Category Archives: Politics

August 17, 2024 · 23:04

Glitch Day #15

Payroll preperation was the cause. In my job there aren’t many priorities higher than that, not too many deadlines that are more important. We take care of our employees and that means that we get paid on time. Those deadlines are solid – miss them by 3 seconds and folks get paid on Monday instead of Friday and that’s a major failure mode.

So it was about 01:15 on Thursday AM when I hit the “send” button and wrapped it up, and about 01:16 when my brain unfocused from payroll processing enough to go, “Oh, crap!” For the 15th time in over ten years of daily posts on this site, there was no daily post. “C’est la vie,”  as the sophisticated French say, or “Shit happens!” as the somewhat more vulgar Americans would say.

A quick check shows it had been about 1586 days since the last time that happened, back on April 10, 2020. Oddly, while I do get anal about my “atta boy!” posts showing how many days in a row I’ve posted, and I didn’t get one of course on Thursday and am now starting over, I did get one at random from WordPress saying that (coincidentally!) someone looked at something on the site that day and it was the 100,000th “view” of one of my website pages.

Cool! If just a bit odd that it happened to occur on the day I broke that 1,586 day posting streak. Weird little Universe we got going here, but anyone watching politics for the past few years probably had noticed that.

Perspective is important. Not just the relative priority of keeping my little daily posting streak going vs getting everyone in the company paid on time, I was thinking more globally or cosmically as in the terrible news we got on Friday and everything going on with COVID and politics in the big, bad world and more personally the pain levels from my teeth and knee. (Both are getting better, but are very annoying.)

On so many different levels of our existance and life experiences, the common thread is that we’re going to get knocked down (or trip on a treadmill) and the only real option is to laugh, get up, and start over. Here’s to Day Three of the current streak.

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Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul, Politics, Writing

July 21, 2024 · 23:52

Fly The Plane!

My reaction to the news was a string of expletives that would have shocked a sailor and would have killed my saintly mother, and even then it felt inadequate.

So we need even MORE calm this evening.

There’s a lesson that I heard early and often when taking flying lessons. “Fly the plane!” Things happen, things that are unexpected, things that catch you off guard, things that surprise and distract you. You have be prepared at a cellular level to remember tha no matter what happens (a door flew open, the engine quit, there’s a fire or smoke, a bird strike) the first rule has to be to “Fly the plane!” The reasoning, in short, is that while bad things might be happening that will be disasterous in five minutes or ten minutes, if you lose control of the plane you now have two overlapping emergencies and losing control of the plane can kill you in seconds, so you’ll never have a chance to solve the unexpected problem.

This happened to me a couple of times. One time the door latch cut loose and the pilot side door popped open when I was just taking off, just a couple hundred feet off the ground and slow and climbing. Suddenly, tons of noise and wind and stuff blowing around the cabin. The plane will fly just fine with the door unlatched, THAT won’t crash you. Stalling the plane by climbing too steeply, or turning to bank, losing control when you’re low and have not room or time to recover, THAT will leave you the first one at the crash site in a ball of fire and a small crater. So “Fly the plane!”

Similarly, in 107 days we absolutely must prevent a psychotic rapist, felon, and traitor from getting anywhere near the Oval Office, and it would be really helpful to take honkin’ big majorities back in the House and Senate so that we can get legislation throught to fix some of the problems that have come up in the last dozen years. SCOTUS reform and accountability. Women’s reproductive rights. Trans rights. Voting rights. Repealing Citizens United.

Those are the things that we need to accomplish and winning the election in November is how we get them done. We got a surprise today, we’re caught off guard, we’re distracted. “Fly the plane!”

We have a lot of work to do. The initial signs seem good as of this evening, order is being restored. It might almost get exciting, as opposed to terrifying.

But we have to stay calm and “Fly the plane!”

Here’s some calm. (Ascutney again – DUH!)

The path ahead might not be flat or easy, but it can be beautiful and we can have a fantastic time travelling on it, working to reach our goals. It will be worth it. You know what to do.

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Filed under Flying, Photography, Politics, Travel

July 4, 2024 · 22:43

Are We Still Doing This?

Democracy, that is. We’re hip deep in fireworks, which is a good thing. Whereas democracy seems to be on shakier ground.

These are actually from an international competition in Montreal in August 2009, but “close enough for government work!”

 

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Filed under Fireworks, Photography, Politics

July 1, 2024 · 22:53

One Step Back

Thank goodness for the multiple steps forward in our lifetimes, because it feels like we took a HUGE step backwards today. It’s scary enough to see the damage, racism, incompetence, and outright treason being carried out for the last decade or so by one of the two major US political parties, which led to the deaths of over a million Americans from COVID in the last five years among other small details, but even with some of the evil, stupid, vile decisions that have come out of the increasingly illegitimate Supreme Court in the last few years, today’s tops them all. By a number of definitions, we are no longer a democracy. If the President is above the law, then we don’t have laws, and if we don’t have laws, we’re a failed society.

That’s on top of some of the personal angst going on, including the annoying pain and dental problems that don’t seem to be getting better.

It seems that my feeling of impending doom about July 2024 might have been justified. It’s not like we can’t expect the worst from the evil chucklefucks in the GOP and far-right white supremacists who want to take us back to the Fifties. (And that might be the 1850’s.)

So let’s stop doomscrolling and just breathe and calm ourselves. The Calm app helps, and here’s a picture of a peaceful, warm, beach and seagull, to help.

Tomorrow’s another day, I still (deep down) have faith that folks are good, and together we’ll get through this.

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Filed under Photography, Politics, Travel

May 30, 2024 · 23:49

It’s All The Same Horror

At work I’m reviewing resumes and applications for a position on my staff.

Back when this blog started, eleven years ago, I had just had the company I had worked for for 30+ years shut down and I was looking for a new position myself.

Twenty-five years ago, as a single dad, I got back into the dating game and looked for a new partner.

Now we’re about three years into a search for a new house, having looked at countless Zillow listings, and now ramping up the intensity of the search by actually getting out and looking at potential houses.

It occurred to me today that all of these endeavours, house hunting, dating, and job hunting are just different facets of the same horrible game.

We’re making life-altering decisions which are fraught with peril, where a mistake can have massive negative consequences but the correct choice can have equally massive positive results. Yet we are working in the dark with insufficient or even incorrect information, hoping for the best, praying for the very best, and terrified of the worst. It would be fantastic to just get out of the game, to be safe, but that doesn’t work either.

So it’s like the Three Laws of Thermodynamics, which can be colloquially phrased as, “You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the game.”

The potential upside is what makes it worthwhile, at least in theory. The chance to build a team, to have someone who will have your back, to be stronger as a team than the individuals in it, to have better tools and more capabilities.

Just be careful if you make the mistake of turning on the news…

A hell of a day, wasn’t it? Speaking of “horror.” But today we might have won one, despite what’s being said tonight by Faux News and the GOP “leadership.”

So we need to celebrate our victories, even if they’re not 100% complete and to the satisfaction of our dreams of a better world. We celebrate and we move on.

We can’t get out of the game. But we can keep playing hard and fighting the horrors.

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Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul, Politics

May 21, 2024 · 23:33

Nostalgia

One of the goals of our weekend trip to the Apple Valley / Hesperia region was to not eat at any fast food or national chain restaurants, but instead to eat at local, mom-and-pop style restaurants. We did that!

One of the meals was at a 50’s themed diner along what was once Route 66.

While there I got to thinking about nostalgia and how misguided and just plain wrong it can be. We have this whole warm and fuzzy thing going on about the 1950’s thanks to “Happy Days,” “Back To The Future,” and the like (“Peggy Sue Got Married” is a favorite of mine) but I was there. We had polio and measles and the Korean War and civil rights horrors and women were truly second class citizens and the Cold War and a lot of stuff sucked really bad! We think about Marilyn Monroe and James Dean and the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, which is fine, but it’s not the whole picture. It was not a more innocent time!

One thing that I’ve always loved from that era is the use of glass blocks as an architectural element. I love the look, especially if you can get some color or colored light coming through. I was glad to see several of the houses we looked at using it, particularly in bathrooms and shower settings.

In 2100, seventy-five years from now, will there be 2020’s-themed restaurants and movies? Will they glorify the era of Taylor Swift and the MCU and Teslas while ignoring the existence of Trump, COVID, and the Ukraine invasion?

Will anyone still be around to remember or celebrate anything at all in 2100? “Of course!” but if we’re not careful…

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Filed under Paul, Photography, Politics, Travel

July 15, 2023 · 23:23

Twitter Time Out

Huh!

It turns out if you respond to Ron Desantis’ Twitter ad (where he’s requesting support and money, of course) with a common phrase from my teenage days suggesting something anatomically improbable, you’ll get a “time out” and not be able to post on Twitter for a day or so.

HUH!!

First of all, isn’t that sort of thing protected political speech under the First Amendment? IANAL, but I watched a LOT of “Paper Chase” and I’m not sure John Houseman would have put up with any of this nonsense.

Secondly, my time out can’t even start until I “review and delete” the offending response? That feels way too much like an apology or an admission of guilt on my part, and that’s not happening! On the other hand, I am busier than god and I’ve got bigger fish to fry. That whole proverbial “hill you want to die on” thing…

Thirdly, I understand that while the suggested actions might be difficult for even a circus contortionist, the odds of good ol’ Ron being able to do them are, well, probably even worse than 🌟ME🌟 being able to do them. Still, the suggestion is hardly “abuse.” I like to think of it as good-hearted encouragement! Ron said he wanted 🌟ME🌟 on his team – don’t teammates encourage each other and urge each other to dream big?

(BTW, I saw someone I like on Twitter doing the “🌟ME🌟” thing today and while I suspect it paints a target on my back as an “olde,” I realized that A) I 🌟AM🌟 an “olde” and have been for quite a while, and B) I stopped giving a shit about the opinions of those who would diss me for being an “olde” back before most of them were born, so C) 🌟I’m🌟 going to keep doing it! It’s my name in the URL!)

But – I’ve digressed.

No, I’m not going to repeat the exact post, although you might still be able to see it on Twitter. I try to keep this site free of the worst of my extreme cussing, whereas Twitter is a PERFECT place for it. Especially since 2015 or so, if you catch the way I’ve drifted…

It’s weird – I get a time out for posting it, have to agree that it’s wrong and “delete” it, but it’s still up there so far as I can see. On the other hand, there are a LOT (or should that be “a 🌟LOT🌟”?) of really screwy things going on over at Twitter these days, so it may just be a screw up in their system. Who knows? Better yet, who cares?

I’ll be back to insulting fascists and blocking right-wing, guanopsychotic Nazis tomorrow. How long I’ll stay? Depends on whether or not they take the hint I was sending on the original note.

Just ’cause I was rude doesn’t mean I was wrong!

 

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Filed under Politics, Social Media

November 9, 2022 · 23:26

West

The storm is gone and our democracy is still here. -Ish, at least.

As with the election, so with the weather. It can always be so much worse – and it might be any time.

But for now, we’ll take it. “Perfect is the enemy of good,” as they say, and there’s a lot of truth to that.

Tomorrow’s another day.

We fight on.

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Filed under Photography, Politics, Sunsets, Weather

November 8, 2022 · 11:45

Vote!

Early again today with a couple of quick notes and one critically important message for the day:

    1. Critically important message for the day – if you’re in the US and eligible,

      VOTE!

    2. For last night’s total lunar eclipse, the last one until 2025, as expected, I saw exactly diddly squat.
    3. In case you haven’t heard, there’s an incredibly important election in the US today, so make sure you vote if you’re eligible!
    4. About an hour before last night’s total lunar eclipse started there were huge breaks in the clouds and the extremely bright full moon was lovely. You can see Jupiter just above the tree in the lower left.
    5. In many US states, California included, you can sign up and register to vote on the day of the election, so not being registered isn’t an excuse. If you’re in one of those states and you can do this, then vote!
    6. We didn’t win the $2.04B lottery last night, even though they’re reporting that the ticket was sold in LA County. There’s something like ten million plus folks in LA County and about 99% of them bought tickets. Someone’s a megabazillionaire today, but not on our block.
    7. In most states (I’m not an expert, but it’s what I keep seeing repeated) if you’re in line when the polls close, stay there and they have to keep the polls open until everyone votes. So get in line and stand your ground to vote!
    8. This morning, we’re getting some much needed rain. It’s only an inch or so, but given the multi-year drought we’re in, that’s a good thing.
    9. Finally, even if it’s raining or snowing where you are, even if the lines are long (which is actually a good thing!), even if it’s inconvenient, even if it means you’re going to miss some TV show or sportsball event, even if you’re really tired – none of those are legitimate excuses. For probably the most critical threat to our government since the Civil War over 160 years ago, we all need to go out and vote. Bury the fascists and their attempts to drag us back to the 1850’s with an overwhelming vote for democracy, personal rights, and human decency.
    10. With this list format, pictures, and video, the formatting on this is going to be bizarre – whatever. You know what’s important?

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Politics, Video, Weather

October 24, 2022 · 23:12

Ballot Deposited & Blood Donated

Getting things done, checking things off the list!

I know that there are vast stretches of this country where one of the two political parties has been working very hard for decades to make it extremely difficult for some people to vote. I understand why – it’s because they know that they can’t possibly win a free and fair election, they’re fascists who have to stay in power at all costs, and the ony way they can do that is by cheating or stacking the deck. That’s not a conspiracy theory, that’s documented fact. Just read the laws they’ve written and look at the gerrymandered maps that they’ve rigged up.

California’s the exact opposite of that and I sort of love it. When it’s time for voting, EVERY registered voter gets a ballot sent in the mail, and it’s easy to get registered. If you want to be kept in the loop on where your ballot is, sign up and they’re happy to overwhelm you with notifications. When they are going to mail out the ballots in a few days, I get a text, and email, and a phone call. Again when they actually do mail out the ballots. Again to remind me that the ballot should have arrived to remind me how many days there are to get it sent back.

Then when you put the ballot in a drop box (like I did tonight) you’ll get another round of texts, emails, and calls when they pick it up from the dropbox. And again when it’s scanned and counted.

Overkill, FTW!!

Every time I get even the tiniest little bit of annoyance or bother about it I think about Florida and Texas and Ohio and Mississippi and Georgia and I’m just fine with what California has going for it.

After dropping off my ballot, it was time to go donate a pint. I asked them to take only the blood that was saturated with those little hemoglobin H1C molecules and leave behind the ones that are still fresh and empty and happy. They smiled and nodded a lot, but I have suspicions about their sincerity.

The needle thing is fine, but I would really like to get back the arm hair on those patches where they yanked it all off  while removing the adhesives. Yanked it off gleefully, I might add.

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Filed under Health, Photography, Politics