or die? Me thinks that Martin Luther King would not approve.
The Supreme Court needs to step in here and spank these officials and spank them hard. This cannot stand. They need to be made an example of so that others wishing to implement these kinds of policies know and understand that this is not who we are as a nation. If one community can put people of color at the front of the line, another community can put white people at the front of the line. Can you imagine a weight-based lottery system? Hey, fatso! You're in the wrong line! How about priorities based on height? How about vaccinated versus non-vaccinated? Oh, wait.
I'm encouraged by what I'm seeing in Virginia. Glenn Youngkin, a republican, was sworn in yesterday as governor. I don't know if Virginia was heretofore a blue state or a purple state, political speaking, but I can tell you that in a Youngkin administration the state is going to be just a little bit more red than blue. Maybe a lot more red than blue, god willing. The new Attorney General has already fired the freaks from the prior administration and the house cleaning will continue. Say goodbye to teaching Critical Race Theory in elementary schools and say goodbye to a handful of onerous tax policies which were more than burdensome. "Virginia," as Governor Youngkin states with great aplomb, "is now open for business."
Oh, and he's doing away with vaccine and mask mandates as they are currently prescribed under Virgina law. He rightly places the responsibility of everything mask and vaccine related, when it comes to the children in the state, with the parents. Imagine that. Some schools and other institutions are already pushing back. My recommendation to the governor would be to get on the phone with governor DeSantis from Florida and ask him what he does to deal with the recalcitrant enterprises in his state. There has to be a price to pay for ignoring or bucking the will of the people making the laws. If he needs to make an example of them, then so be it. There's a new sheriff in town. Suck on it.
If I might, I'll quote Luke 12:47: "The servant who knows the master's will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows." Some conservatives viewed Youngkin with suspicion and, given that Youngkin appreciated Trump's kind words about his candidacy for governor but fell short of embracing Trumpism outright, thought that he might be just another fair weather conservative who talks a good talk but never gets around to walking the walk. I think the lot of them are more encouraged today after hearing him address the Virginia House in his first address to the Commonwealth of Virginia. It was pretty darn MAGA. Let's be hopeful, shall we?
Youngkin is a young man, relatively speaking, and it is a little refreshing to see someone so young and so full of vigor and vitality instead of the usual battle scarred warhorses that we see on the national stage these days. That carries a premium of its own and it's not something that you can fake, buy, or delegate if you're an old dog trying to market yourself to new and maybe younger prospective voters. Youngkin had instant cred with the young parents who, like himself, had children in school and had to worry about what they were being taught behind closed doors. He was simpatico in spades.
Maybe we American's are getting a little tired of the same old same old when it comes to voting for presidential candidates. I'm not sure how many democrats turned out for Youngkin but I'm guessing you don't win elections in blue (maybe purple) states without getting a significant number of crossover votes. That's a winning recipe if you're looking to break on through. I can see that working on the national stage as well. It helps to be seen as a viable candidate and not some Johnny-come-lately like Butt-Edge-Edge who, by all accounts, lacks the political heft that is typically required of candidates when running for the highest office in the land. I think "gravitas" is the word I'm looking for.
I'm not wanting to beat this Youngkin thing to death but I will say that he is probably a breath of fresh air when it comes to improving our prospects for securing the votes of the suburban moms. I'm talking about the same moms who love Trump's policies but who hates his tweets and his constant belittling of his political opponents. Trump could often be his own worst enemy and, to many, he is an acquired taste. Just how much of all of that a prospective voter is willing to swallow before pulling the lever in the voting booth is an open question. I do worry that we'll find out the hard way in 2024 that the political landscape has changed and not in a way that favors candidates like Trump. Maybe it depends on who the Dems put up.
I think I've said before that I do not like the vaccine passports for the simple reason that they discriminate against the unvaccinated. Oh, and the fact that government is open to such a thing tells me that someone needs to go back and read our Constitution. You know, the one that our founders wrote 250 years ago. Or, as Sleepy Joe puts it, "you know, the thing." There's a lot in the Constitution about tyranny and what we as a country need to avoid to make sure that we don't let that fucking camel's nose under the tent door. Well, this vaccine passport thing is taking hold in various larger cities across the United States and the latest city to implement the passport mandate is Boston. Paul Revere must be rolling over in his grave.
Fast forward 250 years, you might see Paul Revere driving through the North End of Boston in his Tesla with the windows down while yelling, "The Communist Chinese are coming! The Communist Chinese are coming!" We can laugh but it ain't just happening here. It's a global phenomenon. Anyway, I'll be picking and choosing my spots but I have no plans to frequent any establishment that demands that their customers show a vaccine passport in order to dine there. I'll happily support any and all efforts to close down said establishments if necessary. If enough restaurants go out of business, maybe the government officials will get the message. We're fucking Americans. Let's start acting like Americans.
There's talk here and there in the media about going to war with Russia. Yes, I know the Ruskies have amassed a large number of troops on the border of Ukraine but what the hell does that have to do with us? Do we have a vested interest in protecting the sovereignty of Ukraine? No, we do not. Most Americans couldn't find Ukraine on a map so there's that. Let's not forget, the Commander-in-Chief we have leading our troops into this so-called war is none other than feckless Joey Biden. Yes, the same Joey Biden who embarrassed our nation and our allies when he pulled our troops out of Afghanistan without having an exit strategy in place. You might remember the 13 marines who lost their lives as a result of demented Joe's ineptness.
Everything you heard and see coming out of the Biden Administration seems to suggest that this confrontation is imminent. To those of us who are clear eyed about Biden's intentions, this is a massive wag-the-dog campaign. It's all about distracting the American people from the day-to-day disasters created by Biden and his minions. And we all know, the one thing that Americans do well is that they get behind their Commander-in-Chief when our nation's blood and treasure are on the line. Just between you and me, no American that I know of thinks that we have any business getting into a war with Russia over Ukraine. Unfortunately, no one in the Biden Administration cares what the American people think. They know that Russia has nuclear weapons. Right?
This Voting Rights legislation that the democrats are trying to push through is a joke. We all know it's a joke. Not in the ha-ha sense of the word but laughable nonetheless in that we all know what the democrats are up to with this legislation. They are trying to federalize our elections and that means that the democrats can steal elections in perpetuity in order to stay in power. The good news is that they don't have the votes. They are two votes shy thanks to Senator's Manchin and Sinema. It's amazing to me that we have two democrats who are willing to break ranks with their party on legislation that is, by their own admission, legislation that will save our very democracy.
The vote will go down later this evening and I'm expecting Manchin and Sinema to stick to their guns. I can just imagine the pressure they are under by their leftist constituencies that see the wild-eyed notions of government in perpetuity slipping from their grasp. So close, yet so far. The progressive radio stations that I tune into on occasion are rallying their listeners to do everything they can to exert pressure on the two senators to get back in line or face the threat of being removed from office. It's not enough to have the communist contingent of the democrat party chase the likes of Krysten Sinema into a bathroom stall and harangue her from the other side of the door. It's all hands on deck.
The vote on the Voting Rights legislation has now come and gone. Thank you to the senators who stood tall in the breach and held tight to their promise to veto this terrible piece of legislation. This is what having a backbone looks like. The republicans should pay attention. They might learn something. I'm looking forward to listening to a day's worth of dems gnashing their teeth and clutching their pearls on any and all progressive radio stations that I can find. My cup floweth over with leftist's tears and I'll be sipping generously and deliciously throughout the day. We've won this battle but the war goes on.
I don't know what to say about Biden's press conference last night. Anything I say will be viewed as partisan since I wear my party affiliation on my sleeve so there's that. I tuned in to the CNN's and MSNBC's after the press conference and the looks on their faces told you everything you needed to know about how they thought the presser went. To a person, they were mortified. They saw what the rest of the nation saw. A decrepit and demented old man who was seemingly fading in and out of consciousness as questions were fired at him from a less than friendly press corp. He spoke at times in incomplete and disjointed sentences, bristled at accusations that he considered unwarranted, and gave Russia his personal assurances that the United States would do nothing if they were to wage "only a minor incursion" when it comes to invading Ukraine.
He looked older than his 78 years and his multiple plastic surgeries over the years have not weathered well. As a nation on the precipice of going to war with another nuclear power, one would hope for a less feeble Commander-in-Chief but this is where we are. His remarks about allowing a "minor incursion" came as a shock to both our European allies and our friends and allies in Ukraine. I can just imagine what the headlines look and sound like across the span of the European continent this morning. The White House issued a clarification but it was a day late and a dollar short. The damage was done. We're well past talking about a President who has lost a step or two. We're well past talking about a President who has lost his so-called fast ball. It's time to call 911.
So I get a call from the Falls last night telling me that Weesey was listening to her police scanner when she heard a call come over the radio that there was an ambulance heading over to Uncle Wally's residence. "That's not good," I thought to myself. It wasn't clear as to who was in need of an ambulance but it sounded like it had something to do with Uncle Wally himself. The caller was short on facts and we agreed to catch up in the next couple of hours when, hopefully, we might have more information. As it turned out, the ambulance was indeed for Uncle Wally. We now know that he's doing just fine. It was just one of those things. Scary, but not terminal. Very good to know. Indeed.
It made me realize that my lines of communication with the extended family could probably use a little shoring up. I talked to one of my siblings and I was grateful that someone, anyone, had the wherewithal to get on the horn to me. I left a message on Uncle Wally's phone expressing my concern. I was grateful when he returned my call within the hour sounding no worse for wear. It's not an overstatement to say that I was worried about him. I always call Uncle Wally on his cell so I had no other means for reaching out to his extended family for news. Maybe this is something to add to my list of things to work on in 2022. It's a worthy cause. No?
Did I mention that we took the Ev man's car in for servicing? I brought it into the local dealership so they could address the issue where he is getting water in the cabin of his car every time it rains. It turns out that it had nothing to do with the drains at the front of the sunroof. Rather, the windshield was the source of the leak and that came as a bit of a surprise to me. How the heck did that come to be? They resealed the windshield and dried out the floor of the car by removing the seats and taking the floor coverings completely out of the car. It wasn't inexpensive but it was a job that was better addressed by the dealership so I felt good about having made that decision.
I'm still of the mind that the car has a few problems that we've only begun to find out about. I would contend that that's one of the many potential downsides of buying a used car. Is it an out and out lemon? I wouldn't go that far. Did the dealership from whom I purchased the car know about its maybe one or more problems or potential problems? I think so. I can tell you that the Ev man is about as delighted as delighted can be to get his car back. I think he was not at all happy about the water leak business and having to live and deal with that was not something he was at all comfortable with. Maybe he thought it was unfixable? We got it figured out so, from here on in, fingers crossed.
Man, what is going on with the stock market these days? The indices were up anywhere from 25 to 30% in 2021 and, as of today anyway, they seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. You knew the stair stepping of the market to higher and higher levels in 2021 was not sustainable. It was just a matter of time before it came back down to earth. Like everything else in life, the stock market always reverts to the mean. Were I to give any advice today, I would stress the need for capital preservation given that the indices are trading on or below the 200 day moving average. Nothing good happens when price action is below the 200 day moving average.
Beneath the surface, a lot of stocks have been in a bear market for months. It's just been the high flyers with the high betas that have kept the indices at all time highs. In a bear market, it's just a matter of time before they come for the Apple's and the Amazon's. When that happens, it's Katy bar the door. In the last few days, we've seen a lot of selling into the close. That's another indicator of a bear market. It's not something you see in bull market. Can there be a countertrend rally here and there? For sure. I suspect we'll see good news sold off and bad news sold off even harder as we go forward. With any luck, and this is going to take a while to play out, we may get a mother-of-all buying opportunity.
Just to put a finer point on the carnage occurring in the market, the S&P was down 5.7% on the week. The Nasdaq was down maybe 8-9%. If this continues, real estate will be the next asset on the chopping block. This is what my financial guy says anyway. I think he's right. When people line up at their local banks wanting to borrow money on the inflated values of their homes in order to buy into the stock market, that's a problem. When it all comes crumbling down, they are left holding the bag. You know, up the creek without a paddle. Not sure if that's where all this is going, but it sure has an apocalyptic feeling to it. Is there anything that doesn't feel apocalyptic in Joe Biden's America?
I'll have to remind myself to save this here document after each paragraph so I don't lose anything if we do lose electricity. Our refrigerator is full of food so no worries there. All of this business about empty store shelves in the midst of a pandemic is not something we've experienced here along the coast. The Ev man is here riding out the storm with us so we made sure that we had plenty of things for him eat and then some. Is a rain and wind storm something that you actually have to ride out? I think he's more comfortable being here than not so we'll leave it at that.
It's funny to think that just 24 hours ago it was zero degrees here along the coast. Now, temperatures are in the upper thirties and they are expected to stay there for the duration of the storm. Inland and points north, maybe 30 miles or so, I think the snow is probably piling up in earnest. You know you have an epic storm on your hands when they give it a name. I don't know if that has more to do with the width and breadth of the storm or maybe the intensity of said storm. Come to think of it, I can't ever remember a rain storm being named. Is that a thing?
Today is Martin Luther King Day. Had I my druthers, I would have never put him on the calendar as a holiday or anything of the sort. He was reportedly a womanizer extraordinaire and an FBI informant. I suppose he gave lip service to this, that, and the other civil rights cause so I suppose you could say he was a cause celeb of sorts. Maybe he came along at a time when the racial climate in America was overdue for a ministerial man of the so-called cloth to rise up and give a voice to the faithful in his community. I'm still not convinced he's deserving of a holiday named in his honor. With the bar being so low, I have to ask the question. Who's next? George Floyd? Al Sharpton? Jesse Jackson?
If the leftists can come after Christopher Columbus and George Washington by renaming their holidays to Indigenous People's Day and President's Day respectively, certainly Martin Luther King can be taken down a peg or two. How about "People Of Color" Day? As much as I hate that expression, I think it's something that I can live with. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Right? When I see Martin Luther King's spawn out and about on the breakfast circuit telling Americans what Marty might or might not approve of given the social and racial injustices in America today, all I see are a handful of grifters still looking to cash in on their grandfather's legacy. Can you blame them?
Is this story coming out of New York City true? You know, the story about how healthcare facilities that are now doling out health care based on skin color. It's no longer first come, first serve. That's a special kind of reparations is what I would say. If you're white, get to the back of line. Maybe they'll hang a "honky" or "cracker" sign around your neck the way they put yellow stars on the overcoats of the Jewish people back in the day before sending them off to the concentration camps. Whatever happened to "We the People"? These are death panels plain and simple. What else do you call it when your skin color dictates whether you live or die? Me thinks that Martin Luther King would not approve.
The Supreme Court needs to step in here and spank these officials and spank them hard. This cannot stand. They need to be made an example of so that others wishing to implement these kinds of policies know and understand that this is not who we are as a nation. If one community can put people of color at the front of the line, another community can put white people at the front of the line. Can you imagine a weight-based lottery system? Hey, fatso! You're in the wrong line! How about priorities based on height? How about vaccinated versus non-vaccinated? Oh, wait.
I'm encouraged by what I'm seeing in Virginia. Glenn Youngkin, a republican, was sworn in yesterday as governor. I don't know if Virginia was heretofore a blue state or a purple state, political speaking, but I can tell you that in a Youngkin administration the state is going to be just a little bit more red than blue. Maybe a lot more red than blue, god willing. The new Attorney General has already fired the freaks from the prior administration and the house cleaning will continue. Say goodbye to teaching Critical Race Theory in elementary schools and say goodbye to a handful of onerous tax policies which were more than burdensome. "Virginia," as Governor Youngkin states with great aplomb, "is now open for business."
Oh, and he's doing away with vaccine and mask mandates as they are currently prescribed under Virgina law. He rightly places the responsibility of everything mask and vaccine related, when it comes to the children in the state, with the parents. Imagine that. Some schools and other institutions are already pushing back. My recommendation to the governor would be to get on the phone with governor DeSantis from Florida and ask him what he does to deal with the recalcitrant enterprises in his state. There has to be a price to pay for ignoring or bucking the will of the people making the laws. If he needs to make an example of them, then so be it. There's a new sheriff in town. Suck on it.
If I might, I'll quote Luke 12:47: "The servant who knows the master's will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows." Some conservatives viewed Youngkin with suspicion and, given that Youngkin appreciated Trump's kind words about his candidacy for governor but fell short of embracing Trumpism outright, thought that he might be just another fair weather conservative who talks a good talk but never gets around to walking the walk. I think the lot of them are more encouraged today after hearing him address the Virginia House in his first address to the Commonwealth of Virginia. It was pretty darn MAGA. Let's be hopeful, shall we?
Youngkin is a young man, relatively speaking, and it is a little refreshing to see someone so young and so full of vigor and vitality instead of the usual battle scarred warhorses that we see on the national stage these days. That carries a premium of its own and it's not something that you can fake, buy, or delegate if you're an old dog trying to market yourself to new and maybe younger prospective voters. Youngkin had instant cred with the young parents who, like himself, had children in school and had to worry about what they were being taught behind closed doors. He was simpatico in spades.
Maybe we American's are getting a little tired of the same old same old when it comes to voting for presidential candidates. I'm not sure how many democrats turned out for Youngkin but I'm guessing you don't win elections in blue (maybe purple) states without getting a significant number of crossover votes. That's a winning recipe if you're looking to break on through. I can see that working on the national stage as well. It helps to be seen as a viable candidate and not some Johnny-come-lately like Butt-Edge-Edge who, by all accounts, lacks the political heft that is typically required of candidates when running for the highest office in the land. I think "gravitas" is the word I'm looking for.
I'm not wanting to beat this Youngkin thing to death but I will say that he is probably a breath of fresh air when it comes to improving our prospects for securing the votes of the suburban moms. I'm talking about the same moms who love Trump's policies but who hates his tweets and his constant belittling of his political opponents. Trump could often be his own worst enemy and, to many, he is an acquired taste. Just how much of all of that a prospective voter is willing to swallow before pulling the lever in the voting booth is an open question. I do worry that we'll find out the hard way in 2024 that the political landscape has changed and not in a way that favors candidates like Trump. Maybe it depends on who the Dems put up.
I think I've said before that I do not like the vaccine passports for the simple reason that they discriminate against the unvaccinated. Oh, and the fact that government is open to such a thing tells me that someone needs to go back and read our Constitution. You know, the one that our founders wrote 250 years ago. Or, as Sleepy Joe puts it, "you know, the thing." There's a lot in the Constitution about tyranny and what we as a country need to avoid to make sure that we don't let that fucking camel's nose under the tent door. Well, this vaccine passport thing is taking hold in various larger cities across the United States and the latest city to implement the passport mandate is Boston. Paul Revere must be rolling over in his grave.
Fast forward 250 years, you might see Paul Revere driving through the North End of Boston in his Tesla with the windows down while yelling, "The Communist Chinese are coming! The Communist Chinese are coming!" We can laugh but it ain't just happening here. It's a global phenomenon. Anyway, I'll be picking and choosing my spots but I have no plans to frequent any establishment that demands that their customers show a vaccine passport in order to dine there. I'll happily support any and all efforts to close down said establishments if necessary. If enough restaurants go out of business, maybe the government officials will get the message. We're fucking Americans. Let's start acting like Americans.
There's talk here and there in the media about going to war with Russia. Yes, I know the Ruskies have amassed a large number of troops on the border of Ukraine but what the hell does that have to do with us? Do we have a vested interest in protecting the sovereignty of Ukraine? No, we do not. Most Americans couldn't find Ukraine on a map so there's that. Let's not forget, the Commander-in-Chief we have leading our troops into this so-called war is none other than feckless Joey Biden. Yes, the same Joey Biden who embarrassed our nation and our allies when he pulled our troops out of Afghanistan without having an exit strategy in place. You might remember the 13 marines who lost their lives as a result of demented Joe's ineptness.
Everything you heard and see coming out of the Biden Administration seems to suggest that this confrontation is imminent. To those of us who are clear eyed about Biden's intentions, this is a massive wag-the-dog campaign. It's all about distracting the American people from the day-to-day disasters created by Biden and his minions. And we all know, the one thing that Americans do well is that they get behind their Commander-in-Chief when our nation's blood and treasure are on the line. Just between you and me, no American that I know of thinks that we have any business getting into a war with Russia over Ukraine. Unfortunately, no one in the Biden Administration cares what the American people think. They know that Russia has nuclear weapons. Right?
This Voting Rights legislation that the democrats are trying to push through is a joke. We all know it's a joke. Not in the ha-ha sense of the word but laughable nonetheless in that we all know what the democrats are up to with this legislation. They are trying to federalize our elections and that means that the democrats can steal elections in perpetuity in order to stay in power. The good news is that they don't have the votes. They are two votes shy thanks to Senator's Manchin and Sinema. It's amazing to me that we have two democrats who are willing to break ranks with their party on legislation that is, by their own admission, legislation that will save our very democracy.
The vote will go down later this evening and I'm expecting Manchin and Sinema to stick to their guns. I can just imagine the pressure they are under by their leftist constituencies that see the wild-eyed notions of government in perpetuity slipping from their grasp. So close, yet so far. The progressive radio stations that I tune into on occasion are rallying their listeners to do everything they can to exert pressure on the two senators to get back in line or face the threat of being removed from office. It's not enough to have the communist contingent of the democrat party chase the likes of Krysten Sinema into a bathroom stall and harangue her from the other side of the door. It's all hands on deck.
The vote on the Voting Rights legislation has now come and gone. Thank you to the senators who stood tall in the breach and held tight to their promise to veto this terrible piece of legislation. This is what having a backbone looks like. The republicans should pay attention. They might learn something. I'm looking forward to listening to a day's worth of dems gnashing their teeth and clutching their pearls on any and all progressive radio stations that I can find. My cup floweth over with leftist's tears and I'll be sipping generously and deliciously throughout the day. We've won this battle but the war goes on.
I don't know what to say about Biden's press conference last night. Anything I say will be viewed as partisan since I wear my party affiliation on my sleeve so there's that. I tuned in to the CNN's and MSNBC's after the press conference and the looks on their faces told you everything you needed to know about how they thought the presser went. To a person, they were mortified. They saw what the rest of the nation saw. A decrepit and demented old man who was seemingly fading in and out of consciousness as questions were fired at him from a less than friendly press corp. He spoke at times in incomplete and disjointed sentences, bristled at accusations that he considered unwarranted, and gave Russia his personal assurances that the United States would do nothing if they were to wage "only a minor incursion" when it comes to invading Ukraine.
He looked older than his 78 years and his multiple plastic surgeries over the years have not weathered well. As a nation on the precipice of going to war with another nuclear power, one would hope for a less feeble Commander-in-Chief but this is where we are. His remarks about allowing a "minor incursion" came as a shock to both our European allies and our friends and allies in Ukraine. I can just imagine what the headlines look and sound like across the span of the European continent this morning. The White House issued a clarification but it was a day late and a dollar short. The damage was done. We're well past talking about a President who has lost a step or two. We're well past talking about a President who has lost his so-called fast ball. It's time to call 911.
So I get a call from the Falls last night telling me that Weesey was listening to her police scanner when she heard a call come over the radio that there was an ambulance heading over to Uncle Wally's residence. "That's not good," I thought to myself. It wasn't clear as to who was in need of an ambulance but it sounded like it had something to do with Uncle Wally himself. The caller was short on facts and we agreed to catch up in the next couple of hours when, hopefully, we might have more information. As it turned out, the ambulance was indeed for Uncle Wally. We now know that he's doing just fine. It was just one of those things. Scary, but not terminal. Very good to know. Indeed.
It made me realize that my lines of communication with the extended family could probably use a little shoring up. I talked to one of my siblings and I was grateful that someone, anyone, had the wherewithal to get on the horn to me. I left a message on Uncle Wally's phone expressing my concern. I was grateful when he returned my call within the hour sounding no worse for wear. It's not an overstatement to say that I was worried about him. I always call Uncle Wally on his cell so I had no other means for reaching out to his extended family for news. Maybe this is something to add to my list of things to work on in 2022. It's a worthy cause. No?
Did I mention that we took the Ev man's car in for servicing? I brought it into the local dealership so they could address the issue where he is getting water in the cabin of his car every time it rains. It turns out that it had nothing to do with the drains at the front of the sunroof. Rather, the windshield was the source of the leak and that came as a bit of a surprise to me. How the heck did that come to be? They resealed the windshield and dried out the floor of the car by removing the seats and taking the floor coverings completely out of the car. It wasn't inexpensive but it was a job that was better addressed by the dealership so I felt good about having made that decision.
I'm still of the mind that the car has a few problems that we've only begun to find out about. I would contend that that's one of the many potential downsides of buying a used car. Is it an out and out lemon? I wouldn't go that far. Did the dealership from whom I purchased the car know about its maybe one or more problems or potential problems? I think so. I can tell you that the Ev man is about as delighted as delighted can be to get his car back. I think he was not at all happy about the water leak business and having to live and deal with that was not something he was at all comfortable with. Maybe he thought it was unfixable? We got it figured out so, from here on in, fingers crossed.
Man, what is going on with the stock market these days? The indices were up anywhere from 25 to 30% in 2021 and, as of today anyway, they seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. You knew the stair stepping of the market to higher and higher levels in 2021 was not sustainable. It was just a matter of time before it came back down to earth. Like everything else in life, the stock market always reverts to the mean. Were I to give any advice today, I would stress the need for capital preservation given that the indices are trading on or below the 200 day moving average. Nothing good happens when price action is below the 200 day moving average.
Beneath the surface, a lot of stocks have been in a bear market for months. It's just been the high flyers with the high betas that have kept the indices at all time highs. In a bear market, it's just a matter of time before they come for the Apple's and the Amazon's. When that happens, it's Katy bar the door. In the last few days, we've seen a lot of selling into the close. That's another indicator of a bear market. It's not something you see in bull market. Can there be a countertrend rally here and there? For sure. I suspect we'll see good news sold off and bad news sold off even harder as we go forward. With any luck, and this is going to take a while to play out, we may get a mother-of-all buying opportunity.
Just to put a finer point on the carnage occurring in the market, the S&P was down 5.7% on the week. The Nasdaq was down maybe 8-9%. If this continues, real estate will be the next asset on the chopping block. This is what my financial guy says anyway. I think he's right. When people line up at their local banks wanting to borrow money on the inflated values of their homes in order to buy into the stock market, that's a problem. When it all comes crumbling down, they are left holding the bag. You know, up the creek without a paddle. Not sure if that's where all this is going, but it sure has an apocalyptic feeling to it. Is there anything that doesn't feel apocalyptic in Joe Biden's America?
Welcome Back, Kuhner!
16/01/22 07:10
The Kuhner-man is back! Mr Jeff Kuhner is back on the radio on WRKO in Boston after being off for maybe 4 weeks because he came down with the dreaded Covid. He's singing the praises of monoclonal antibodies and Ivermectin that he believes saved his life. The effects of the drugs, when he finally had access to them, were almost immediate. The fact that the federal government is trying to stop the flow of these drugs to states tells you everything you need to know when it comes to their obsession with trying to sell the jabs when therapeutics like the antibody treatments and Ivermectin work so well.
The Kuhner-man couldn't have been more clear about where he believes this Covid thing came from. That is to say, it was clear to him that this virus came from a lab. I've heard this story before. Everyone who comes down with it tells the same story. It almost feels synthetic, is what they say to a person. The Kuhner-man talked about people he knew who had received the jab and the follow-up boosters who were just as sick as he was or maybe even sicker. More to the point, the vaccines do not work and Fauci and his minions need to be held accountable for their role in this fiasco.
I'm glad the Kuhner-man is back on the radio. We need his voice in this fight against big government and the tyranny of the leftists who control our government. I'm talking about the Biden's and the Fauci's of the world and all of their sycophantic followers. You know, all of the 81 million people who voted for Bumbling Joey in the 2020 election. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. It is what it is, I suppose. If we can take back the House in 2022, we can get the proper investigations started and maybe, god willing, we can send a few of these criminals to prison.
The Supreme Court has had the Biden vaccine mandate thing for a couple days or more now and I'm wondering what's taking them so long to make a decision. Was it Justice Sotomayer (Liberal) who lied about the status of children afflicted with covid when she said there were 100k children lying in acute care settings with the virus? If the other justices didn't know that she lied when she uttered that nonsense they must know it by now because it's been throughly vetted in the most media outlets. Well, media outlets who have an interest in seeing to it that Americans get the facts and not the propaganda that the Bidenista's want you to hear.
Maybe they figured that they now need to take a deeper dive on the statistics before making a decision. You know, get to the bottom of what it really happening with this virus and the so-called vaccines. The vaccines that, by and large, have proved to be ill suited to dealing with the Omicron variant. Why would you agree to a mandate that forced people to get vaccines that simply don't work. In fact, they may do more harm than good. There are numerous stories of footballers, I think we're talking about soccer players here, who have died shortly after getting the jab. Oh, we're not supposed to talk about that, are we now?
How about the push by the Bidenista's to get younger people vaccinated? Young people have almost zero chance of succumbing to the virus so you have to wonder why the government thinks that they need to get the jab. Here in New Hampshire, in statistics just provided by the State, there have been 51k confirmed cases of Covid in young people between the ages of 0 and 19 since the beginning resulting in one death. That's right, I said one death. I have to believe that the one child that died had one or more co-morbidities. How many children will the government put at risk or, worse yet, condemn to death by giving them this vaccine that is still considered an "emergency use only drug"?
I think we are starting to see some cracks in the well crafted veneer that is the CDC. The director of the CDC was on the telly the other day saying the silent part out loud. She actually said that 75% of the deaths reported were actually for people who had four or more co-morbidities. She also clarified that many of the cases now lying in hospitals across our country were in the hospital for reasons other than Covid and were subsequently diagnosed with Covid. It was a real what-the-fuck-moment.
When one fellow was asked what this thing was all about, and I'm talking the obsession with wanting to get the jab into everyone's arms, he said very simply, "follow the money." If that doesn't make you sick, nothing will. The health and well being of our nation is now at the beck and call of Big Pharma? Are we guinea pigs to be jabbed, stabbed, lied to, cajoled, and all by the people we elect to public office? This is what we elected them to do? Never mind 10% for the big guy (Biden.) We're talking some serious kickbacks here and, when all is said and done, many of them must be imprisoned for their part in the scam.
Did I mention that I got suspended by Twitter? I'm not even sure if it's something that I said or maybe a meme that I shared. Funny thing is, even though I lost all of my follower information, I can still do a search for certain people or company's on Twitter and I can see their latest posts. I can't retweet, reply, send DM's, or anything like that. It's weird. Does "suspend" imply that my suspension is temporary? When suspended in the past, I could always see that I had x number of hours or whatever until my service was fully restored. I see none of that now so I don't know if it's temporary. I almost don't care.
I must have hit a nerve though. I think they're (Twitter) working overtime to expel conservatives and other critics of the liberal establishment ahead of what looks to be a landslide in November by the republicans when they take over the House of Representatives. The good news is that there are other options these days for we truth-tellers and truth-seekers. They are slow in getting on their feet so patience is the key for those of us wanting alternative platforms. Even Donald Trump is expected to have a platform up and running in February so we'll see what that looks like.
The Donald is having a rally on Saturday in Arizona so I'm looking forward to watching that on the telly. I don't know that I'm looking forward to hearing anything in particular but there is plenty of fodder in the queue so he shouldn't have any trouble sussing it all out and doing what he does best. Maybe he'll promise to pardon all of the January 6th defendants who have been sitting in jail since January 6th. He needs to recognize these so-called "insurrectionists" and he needs to condemn a Justice system that is responsible for treating them like dogs.
But, I digress. I thought I saw something yesterday about the Justice Department setting up a Unit to go after domestic terrorists. This, my friends, is Joe Biden's America. You know what they mean by "domestic terrorists", right? That would be anybody who speaks the truth about what we see going on in our country under the tyrannical rule of one Joseph Biden. It would be parents who dare speak out against what they see happening in their children's classrooms. It would be anyone who has a contrarian word to say about the Biden Administration's handling of the Covid pandemic.
Oh, and that would include anyone who believes in the so-called "big lie" that Biden stole the election. In other words, if you're not drinking the Administration's Kool-aid, you're suspect. It makes me wonder if those people planning to go to Trump's rally in Arizona this weekend aren't just a little concerned that the FBI and maybe this new Domestic Terrorism Unit are planing to infiltrate the rally for nefarious purposes. It's doubtful we'll see Ray Eps, since he's still denying his role as an alleged FBI agent in the January 6th riot, but the FBI has other agents and other means of doing what they do.
Maybe they'll plan to arrest everyone who attends the rally. Using facial recognition software, they will show up on their doorsteps in the pre-dawn hours in the weeks and months leading up to the mid term elections in November, 2022, just to send a message that if you're a supporter of Donald J Trump then that makes you an enemy off the state. I said it before and I'll say it again. This is Stalin-esque. Since when did it become fashionable in the United Sates to go after your political opponents and, worse yet, demonize his or her supporters and criminalize their behavior?
Did I mention that Mrs G doesn't like chimes? Who knew? I'm just now finding this out after she said something about it during the Christmas holiday. I wanted to get a better sense of what that was all about but she seemed singularly uninterested in talking about it. Just when you think you know someone, this comes out of left field. Not that it matters one way or another. Maybe it's a childhood thing. Maybe she's sensitive to certain tones or sound patterns the likes of what you get when chimes are really chiming. It's a cacophony of sorts that I find pleasing to the ear but not so for Mrs G. That's fine.
You know what they say about certain erratic patterns of light and how that can sometimes trigger a psychosis. Maybe the same is true with Mrs G and the sounds emanating from chimes. I'm guessing that's a nut we'll not soon crack so let's not beat it to death. She was inquiring about a certain soup establishment hereabouts the other day which resulted in her placing an order with me to pick her up some chicken noodle soup and maybe a greek salad assuming they have one or both available during my visit. Will do, Mrs G. I'm on it.
Man, I'm really hoping that Senator's Manchin (West Virginia) and Sinema (Arizona) stick to their guns when the time comes to vote for this Voting Rights piece of shit that the Democrats are looking to pass. They have already said that they are not willing to change the rules around the filibuster in order to get this legislation over the finish line and the dems are wanting to hold their feet to the fire by having them vote for it (or against it) next Monday on Martin Luther King Day. Do they really want to be the only two democrats senators who vote against a voting rights bill on Martin Luther King Day? I don't think either of them appreciate this desperate tactic so prepare to see the bill down in defeat. Here's hoping. Fingers crossed. Prayers placed. A little divine intervention would be nice.
The Ev man has had a problem or two with his car lately. His right rear tire has been losing air and he keeps getting messages on his dash that he promptly sends along to me after taking a picture of the message with his iPhone. That's fine. He got an even more urgent message the other day and I thought I'd better go over to his place to get a closer look at the problem. I asked him beforehand if he might take a look at the tires and, you know, just to get a visual. He remarked, "I'm no tire expert." He's so right. It is a little hard to tell sometimes if it's not totally flat. Compared to the other tires, maybe you can see a difference.
On the way over to his house I drove by a Tire Warehouse that was just up the street from his home. One way to nip this puppy in the bud is to just bring his car in and see what they have to say. Will they be able to fit me in quickly? Do they do drop-in's? It's just a slow leak for chrissakes. How much can it cost to fix that? With inflation raging under Bumbling Joe Biden, one can never be sure. Do they even have the employees on hand to get the job done? How many are out and on the dole because of a case of Covid or two? There was only one way to find out. I took his car and stopped in.
The Ev man wasn't interested in going along so I took the car over there myself. After the fact, I was up front with him and told him that this was something he could and should do for himself. It was an easy peasy job after all was said and done. I didn't think to tell him this at the time, but I should have told him that it was no different then going to his favorite sub shop and ordering a sandwich. Maybe I should have insisted that he go with me just to see how easy it was. It turns out that all he needed was a new valve stem on one of his tires. It was a $20 fix. It took maybe 20 minutes in total.
Ev has a bigger problem with some water getting into the cabin of his car when it rains and snows. I don't usually bring my cars to the dealer unless it's a problem that I think they are maybe both familiar with and that they have the appropriate tools necessary to get the job done. I'm guessing this is a long-standing problem with the specific model of Evan's car that they probably know all about and can likely apply a fix quickly and efficiently. We'll see how much this is going to cost but I'm thinking I'll be paying a premium for their services so I should be prepared to be shocked (but not surprised.)
I also asked that they take a look at the "check engine light" indicator on Ev's car which has been on for the last three weeks or so. It came on after that vacuum thing-a-ma-bob fell off his air filter hose. You know, the one that I struggled to pop back in and failed miserably. "It's the size of a fist" as I described it to the fellow at the service desk yesterday, but I couldn't really tell if he knew what I was talking about or not. The engine light never came on before that thing fell off so I'm guessing there is a connection. You know, 1+1=2, right? I just don't think that when I finally found someone to pop the thing back into place that everything got snugged up properly.
I've had a good mind to start a list of the things that have gone from bad to worse in the used car that we purchased for the Ev man back in 2020. Is this car the best thing since sliced bread or is it a lemon extraordinaire? I wouldn't say that there always seems to be something going wrong with the car but it sure seems that way. The minute you get one thing fixed, something else pops up. It's like a fucking game of whack-a-mole. He likes the car and so do I but it sure seems quirky for a car with only 70k miles. I sometimes think the car isn't quite right but it's never something that I can put my finger on.
One thing that I was pleased to see yesterday when I stopped by Ev's place was that he was bagging up some of the trash that had accumulated in his car prior to our bring it to the dealership. When I arrived, I saw him carrying a fast food paper bag as he was walking away from the car. I thought that odd since I had stopped to pick up a sub or two on my way over to his house, and had informed him of same, so why would he have gone out for food. He informed me that he was cleaning out his car before it went off to the dealer for repairs, hence, the bulging fast food bag he was carrying. Cleaning out his car has never been a priority so this was a welcome sight. Good for him.
Ev insisted that I go up to see his place when I was over. "I hope you brought your mask, dad." "You're going to need it", he said. He had apparently spent a lot of time cleaning and sorting out his place and I think he was looking for a bit of positive feedback. I can't be sure but I think his usual modus operandi when it comes to cleaning his apartment is to let thing go to hell in a hand basket and then take a deep dive when things get to a certain point. I've seen both ends of the spectrum and his place looked good yesterday but not perfect. That's not a criticism, it's just a fact.
I didn't say anything about the "not perfect" piece but he took note when I opened his microwave and then looked in his refrigerator. The microwave was in need of a good washing out and the refrigerator had lots of things, boxes and bottles and the sort, that were probably empty and better off in the trash than in his refrigerator. I hope he doesn't have my gene. You know, the one that has me leaving one or more stones unturned when I clean up. Maybe it's a dirty dish that I leave on the counter when everything else is spotless. There is a part of me that stops short when I'm otherwise on a roll and close to attaining what they refer to in the house cleaning business as "mission accomplished." I'm not sure where that comes from, but I know it when I see it.
What a difference a day makes. Both Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema are saying that Biden's Voting Rights bill is dead in the water. The democrats needed both of their votes in order to pass this bill that would federalize much of the election processes that currently are the bailiwick of the individual states. Federalizing theses processes would effectively give the federal government control of the processes and would enable and empower a corrupt democrat administration to put their stamp of approval on any and all election outcomes in perpetuity. In other words, it would empower them in their efforts to steal elections with impunity.
Sinema and Manchin were having no part of this scheme. Thank the baby Jesus! No republicans were planing to vote for it so the democrats would have to do it alone but needed all hands on deck. While the senators thought that the bill had some merit, they did not want to do a carve out on the filibuster to get it done. This is a huge victory for the American people. Biden has effectively been emasculated and, despite his last minute lobbying by showing up and making his pitch in the halls of Congress, the bill now has two fewer democrat votes and the bill will not now become law.
It was stunning to see a deflated and demented Biden standing alone in the hallways of Congress with a microphone in his face while members of Congress walked around and by him like he was an itinerant panhandler wandering from corner to corner in Times Square. It was almost like he didn't even exist. He looked pathetic and irritated that he even had to lower himself to go to Congress on bended knee but there he was. I don't know what fool of an advisor put him up to this stunt but he had to know in his heart of hearts that he was never going to get the support of Senator's Manchin and Sinema. It was all so futile.
Can anything else go wrong in the Biden Administration? Has anything gone their way? Their Build Back Better bullshit of a bill went down in flames just a few weeks ago and now this with the Voter Rights bill. Inflation has gone scorched earth and the Fed seems impotent when it comes to scaling back their printing of monies and raising interest rates. Everything is out of whack for demented Joey and his minions and it's hard to see how they come back from any of this. Certainly, Kamala Harris is not the answer. And, how about the Supremes knocking down the vaccine mandate? More winning!
There are currently 25 or so democrats who have announced their retirement from Congress. That number is expected to go to maybe 35 by the middle of February or so. That should tell you everything you need to know about what the mid term elections are going to look like. Spoiler alert: The democrats are going to get smoked. Was there ever a time in the history of our country when you had a president with approval ratings barely in the 30's and his party won seats in the mid terms? Uh, no. Let the fucking impeachment hearings begin is what I say.
I have to laugh. I was listening to this idiot on the radio yesterday talking about how past presidents whose approval ratings after their first year in office were abysmal and who subsequently improved their those ratings in years two and three. This may be true with past presidents but we're talking about bumbling Joey Biden here. We've never had a president more cognitively impaired than Bumbling Joey. Yet, not a mention of any of that. How do you not factor that into any predictions about what may or may not become of Joey Biden's remaining time in office?
Keep selling the unicorns and rainbow bullshit is what I say. And yes, the reporting on this issue came from a CNN contributor whose network's sole purpose is to prop up this doofus from Delaware and gloss over any and all imperfections real and perceived. Truth be told, the report begs credulity. If you're willing to write a piece and fail to make so much as a reference to his cognitive decline, then you give your readership short shrift and that is unforgivable. This is may be yet one more example of why CNN's ratings are in the toilet. Let me count the ways.
The Kuhner-man couldn't have been more clear about where he believes this Covid thing came from. That is to say, it was clear to him that this virus came from a lab. I've heard this story before. Everyone who comes down with it tells the same story. It almost feels synthetic, is what they say to a person. The Kuhner-man talked about people he knew who had received the jab and the follow-up boosters who were just as sick as he was or maybe even sicker. More to the point, the vaccines do not work and Fauci and his minions need to be held accountable for their role in this fiasco.
I'm glad the Kuhner-man is back on the radio. We need his voice in this fight against big government and the tyranny of the leftists who control our government. I'm talking about the Biden's and the Fauci's of the world and all of their sycophantic followers. You know, all of the 81 million people who voted for Bumbling Joey in the 2020 election. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. It is what it is, I suppose. If we can take back the House in 2022, we can get the proper investigations started and maybe, god willing, we can send a few of these criminals to prison.
The Supreme Court has had the Biden vaccine mandate thing for a couple days or more now and I'm wondering what's taking them so long to make a decision. Was it Justice Sotomayer (Liberal) who lied about the status of children afflicted with covid when she said there were 100k children lying in acute care settings with the virus? If the other justices didn't know that she lied when she uttered that nonsense they must know it by now because it's been throughly vetted in the most media outlets. Well, media outlets who have an interest in seeing to it that Americans get the facts and not the propaganda that the Bidenista's want you to hear.
Maybe they figured that they now need to take a deeper dive on the statistics before making a decision. You know, get to the bottom of what it really happening with this virus and the so-called vaccines. The vaccines that, by and large, have proved to be ill suited to dealing with the Omicron variant. Why would you agree to a mandate that forced people to get vaccines that simply don't work. In fact, they may do more harm than good. There are numerous stories of footballers, I think we're talking about soccer players here, who have died shortly after getting the jab. Oh, we're not supposed to talk about that, are we now?
How about the push by the Bidenista's to get younger people vaccinated? Young people have almost zero chance of succumbing to the virus so you have to wonder why the government thinks that they need to get the jab. Here in New Hampshire, in statistics just provided by the State, there have been 51k confirmed cases of Covid in young people between the ages of 0 and 19 since the beginning resulting in one death. That's right, I said one death. I have to believe that the one child that died had one or more co-morbidities. How many children will the government put at risk or, worse yet, condemn to death by giving them this vaccine that is still considered an "emergency use only drug"?
I think we are starting to see some cracks in the well crafted veneer that is the CDC. The director of the CDC was on the telly the other day saying the silent part out loud. She actually said that 75% of the deaths reported were actually for people who had four or more co-morbidities. She also clarified that many of the cases now lying in hospitals across our country were in the hospital for reasons other than Covid and were subsequently diagnosed with Covid. It was a real what-the-fuck-moment.
When one fellow was asked what this thing was all about, and I'm talking the obsession with wanting to get the jab into everyone's arms, he said very simply, "follow the money." If that doesn't make you sick, nothing will. The health and well being of our nation is now at the beck and call of Big Pharma? Are we guinea pigs to be jabbed, stabbed, lied to, cajoled, and all by the people we elect to public office? This is what we elected them to do? Never mind 10% for the big guy (Biden.) We're talking some serious kickbacks here and, when all is said and done, many of them must be imprisoned for their part in the scam.
Did I mention that I got suspended by Twitter? I'm not even sure if it's something that I said or maybe a meme that I shared. Funny thing is, even though I lost all of my follower information, I can still do a search for certain people or company's on Twitter and I can see their latest posts. I can't retweet, reply, send DM's, or anything like that. It's weird. Does "suspend" imply that my suspension is temporary? When suspended in the past, I could always see that I had x number of hours or whatever until my service was fully restored. I see none of that now so I don't know if it's temporary. I almost don't care.
I must have hit a nerve though. I think they're (Twitter) working overtime to expel conservatives and other critics of the liberal establishment ahead of what looks to be a landslide in November by the republicans when they take over the House of Representatives. The good news is that there are other options these days for we truth-tellers and truth-seekers. They are slow in getting on their feet so patience is the key for those of us wanting alternative platforms. Even Donald Trump is expected to have a platform up and running in February so we'll see what that looks like.
The Donald is having a rally on Saturday in Arizona so I'm looking forward to watching that on the telly. I don't know that I'm looking forward to hearing anything in particular but there is plenty of fodder in the queue so he shouldn't have any trouble sussing it all out and doing what he does best. Maybe he'll promise to pardon all of the January 6th defendants who have been sitting in jail since January 6th. He needs to recognize these so-called "insurrectionists" and he needs to condemn a Justice system that is responsible for treating them like dogs.
But, I digress. I thought I saw something yesterday about the Justice Department setting up a Unit to go after domestic terrorists. This, my friends, is Joe Biden's America. You know what they mean by "domestic terrorists", right? That would be anybody who speaks the truth about what we see going on in our country under the tyrannical rule of one Joseph Biden. It would be parents who dare speak out against what they see happening in their children's classrooms. It would be anyone who has a contrarian word to say about the Biden Administration's handling of the Covid pandemic.
Oh, and that would include anyone who believes in the so-called "big lie" that Biden stole the election. In other words, if you're not drinking the Administration's Kool-aid, you're suspect. It makes me wonder if those people planning to go to Trump's rally in Arizona this weekend aren't just a little concerned that the FBI and maybe this new Domestic Terrorism Unit are planing to infiltrate the rally for nefarious purposes. It's doubtful we'll see Ray Eps, since he's still denying his role as an alleged FBI agent in the January 6th riot, but the FBI has other agents and other means of doing what they do.
Maybe they'll plan to arrest everyone who attends the rally. Using facial recognition software, they will show up on their doorsteps in the pre-dawn hours in the weeks and months leading up to the mid term elections in November, 2022, just to send a message that if you're a supporter of Donald J Trump then that makes you an enemy off the state. I said it before and I'll say it again. This is Stalin-esque. Since when did it become fashionable in the United Sates to go after your political opponents and, worse yet, demonize his or her supporters and criminalize their behavior?
Did I mention that Mrs G doesn't like chimes? Who knew? I'm just now finding this out after she said something about it during the Christmas holiday. I wanted to get a better sense of what that was all about but she seemed singularly uninterested in talking about it. Just when you think you know someone, this comes out of left field. Not that it matters one way or another. Maybe it's a childhood thing. Maybe she's sensitive to certain tones or sound patterns the likes of what you get when chimes are really chiming. It's a cacophony of sorts that I find pleasing to the ear but not so for Mrs G. That's fine.
You know what they say about certain erratic patterns of light and how that can sometimes trigger a psychosis. Maybe the same is true with Mrs G and the sounds emanating from chimes. I'm guessing that's a nut we'll not soon crack so let's not beat it to death. She was inquiring about a certain soup establishment hereabouts the other day which resulted in her placing an order with me to pick her up some chicken noodle soup and maybe a greek salad assuming they have one or both available during my visit. Will do, Mrs G. I'm on it.
Man, I'm really hoping that Senator's Manchin (West Virginia) and Sinema (Arizona) stick to their guns when the time comes to vote for this Voting Rights piece of shit that the Democrats are looking to pass. They have already said that they are not willing to change the rules around the filibuster in order to get this legislation over the finish line and the dems are wanting to hold their feet to the fire by having them vote for it (or against it) next Monday on Martin Luther King Day. Do they really want to be the only two democrats senators who vote against a voting rights bill on Martin Luther King Day? I don't think either of them appreciate this desperate tactic so prepare to see the bill down in defeat. Here's hoping. Fingers crossed. Prayers placed. A little divine intervention would be nice.
The Ev man has had a problem or two with his car lately. His right rear tire has been losing air and he keeps getting messages on his dash that he promptly sends along to me after taking a picture of the message with his iPhone. That's fine. He got an even more urgent message the other day and I thought I'd better go over to his place to get a closer look at the problem. I asked him beforehand if he might take a look at the tires and, you know, just to get a visual. He remarked, "I'm no tire expert." He's so right. It is a little hard to tell sometimes if it's not totally flat. Compared to the other tires, maybe you can see a difference.
On the way over to his house I drove by a Tire Warehouse that was just up the street from his home. One way to nip this puppy in the bud is to just bring his car in and see what they have to say. Will they be able to fit me in quickly? Do they do drop-in's? It's just a slow leak for chrissakes. How much can it cost to fix that? With inflation raging under Bumbling Joe Biden, one can never be sure. Do they even have the employees on hand to get the job done? How many are out and on the dole because of a case of Covid or two? There was only one way to find out. I took his car and stopped in.
The Ev man wasn't interested in going along so I took the car over there myself. After the fact, I was up front with him and told him that this was something he could and should do for himself. It was an easy peasy job after all was said and done. I didn't think to tell him this at the time, but I should have told him that it was no different then going to his favorite sub shop and ordering a sandwich. Maybe I should have insisted that he go with me just to see how easy it was. It turns out that all he needed was a new valve stem on one of his tires. It was a $20 fix. It took maybe 20 minutes in total.
Ev has a bigger problem with some water getting into the cabin of his car when it rains and snows. I don't usually bring my cars to the dealer unless it's a problem that I think they are maybe both familiar with and that they have the appropriate tools necessary to get the job done. I'm guessing this is a long-standing problem with the specific model of Evan's car that they probably know all about and can likely apply a fix quickly and efficiently. We'll see how much this is going to cost but I'm thinking I'll be paying a premium for their services so I should be prepared to be shocked (but not surprised.)
I also asked that they take a look at the "check engine light" indicator on Ev's car which has been on for the last three weeks or so. It came on after that vacuum thing-a-ma-bob fell off his air filter hose. You know, the one that I struggled to pop back in and failed miserably. "It's the size of a fist" as I described it to the fellow at the service desk yesterday, but I couldn't really tell if he knew what I was talking about or not. The engine light never came on before that thing fell off so I'm guessing there is a connection. You know, 1+1=2, right? I just don't think that when I finally found someone to pop the thing back into place that everything got snugged up properly.
I've had a good mind to start a list of the things that have gone from bad to worse in the used car that we purchased for the Ev man back in 2020. Is this car the best thing since sliced bread or is it a lemon extraordinaire? I wouldn't say that there always seems to be something going wrong with the car but it sure seems that way. The minute you get one thing fixed, something else pops up. It's like a fucking game of whack-a-mole. He likes the car and so do I but it sure seems quirky for a car with only 70k miles. I sometimes think the car isn't quite right but it's never something that I can put my finger on.
One thing that I was pleased to see yesterday when I stopped by Ev's place was that he was bagging up some of the trash that had accumulated in his car prior to our bring it to the dealership. When I arrived, I saw him carrying a fast food paper bag as he was walking away from the car. I thought that odd since I had stopped to pick up a sub or two on my way over to his house, and had informed him of same, so why would he have gone out for food. He informed me that he was cleaning out his car before it went off to the dealer for repairs, hence, the bulging fast food bag he was carrying. Cleaning out his car has never been a priority so this was a welcome sight. Good for him.
Ev insisted that I go up to see his place when I was over. "I hope you brought your mask, dad." "You're going to need it", he said. He had apparently spent a lot of time cleaning and sorting out his place and I think he was looking for a bit of positive feedback. I can't be sure but I think his usual modus operandi when it comes to cleaning his apartment is to let thing go to hell in a hand basket and then take a deep dive when things get to a certain point. I've seen both ends of the spectrum and his place looked good yesterday but not perfect. That's not a criticism, it's just a fact.
I didn't say anything about the "not perfect" piece but he took note when I opened his microwave and then looked in his refrigerator. The microwave was in need of a good washing out and the refrigerator had lots of things, boxes and bottles and the sort, that were probably empty and better off in the trash than in his refrigerator. I hope he doesn't have my gene. You know, the one that has me leaving one or more stones unturned when I clean up. Maybe it's a dirty dish that I leave on the counter when everything else is spotless. There is a part of me that stops short when I'm otherwise on a roll and close to attaining what they refer to in the house cleaning business as "mission accomplished." I'm not sure where that comes from, but I know it when I see it.
What a difference a day makes. Both Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema are saying that Biden's Voting Rights bill is dead in the water. The democrats needed both of their votes in order to pass this bill that would federalize much of the election processes that currently are the bailiwick of the individual states. Federalizing theses processes would effectively give the federal government control of the processes and would enable and empower a corrupt democrat administration to put their stamp of approval on any and all election outcomes in perpetuity. In other words, it would empower them in their efforts to steal elections with impunity.
Sinema and Manchin were having no part of this scheme. Thank the baby Jesus! No republicans were planing to vote for it so the democrats would have to do it alone but needed all hands on deck. While the senators thought that the bill had some merit, they did not want to do a carve out on the filibuster to get it done. This is a huge victory for the American people. Biden has effectively been emasculated and, despite his last minute lobbying by showing up and making his pitch in the halls of Congress, the bill now has two fewer democrat votes and the bill will not now become law.
It was stunning to see a deflated and demented Biden standing alone in the hallways of Congress with a microphone in his face while members of Congress walked around and by him like he was an itinerant panhandler wandering from corner to corner in Times Square. It was almost like he didn't even exist. He looked pathetic and irritated that he even had to lower himself to go to Congress on bended knee but there he was. I don't know what fool of an advisor put him up to this stunt but he had to know in his heart of hearts that he was never going to get the support of Senator's Manchin and Sinema. It was all so futile.
Can anything else go wrong in the Biden Administration? Has anything gone their way? Their Build Back Better bullshit of a bill went down in flames just a few weeks ago and now this with the Voter Rights bill. Inflation has gone scorched earth and the Fed seems impotent when it comes to scaling back their printing of monies and raising interest rates. Everything is out of whack for demented Joey and his minions and it's hard to see how they come back from any of this. Certainly, Kamala Harris is not the answer. And, how about the Supremes knocking down the vaccine mandate? More winning!
There are currently 25 or so democrats who have announced their retirement from Congress. That number is expected to go to maybe 35 by the middle of February or so. That should tell you everything you need to know about what the mid term elections are going to look like. Spoiler alert: The democrats are going to get smoked. Was there ever a time in the history of our country when you had a president with approval ratings barely in the 30's and his party won seats in the mid terms? Uh, no. Let the fucking impeachment hearings begin is what I say.
I have to laugh. I was listening to this idiot on the radio yesterday talking about how past presidents whose approval ratings after their first year in office were abysmal and who subsequently improved their those ratings in years two and three. This may be true with past presidents but we're talking about bumbling Joey Biden here. We've never had a president more cognitively impaired than Bumbling Joey. Yet, not a mention of any of that. How do you not factor that into any predictions about what may or may not become of Joey Biden's remaining time in office?
Keep selling the unicorns and rainbow bullshit is what I say. And yes, the reporting on this issue came from a CNN contributor whose network's sole purpose is to prop up this doofus from Delaware and gloss over any and all imperfections real and perceived. Truth be told, the report begs credulity. If you're willing to write a piece and fail to make so much as a reference to his cognitive decline, then you give your readership short shrift and that is unforgivable. This is may be yet one more example of why CNN's ratings are in the toilet. Let me count the ways.
Irked
09/01/22 07:43
Here we go, fellow patriots! We are off and running! It's 2022 so let's get this fucking party started! Listen to me, Mr Bluster himself. All dressed up and nowhere to go. Got to start somewhere. No? I have no New Years resolutions so I should probably start there. I feel pretty good about staying on track with this here blog in 2020 so let's see if we can keep that going. Yeah, that's a pretty good place to start. I already put a bow on 2020 so we can say good bye to last year. Onwards to 2022!
We ain't got a lick of snow hereabouts so that's weird. Maybe there is something to the global warming bullshit the liberals are pedaling. There is no electric car in my immediate future so my pedal is to the metal with the carbon foot-printing that the libs so despise. I'll have no solar panels on my roof and no windmills in my backyard yard either. I plan to resist with every fibre of my being. I don't care how much I have to pay for gasoline at the pump. And, if I want to keep the thermostat at 70 degrees in my house, I'll damn well do as I please. Hrrruuumph!
It all fits so well with the liberals and their emasculation of our armed forces and the transitioning of our economy from a carbon based economy to a wind based economy. I read somewhere yesterday that Germany is in the process of doing away with their nuclear power plants that have been in operation now for decades. In the meantime, countries like China and Russia are doubling down on the production of carbon based industries that will likely sustain and support their expansionist goals into 2022 and beyond.
These woke generals of the Biden Administration are doing their level best to remove elements of our armed forces that they deem "extremist." Of course, they get to define what they consider "extremist" but we all know where they're going with it. They want to purge the best and the brightest, likely Trump supporters all, and anyone else with an iota of testosterone who will stand up and speak out about what they perceive as threats to our institutions from the left. A weakened and pussyfied military is a more maleable military and one that will do the bidding of a corrupt and illegitimate president like bumbling Joe Biden. What more could they ask for?
Where the devil is Jeff Kuhner? He's my main man on WRKO who I listen to starting at 6 every morning. Going into year end I remember him coming on the radio one morning talking about how he thinks he might have picked up Covid from his son. "The kids these days", he said. "They're bringing everything home from school including the dreaded Cove." "I feel like I've been hit by a truck." I don't know if he ever completed that day's show since I rarely listen to him for the entire four hours of his morning show.
I do know that he hasn't been on since before Christmas. I was fully expecting to hear him back on his show this morning both bright eyed and bushy tailed after being off for what, maybe four weeks? It's the New Year, for chrissakes. He's had time to get well and I'm really not happy that I'm not hearing him. I've googled this and that looking for his obituary, god forbid, and found nothing. I checked his Twitter feed and nothing there either. He has a very loyal base so I'm surprised that he's not reaching out to us with an update on his health and when he might be coming back to do his morning show. Crickets.
The purge of conservative voices continues this week with Twitter permanently ousting Congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Green. She is an outspoken critic of everything Biden and she's been stripped of her committee work in Congress so she's grabbed her megaphone and is rattling cages coast to coast against the leftists who are doing their level best to destroy our country. I appreciate her. We need more voices like hers. I suspect that she will be a major voice in Congress when the republicans take back the House in 2022. She may even lead the charge in impeaching one Joseph Biden.
So, I hope the powers that be behind the radio station that employs Jeff Kuhner aren't taking this opportunity to also silence his voice. He has been a constant critic of the Biden Administration and wholeheartedly believes that the democrats stole the election from Donald Trump. There is a lot at stake in both 2022 and 2024 so I wouldn't be surprised to see liberal power brokers try to control who does and who doesn't have a voice in 2022 and 2024. Its will make a difference in which party controls both congress and the White House in the years ahead.
Update: Jeff Kuhner contracted the Delta variant of Covid-19 and was in dire condition according to the person sitting in for him this morning. He was treated with monoclonal antibodies and Ivermectin and is now on the mend. He expects to be back in the saddle on WRKO next Monday morning. Oh, and he wouldn't haven't done anything different when it comes to taking the vaccine. He doesn't believe in mandates and he has never been anti-vaccine. He is all about choice. He is grateful for all the letters, cards, and notes wishing him well during these difficult times. It's good to hear from the old boy.
Uncle Wally informed us yesterday that Carli has come down with Covid. The timing is a little suspect but he believes she came in contact with the virus after spending time with friends on New Year's Eve. She just has a case of the sniffles thus far so no reason for alarm. People in her age group are more likely to get hit by lightning than die from some Covid related illness so there's that. I'll want to reach out to Uncle Wally today or tomorrow to see what, if any, mitigation measures have been put in place to protect other family members. Everyone is vaxxed to the max in their household so they should be fine even if it infects the lot of them.
I put our trail cam out last night and programmed it to be active between the hours of 10pm and 5am. I placed it on our back deck where I thought we might get a little action because of the heated bird bath we have there. It got pretty cold last night so I'll have to see how the camera held up to the temperatures that got down around 14 degrees overnight. I think 14 degrees was the threshold on the lower end so it will be a good test. If there is nothing on the disk then I'll have to rethink where I might put the camera the next go-round. I'm not sure that moving it after one night makes sense so I'll have to think about that a little bit.
This voting rights bill bulllshit that the democrats are pushing is a crock of hooey. It's nothing more than an attempt by the Federal Government to hijack the rights of the state legislatures to control their own elections. It's a constitutional matter, you dumb fucks. Read the Constitution. It's all there in black and white. The bill also assumes that the democrats will always be the stewards of our Oval Office so take from that what you will. Power in perpetuity is what the leftists want and they will stop at nothing to get it. If I'm not mistaken, I think the democrats are two votes short of being able to pass this legislation. Joe Manchin to the rescue again?
What I'm less certain of is what rules in the Senate that they might be able to change that would get them over the finish line without those two votes from Senators Manchin and Sinema. What the democrats fear, should this legislation not pass, is that the changes put in place since the 2020 elections by key swing states in order to correct certain shortcomings, will make it more difficult for them to steal elections going forward. The sanctity of the voting process must be preserved. That means leaving it in the hands of the individual states as was intended by our Founding Fathers. They were mindful of the tyranny that a federal government might impose if left to their own devices. It's almost like they saw it coming.
But I digress. I'm hearing that Trump has now cancelled his press conference that was scheduled for January 6th. I thought his speech was intended to set the record straight about what did and did not happen in our nation's capitol on January 6th, 2020. He's apparently planning to cover this material when he holds his rally in Arizona in the middle of January. With the kangaroo court of leftists and RINO's holding hearings in Congress on what version of January 6th they want the public to not only see but commemorate, I'd hoped that Trump's speech would offer a much needed alternative view.
Trump had such success with individualized and stylized speeches on specific topics in the days and months leading up to the Presidential election of 2016. I thought this was just one more speech that would do just that. The timing seemingly coincided with other fanciful and contrarian media events looking to memorialize the event in the minds and eyes of the voting public. If they can portray our former president as a criminal who fashioned a government take-down for personal gain, they can probably get just enough Americans on board with that view such that Trump wouldn't stand a chance winning a second term.
Let's call a spade a spade here. This is all happening because they know that Trump would beat Biden, and really any democrat for that matter, like a rented mule in 2024. The Attorney General of New York subpoenaed Donald J Trump, Don Jr, and Ivanka Trump the other day looking once again to further criminalize a family for no other reason that to paint them with a broad and damning brush. Trump has filed suit against the Attorney General for their harassment of the Trump family and Trump enterprises. The Attorney General actually ran for the office promising to bring Trump to justice. As they say in the old Soviet Union, show me the man and I'll show you the crime.
These are political tactics of Stalin's Russia or something you might expect to see in North Korea. It makes me sick. Criminal indictments, as ludicrous as that sounds, can't be far behind. Will they also be putting them in jail like so many January 6th participants who, to this day, are held behind bars without being charged and without any offer of bail? Yes, my friends, this is Joe Biden's America. This is your Democrat party in the year of the Lord, 2022. They thought that the Obama presidency would pave the way for a perpetual democrat presidency but Trump had other plans. Just between you and me, I believe that Trump still has other plans. Here's hoping.
Today is January 6th. A day that will go down in infamy. No, not really. It's a day that the leftists are doing their level best to memorialize as a day that our democracy nearly died because of the actions of one Donald J. Trump and his supporters. The leftists and their media lackeys tried desperately to sell it as an insurrection yet no one has been charged with insurrection. That hasn't stopped them from making this the next best, or baddest, thing since 9/11. But none of this has anything to do with the actual date on the calendar. It has everything to do with painting Trump and his supporters as far right extremists. You know, the kind of extremists that you can't possibly allow to come to power.
They need to be careful here not to cross the veritable rubicon when it comes to making allegations and potentially charging a former president with criminal activity. That puts the hard core leftists in a box of sorts. If they can't put Trump behind bars they will likely have to live with the fact that he not only can run for president again but that he is likely to win if and when he runs. If they are able to lock Trump up, then it is only a matter of time before the republicans lock up a president or former president of the opposing party. The horse will have left the barn and there will be no looking back.
It does make me wonder what the left wing media is going to talk about tomorrow (January 7th.) The public will likely moved on from January 6th although many leftists hope that January 6th will go down in infamy. How long can they possibly expect the public to follow their tiresome stories about maybe one more grandmother or perhaps a Trump supporter in a wheelchair who they've located and now want to bring to justice for their actions on January 6th. It's being reported that the Department of Justice has actually expanded their net and they are now looking to track down people who were not even on the grounds of the Capitol that day. WTF?
When Trump does address all of this in his January 15th rally in Arizona, he damn well better have something to say about the patriots who have been arrested and locked up without bail and the ability to see their family members since being arrested some months ago. It needs to be full throated and, well, Trumpian. It needs to be said with the same passion and fervor as his comments back in 2016 when not a rally went by when he didn't say something about either building a wall or maybe locking her (Hillary) up. Well, that bitch is still running free and the wall never got built in total so I guess fervor is one thing and fulfillment is another. Maybe it's all about giving people hope when things seem hopeless.
We're likely going to get between 6 and 8 inches of snow today. Ev is over for the duration of the storm and his car is tucked away in our garage. This is what we do when we get snow storms here in the Northeast. The whole business about moving his car here, there, and everywhere at his apartment building so the plows can plow the upper and lower lots without having to deal with plowing around cars is, I think, a bridge too far for the Ev man. As such, he has a standing invitation to hunker down with the missus and me when storms are in the forecast.
I don't know that this is a bring our world to a standstill kinda storm but it's enough to slow it all down and take stock of where we are, ask ourselves what do we need to get ourselves through the next day or two, and is what we have on hand enough to do the trick. I can get by on dried beans and brown rice if push comes to shove but the Ev man is a different story. He will need a meal or two or maybe three to get through it all. So, the missus and I went off yesterday seeing what we could find so that no one would have to worry about what we do and do not have in the refrigerator when the Ev man goes looking. Oh, and the missus is fine with rice and beans too. Just sayin'.
I always say that about rice and beans but if it ever comes to the point where that is all we have then I might be looking for a re-do. Did I really say that about rice and beans? I just shoveled a spot on our back deck and spread a bit of thistle around for the Junco's that seem to be looking for something to eat. They don't strike me as picky eaters. If they are open to eating thistle seeds then I have some good news for them. I have a large bag of thistle and I am in the sharing mood. Just don't wait too long, you little buggers, since the snow seems to be falling somewhat relentlessly at the moment and it won't be long before it disappears from sight.
I have another bag of combo thistle and sunflower seed concoction but I won't put it down because I don't want to attract any squirrels or other rodent-like animals to the area. They have a tendency to dominate the space once they come around and the Junco's, being the little scaredy cats that they are, don't respond well to bullies and will look elsewhere in order to continue their foraging. Although the Junco's seem to be around in groups, they don't seem to share well. They'll not stand side by side feeding on the same seed, unlike some other species, and maybe that says something about their competitive nature. What the hell do I know?
It's a nice fluffy snow so what's not to like? It will be easy to shovel and maybe even a little fun to get around in assuming we get out and about during the storm. You know how the missus likes to take a walk to the end of the street and back when we have these snow storms. Is it really a snow storm if we only get 6 to 8 inches? Maybe not by Montana standards but we don't live in Montana. And when the snow is light and fluffy like this, it sticks to the trees and coats everything it touches giving our neighborhood and environs a winter wonderland kinda look. Grab your boots, baby! We're going outside!
This is probably a good day to just grab a book, sit by the fireplace, and catch up on my reading. I've been meaning to look at Alex Berenson's book about the pandemic. I need to see someone reconstruct this nonsense and put it into some kind of perspective now that we're going into our third year of the pandemic. Berenson has been all over this from day one. He has been a regular on Tucker Carlson's show on FOX as maybe a voice in the wilderness when voices like his have been few and far between. It takes a certain amount of courage to swim upstream in a tide that is gushing in the opposite direction so I'm thankful for what he has to offer.
Speaking of Tucker, he had Senator Ted Cruz (Texas) on his show last night to explain why he referred to the January 6th rioters in our nation's capitol as "terrorists." Cruz's comments came earlier in the day at a Congressional hearing and it ignited something of a viral firestorm since he is the last person you would expect to hear use that kind of language as it relates to Trump supporters. I'm not sure what Cruz is running for in the coming months, be it President or another Senatorial stint, but he quickly realized that his choice of words were likely to alienate his supporters either way. You either walk back comments like that, and you do it quickly, or they will bury you and write you off for dead.
I'm not sure that Cruz did himself any favors by going on Tucker's show. It was a namby-pamby apology and Tucker so much as told him so. Tucker wasn't buying what Cruz was selling. He told Cruz that Cruz was one of the more articulate people in the Senate, if not the most articulate, and he knew better than to use a word like "terrorist" when referring to Trump supporters. I think Tucker's response took Cruz by surprise and he looked a little shell shocked. It was hard to gauge how much of what Cruz was saying was heartfelt and Tucker's pushing back wasn't helping Cruz's case. All-in-all, I would give him maybe a 4 out of 10 but that's about it. And, I like Ted Cruz, so there's that.
Headline this morning in the NewYork Times: "Amy Schneider became the first woman in the game show’s history to surpass $1 million in winnings during regular-season play." Wait one fucking minute, Jack. This is one of those trans jobs. You know, not REALLY a woman. I'm not trans-phobic or anything but I'm one of those old fashioned fellas who believes that there are only two genders. Is it genders, or is it sexes? To put it more simply, you're either born with a pair or you're not. This dude was born with pair and he'll die with a pair. I don't care how many operations he has to change any of it.
I'm all for getting these people the counseling that they need. I think the sexual dysphoria thing is real. We've all heard the stories of little Tommy wanting to dress up in his sisters clothes and little Sally wanting to hang out with the guys instead of joining her buds who prefer to join mom in the kitchen for an afternoon of baking. I can imagine that the parents of these children have unimaginable struggles that they probably never saw coming. Some reach the acceptance stage and some never reach the acceptance stage. Some go to their graves wondering what they could have done differently.
We are in a day and time when and where these congenitally confused individuals want the world to recognize them as what they want to be and not what they really are. Maybe they're getting a little tired of having to sit at the back of the bus, metaphorically speaking. "Be loud and be proud" is the their new rallying cry. You can't blame them for wanting more. That said, I draw the line at referring to them by the wrong gender. I'll not be addressing a man as I would a woman and vice versa. I don't care how many laws they pass that make pronouns a thing. Oh, and feel free to call me "old fashioned."
That doesn't stop rags like the New York Times from indulging them in their wildest fantasies. That may have something to do with the fact that the New York Times is wanting to play nice with the fanciful types whose city they share. It is the paper of record, don't you know. And just because the NYT does it doesn't mean that the rest of us have to like it. It doesn't mean that we can't say something just because someone or something might be offended. Why can't we be loud and proud too?
I wonder how real women feel about this misappropriation or hijacking of their sexual identities by these dysphoric imposters. Are they thinking, you go girl? Or, are they thinking that these men who think they're women need to stay in their own lane and stop co-opting the feminine mystique that real women have worked so hard over the years to cultivate and preserve? "Mystique" may not be the right word but you get my drift. And what about this asshat (man) who is competing in swimming competitions around the country as a woman and winning, not surprisingly, handily.
Women in these swimming feats don't stand a chance against a man who thinks he's a woman. You'd be surprised at how a little extra musculature can help get you from point A to point B faster when it comes to sports. This is not lost on the real women in those competitions. Just when you think you've reached the pinnacle of your sports career by going for the gold in your preferred sport of swimming, you're forced to stand at the starting line with a "women" sporting a three day stubble of what's left of his beard and a bulge in his Spandex that says in ways a woman can't, "I've got this."
Were I a woman standing on that starting line, I would urge every other female contestant standing with me to stay standing when the pistol goes off. Let this clown show of a man who thinks he's a woman do his thing and let the world know that we're having none of it. We want our old world back and we want it now. We have rights too! It will be the veritable shot heard round the world. It will be the start of a new world where real women compete with real women and real men compete with real men. You know, the way it used to be before the world went to hell in a hand basket.
Well, I'm glad I got that off my chest. Next up, the Supremes are getting ready to rule on Biden's vaccine mandates. I listened to a little bit of the oral arguments and I was astounded at the ignorance of some of the Justices on precisely what this Covid thing is and what Biden and his minions are trying to accomplish. Were they just throwing shit against the wall to see how much they could get away with? How can they come to any kind of conclusion when they don't understand the problem? I'm referring to the liberals on the court here just so there's no confusion. Here's hoping that the conservatives on the court have done their homework and can cut through the bullshit.
We ain't got a lick of snow hereabouts so that's weird. Maybe there is something to the global warming bullshit the liberals are pedaling. There is no electric car in my immediate future so my pedal is to the metal with the carbon foot-printing that the libs so despise. I'll have no solar panels on my roof and no windmills in my backyard yard either. I plan to resist with every fibre of my being. I don't care how much I have to pay for gasoline at the pump. And, if I want to keep the thermostat at 70 degrees in my house, I'll damn well do as I please. Hrrruuumph!
It all fits so well with the liberals and their emasculation of our armed forces and the transitioning of our economy from a carbon based economy to a wind based economy. I read somewhere yesterday that Germany is in the process of doing away with their nuclear power plants that have been in operation now for decades. In the meantime, countries like China and Russia are doubling down on the production of carbon based industries that will likely sustain and support their expansionist goals into 2022 and beyond.
These woke generals of the Biden Administration are doing their level best to remove elements of our armed forces that they deem "extremist." Of course, they get to define what they consider "extremist" but we all know where they're going with it. They want to purge the best and the brightest, likely Trump supporters all, and anyone else with an iota of testosterone who will stand up and speak out about what they perceive as threats to our institutions from the left. A weakened and pussyfied military is a more maleable military and one that will do the bidding of a corrupt and illegitimate president like bumbling Joe Biden. What more could they ask for?
Where the devil is Jeff Kuhner? He's my main man on WRKO who I listen to starting at 6 every morning. Going into year end I remember him coming on the radio one morning talking about how he thinks he might have picked up Covid from his son. "The kids these days", he said. "They're bringing everything home from school including the dreaded Cove." "I feel like I've been hit by a truck." I don't know if he ever completed that day's show since I rarely listen to him for the entire four hours of his morning show.
I do know that he hasn't been on since before Christmas. I was fully expecting to hear him back on his show this morning both bright eyed and bushy tailed after being off for what, maybe four weeks? It's the New Year, for chrissakes. He's had time to get well and I'm really not happy that I'm not hearing him. I've googled this and that looking for his obituary, god forbid, and found nothing. I checked his Twitter feed and nothing there either. He has a very loyal base so I'm surprised that he's not reaching out to us with an update on his health and when he might be coming back to do his morning show. Crickets.
The purge of conservative voices continues this week with Twitter permanently ousting Congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Green. She is an outspoken critic of everything Biden and she's been stripped of her committee work in Congress so she's grabbed her megaphone and is rattling cages coast to coast against the leftists who are doing their level best to destroy our country. I appreciate her. We need more voices like hers. I suspect that she will be a major voice in Congress when the republicans take back the House in 2022. She may even lead the charge in impeaching one Joseph Biden.
So, I hope the powers that be behind the radio station that employs Jeff Kuhner aren't taking this opportunity to also silence his voice. He has been a constant critic of the Biden Administration and wholeheartedly believes that the democrats stole the election from Donald Trump. There is a lot at stake in both 2022 and 2024 so I wouldn't be surprised to see liberal power brokers try to control who does and who doesn't have a voice in 2022 and 2024. Its will make a difference in which party controls both congress and the White House in the years ahead.
Update: Jeff Kuhner contracted the Delta variant of Covid-19 and was in dire condition according to the person sitting in for him this morning. He was treated with monoclonal antibodies and Ivermectin and is now on the mend. He expects to be back in the saddle on WRKO next Monday morning. Oh, and he wouldn't haven't done anything different when it comes to taking the vaccine. He doesn't believe in mandates and he has never been anti-vaccine. He is all about choice. He is grateful for all the letters, cards, and notes wishing him well during these difficult times. It's good to hear from the old boy.
Uncle Wally informed us yesterday that Carli has come down with Covid. The timing is a little suspect but he believes she came in contact with the virus after spending time with friends on New Year's Eve. She just has a case of the sniffles thus far so no reason for alarm. People in her age group are more likely to get hit by lightning than die from some Covid related illness so there's that. I'll want to reach out to Uncle Wally today or tomorrow to see what, if any, mitigation measures have been put in place to protect other family members. Everyone is vaxxed to the max in their household so they should be fine even if it infects the lot of them.
I put our trail cam out last night and programmed it to be active between the hours of 10pm and 5am. I placed it on our back deck where I thought we might get a little action because of the heated bird bath we have there. It got pretty cold last night so I'll have to see how the camera held up to the temperatures that got down around 14 degrees overnight. I think 14 degrees was the threshold on the lower end so it will be a good test. If there is nothing on the disk then I'll have to rethink where I might put the camera the next go-round. I'm not sure that moving it after one night makes sense so I'll have to think about that a little bit.
This voting rights bill bulllshit that the democrats are pushing is a crock of hooey. It's nothing more than an attempt by the Federal Government to hijack the rights of the state legislatures to control their own elections. It's a constitutional matter, you dumb fucks. Read the Constitution. It's all there in black and white. The bill also assumes that the democrats will always be the stewards of our Oval Office so take from that what you will. Power in perpetuity is what the leftists want and they will stop at nothing to get it. If I'm not mistaken, I think the democrats are two votes short of being able to pass this legislation. Joe Manchin to the rescue again?
What I'm less certain of is what rules in the Senate that they might be able to change that would get them over the finish line without those two votes from Senators Manchin and Sinema. What the democrats fear, should this legislation not pass, is that the changes put in place since the 2020 elections by key swing states in order to correct certain shortcomings, will make it more difficult for them to steal elections going forward. The sanctity of the voting process must be preserved. That means leaving it in the hands of the individual states as was intended by our Founding Fathers. They were mindful of the tyranny that a federal government might impose if left to their own devices. It's almost like they saw it coming.
But I digress. I'm hearing that Trump has now cancelled his press conference that was scheduled for January 6th. I thought his speech was intended to set the record straight about what did and did not happen in our nation's capitol on January 6th, 2020. He's apparently planning to cover this material when he holds his rally in Arizona in the middle of January. With the kangaroo court of leftists and RINO's holding hearings in Congress on what version of January 6th they want the public to not only see but commemorate, I'd hoped that Trump's speech would offer a much needed alternative view.
Trump had such success with individualized and stylized speeches on specific topics in the days and months leading up to the Presidential election of 2016. I thought this was just one more speech that would do just that. The timing seemingly coincided with other fanciful and contrarian media events looking to memorialize the event in the minds and eyes of the voting public. If they can portray our former president as a criminal who fashioned a government take-down for personal gain, they can probably get just enough Americans on board with that view such that Trump wouldn't stand a chance winning a second term.
Let's call a spade a spade here. This is all happening because they know that Trump would beat Biden, and really any democrat for that matter, like a rented mule in 2024. The Attorney General of New York subpoenaed Donald J Trump, Don Jr, and Ivanka Trump the other day looking once again to further criminalize a family for no other reason that to paint them with a broad and damning brush. Trump has filed suit against the Attorney General for their harassment of the Trump family and Trump enterprises. The Attorney General actually ran for the office promising to bring Trump to justice. As they say in the old Soviet Union, show me the man and I'll show you the crime.
These are political tactics of Stalin's Russia or something you might expect to see in North Korea. It makes me sick. Criminal indictments, as ludicrous as that sounds, can't be far behind. Will they also be putting them in jail like so many January 6th participants who, to this day, are held behind bars without being charged and without any offer of bail? Yes, my friends, this is Joe Biden's America. This is your Democrat party in the year of the Lord, 2022. They thought that the Obama presidency would pave the way for a perpetual democrat presidency but Trump had other plans. Just between you and me, I believe that Trump still has other plans. Here's hoping.
Today is January 6th. A day that will go down in infamy. No, not really. It's a day that the leftists are doing their level best to memorialize as a day that our democracy nearly died because of the actions of one Donald J. Trump and his supporters. The leftists and their media lackeys tried desperately to sell it as an insurrection yet no one has been charged with insurrection. That hasn't stopped them from making this the next best, or baddest, thing since 9/11. But none of this has anything to do with the actual date on the calendar. It has everything to do with painting Trump and his supporters as far right extremists. You know, the kind of extremists that you can't possibly allow to come to power.
They need to be careful here not to cross the veritable rubicon when it comes to making allegations and potentially charging a former president with criminal activity. That puts the hard core leftists in a box of sorts. If they can't put Trump behind bars they will likely have to live with the fact that he not only can run for president again but that he is likely to win if and when he runs. If they are able to lock Trump up, then it is only a matter of time before the republicans lock up a president or former president of the opposing party. The horse will have left the barn and there will be no looking back.
It does make me wonder what the left wing media is going to talk about tomorrow (January 7th.) The public will likely moved on from January 6th although many leftists hope that January 6th will go down in infamy. How long can they possibly expect the public to follow their tiresome stories about maybe one more grandmother or perhaps a Trump supporter in a wheelchair who they've located and now want to bring to justice for their actions on January 6th. It's being reported that the Department of Justice has actually expanded their net and they are now looking to track down people who were not even on the grounds of the Capitol that day. WTF?
When Trump does address all of this in his January 15th rally in Arizona, he damn well better have something to say about the patriots who have been arrested and locked up without bail and the ability to see their family members since being arrested some months ago. It needs to be full throated and, well, Trumpian. It needs to be said with the same passion and fervor as his comments back in 2016 when not a rally went by when he didn't say something about either building a wall or maybe locking her (Hillary) up. Well, that bitch is still running free and the wall never got built in total so I guess fervor is one thing and fulfillment is another. Maybe it's all about giving people hope when things seem hopeless.
We're likely going to get between 6 and 8 inches of snow today. Ev is over for the duration of the storm and his car is tucked away in our garage. This is what we do when we get snow storms here in the Northeast. The whole business about moving his car here, there, and everywhere at his apartment building so the plows can plow the upper and lower lots without having to deal with plowing around cars is, I think, a bridge too far for the Ev man. As such, he has a standing invitation to hunker down with the missus and me when storms are in the forecast.
I don't know that this is a bring our world to a standstill kinda storm but it's enough to slow it all down and take stock of where we are, ask ourselves what do we need to get ourselves through the next day or two, and is what we have on hand enough to do the trick. I can get by on dried beans and brown rice if push comes to shove but the Ev man is a different story. He will need a meal or two or maybe three to get through it all. So, the missus and I went off yesterday seeing what we could find so that no one would have to worry about what we do and do not have in the refrigerator when the Ev man goes looking. Oh, and the missus is fine with rice and beans too. Just sayin'.
I always say that about rice and beans but if it ever comes to the point where that is all we have then I might be looking for a re-do. Did I really say that about rice and beans? I just shoveled a spot on our back deck and spread a bit of thistle around for the Junco's that seem to be looking for something to eat. They don't strike me as picky eaters. If they are open to eating thistle seeds then I have some good news for them. I have a large bag of thistle and I am in the sharing mood. Just don't wait too long, you little buggers, since the snow seems to be falling somewhat relentlessly at the moment and it won't be long before it disappears from sight.
I have another bag of combo thistle and sunflower seed concoction but I won't put it down because I don't want to attract any squirrels or other rodent-like animals to the area. They have a tendency to dominate the space once they come around and the Junco's, being the little scaredy cats that they are, don't respond well to bullies and will look elsewhere in order to continue their foraging. Although the Junco's seem to be around in groups, they don't seem to share well. They'll not stand side by side feeding on the same seed, unlike some other species, and maybe that says something about their competitive nature. What the hell do I know?
It's a nice fluffy snow so what's not to like? It will be easy to shovel and maybe even a little fun to get around in assuming we get out and about during the storm. You know how the missus likes to take a walk to the end of the street and back when we have these snow storms. Is it really a snow storm if we only get 6 to 8 inches? Maybe not by Montana standards but we don't live in Montana. And when the snow is light and fluffy like this, it sticks to the trees and coats everything it touches giving our neighborhood and environs a winter wonderland kinda look. Grab your boots, baby! We're going outside!
This is probably a good day to just grab a book, sit by the fireplace, and catch up on my reading. I've been meaning to look at Alex Berenson's book about the pandemic. I need to see someone reconstruct this nonsense and put it into some kind of perspective now that we're going into our third year of the pandemic. Berenson has been all over this from day one. He has been a regular on Tucker Carlson's show on FOX as maybe a voice in the wilderness when voices like his have been few and far between. It takes a certain amount of courage to swim upstream in a tide that is gushing in the opposite direction so I'm thankful for what he has to offer.
Speaking of Tucker, he had Senator Ted Cruz (Texas) on his show last night to explain why he referred to the January 6th rioters in our nation's capitol as "terrorists." Cruz's comments came earlier in the day at a Congressional hearing and it ignited something of a viral firestorm since he is the last person you would expect to hear use that kind of language as it relates to Trump supporters. I'm not sure what Cruz is running for in the coming months, be it President or another Senatorial stint, but he quickly realized that his choice of words were likely to alienate his supporters either way. You either walk back comments like that, and you do it quickly, or they will bury you and write you off for dead.
I'm not sure that Cruz did himself any favors by going on Tucker's show. It was a namby-pamby apology and Tucker so much as told him so. Tucker wasn't buying what Cruz was selling. He told Cruz that Cruz was one of the more articulate people in the Senate, if not the most articulate, and he knew better than to use a word like "terrorist" when referring to Trump supporters. I think Tucker's response took Cruz by surprise and he looked a little shell shocked. It was hard to gauge how much of what Cruz was saying was heartfelt and Tucker's pushing back wasn't helping Cruz's case. All-in-all, I would give him maybe a 4 out of 10 but that's about it. And, I like Ted Cruz, so there's that.
Headline this morning in the NewYork Times: "Amy Schneider became the first woman in the game show’s history to surpass $1 million in winnings during regular-season play." Wait one fucking minute, Jack. This is one of those trans jobs. You know, not REALLY a woman. I'm not trans-phobic or anything but I'm one of those old fashioned fellas who believes that there are only two genders. Is it genders, or is it sexes? To put it more simply, you're either born with a pair or you're not. This dude was born with pair and he'll die with a pair. I don't care how many operations he has to change any of it.
I'm all for getting these people the counseling that they need. I think the sexual dysphoria thing is real. We've all heard the stories of little Tommy wanting to dress up in his sisters clothes and little Sally wanting to hang out with the guys instead of joining her buds who prefer to join mom in the kitchen for an afternoon of baking. I can imagine that the parents of these children have unimaginable struggles that they probably never saw coming. Some reach the acceptance stage and some never reach the acceptance stage. Some go to their graves wondering what they could have done differently.
We are in a day and time when and where these congenitally confused individuals want the world to recognize them as what they want to be and not what they really are. Maybe they're getting a little tired of having to sit at the back of the bus, metaphorically speaking. "Be loud and be proud" is the their new rallying cry. You can't blame them for wanting more. That said, I draw the line at referring to them by the wrong gender. I'll not be addressing a man as I would a woman and vice versa. I don't care how many laws they pass that make pronouns a thing. Oh, and feel free to call me "old fashioned."
That doesn't stop rags like the New York Times from indulging them in their wildest fantasies. That may have something to do with the fact that the New York Times is wanting to play nice with the fanciful types whose city they share. It is the paper of record, don't you know. And just because the NYT does it doesn't mean that the rest of us have to like it. It doesn't mean that we can't say something just because someone or something might be offended. Why can't we be loud and proud too?
I wonder how real women feel about this misappropriation or hijacking of their sexual identities by these dysphoric imposters. Are they thinking, you go girl? Or, are they thinking that these men who think they're women need to stay in their own lane and stop co-opting the feminine mystique that real women have worked so hard over the years to cultivate and preserve? "Mystique" may not be the right word but you get my drift. And what about this asshat (man) who is competing in swimming competitions around the country as a woman and winning, not surprisingly, handily.
Women in these swimming feats don't stand a chance against a man who thinks he's a woman. You'd be surprised at how a little extra musculature can help get you from point A to point B faster when it comes to sports. This is not lost on the real women in those competitions. Just when you think you've reached the pinnacle of your sports career by going for the gold in your preferred sport of swimming, you're forced to stand at the starting line with a "women" sporting a three day stubble of what's left of his beard and a bulge in his Spandex that says in ways a woman can't, "I've got this."
Were I a woman standing on that starting line, I would urge every other female contestant standing with me to stay standing when the pistol goes off. Let this clown show of a man who thinks he's a woman do his thing and let the world know that we're having none of it. We want our old world back and we want it now. We have rights too! It will be the veritable shot heard round the world. It will be the start of a new world where real women compete with real women and real men compete with real men. You know, the way it used to be before the world went to hell in a hand basket.
Well, I'm glad I got that off my chest. Next up, the Supremes are getting ready to rule on Biden's vaccine mandates. I listened to a little bit of the oral arguments and I was astounded at the ignorance of some of the Justices on precisely what this Covid thing is and what Biden and his minions are trying to accomplish. Were they just throwing shit against the wall to see how much they could get away with? How can they come to any kind of conclusion when they don't understand the problem? I'm referring to the liberals on the court here just so there's no confusion. Here's hoping that the conservatives on the court have done their homework and can cut through the bullshit.