Category Archives: Politics

November 6, 2024 · 22:59

Signs & Portents

Well, isn’t THIS just a fine fucking little nightmare!

I don’t even have words to start to express my disappointment and disgust with my fellow Americans.

Then I came out to this on the front porch this morning. It might have been an omen. Or is it a portent? Whatever.

Having the US flag ripping loose and hanging upside down seemed to be appropriate, especially with the leftover Halloween skeleton there.

(Image from ForeFlight app)

Probably not quite a sign from the gods – the winds had been pretty viscious all night. Whiteman was reporting winds at 45 knots, gusting to 60 knots, with Van Nuys, Camarillo, and Burbank all reporting similar readings.

If anyone has figured out what the silver lining or bright side to this debacle is, please let me know. I’ve got nothing.

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Filed under Photography, Politics, Weather

November 4, 2024 · 23:54

At The Edge Of The Abyss

When bored, I will sometimes flip through videos on Instagram and the other social media sites, and since the algorithms will feed you more of what you have already liked, I tend to get a lot of videos of roller coasters, bunjee jumpers, skydivers, BASE jumpers, and so on.

That’s the feeling tonight. Or, as the meme my daughter shared said, “Srong night-before-Helm’s-Deep vibes today.”

Fledgeling birds learn to fly by leaping and having faith that they’ll figure out the flying thing before they get killed. I’m optomistic by nature. I want to believe that we’re not staring into THE abyss, just maybe AN abyss. Maybe this time we’ll learn to fly before we crash and burn and die.

But I remember 2016. I remember after the “grab ’em by the pussy” tape and the mocking the handicapped video and the porn star payoff and all of the THOUSANDS of other offensive, disgusting, ignorant things that TFG did, any one of which would have permaently eliminated him from the possibility of public office, and then after he left office in 2020 the top secret documents and all of the illegal activities he’s been caught doing and the coup on January 6th, my god, THE COUP! And yet he’s still here and there are ways for him to win and I never, EVER thought that he could win to begin with and now I swear I’ve got PTSD from being exposed to him for all of these years.

And just about when I’m about to have another panic attack thinking about another 4 years of him, or more likely 4 weeks of him and then who know how many years with Vance and all of the Nazis behind Project 2025 and the horrors that are lurking, I think about how incredibly ANGRY women seem to be now. And kids, the generation that are voting for President for the first time, who grew up with active shooter drills every month the same way we used to have tornado drills in Kansas City.

Back on August 18th, when the Democratic campaign was energized and reinvigorated by Harris’s entry, I went on http://www.270towin.com and created my “aggressive & hopeful” map.

If I’m in my good head, if I’m not listening to the demons of my TFG PTSD, the only thing I would change tonight is that I think Iowa will turn blue. I think it will be something like 456-82 to Harris. But I’m mentally prepared (I hope) to be more disappointed than I’ve ever been in my entire life.

Get out there and vote tomorrow if you haven’t voted early. In so many ways, this truly could be the end of the world as we know it.

I’m really not feeling so fine.

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Filed under Deep Thoughts, Politics

November 3, 2024 · 23:34

The Next Week

I’ve seen this meme a dozen places in the last 48 hours and it’s ringing so very, VERY true right now. Another one says, “It’s like the whole world is waiting for biopsy results on Tuesday.” That’s true too, although I’ve been feeling more like the characters in “Melancholia” or “Deep Impact” waiting for the comet or rogue planet to hit the Earth.

Let’s keep the faith, keep breathing, keep our sense of humor, and hope for a

over the next 72 hours.

In the meantime, we’ve been experiencing our first good windstorm of the winter, which meant that the roads this morning were littered with palm fronds (which can shred a tire in an instant), small tree branches, tumbleweeds, and the odd, migrating Halloween decoration. In our back yard,

We will rebuild!

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Filed under Memes, Photography, Politics, Weather

October 31, 2024 · 23:50

No Mo’ NaNoWriMo

Tomorrow November starts, and in many years that would have meant the kickoff of a National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) effort on my part. If you’re curious, you can look back in the archives here and search for that term – I’ve always published my feeble and incomplete efforts on here. A couple of them I liked, a couple were just embarrassing. You pays your money, you takes your chances.

This year there’s no way on Earth I have the time or energy to even think about another campaign. I’m already on such physical and emotional thin ice with other time pressures and priorities that it would be suicide.

In addition, in the last year there have been “issues” with the management of NaNoWriMo, which runs as a non-profit. A number of the issues are serious, and while some heads have rolled and some changes have been made, I’m not convinced that the problem has been adequately addressed. So I won’t be a part of the NaNoWriMo organization or efforts, even if I did have the time.

There is at least one other group trying to get a new organization going (I forget the name of the group) but I haven’t heard much, just that it was trying to get started, so maybe we’ll see where we’re at this time next year.

For now – as expected, not a single trick-or-treater tonight at our house, primarily because we live off the beaten path a bit on the top of a huge freakin’ hill. Again, we’ll see where we are at this time next year, hopefully in that legendary Forever Home in a more pedestrian and family-friendly neighborhood.

November starts tomorrow and it will be a big one, especially with the US national election in five days. The fact that it could still go either way is terrifying. For the life of me, I truly can’t understand why it’s not 95/05 in the polls, or more. And even if it does turn into a resounding defeat for fascism, what the Mango Mussoli and his cult do in the days afterward has the potential to be horrific.

C’mon, November. I know you got the short end of the stick and a tough assignment. Make us all proud!

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Filed under Forever Home, Politics, Writing

October 25, 2024 · 23:33

The Stupidest Timeline

If you live off in the country or a rural-ish area or even a small city where things are a bit more normal and less “cool,” you might be lucky enough to not yet have seen one of these abominations in person.

In Los Angeles, we’re not so lucky. I present to you the Tesla Cybertruck, officially the ugliest, most useless, most disfunctional piece of shit ever put on the American roads.

For months now I’ve been seeing them almost daily just driving to the office and around down, but this was the first time I had seen one parked (at my office) and got up close to it. It’s worse up close, just hideous.

From all of the constant reports of massive recalls, to social media postings about how fragile and troublesome they are, to just the simple ugliness of everything about them, it’s astonishing that there are Elon Musk cult brodudes that are paying $100K to $120K or more for them, only to have them be broken and useless at the drop of a hat.

We are indeed living in the stupidest timeline. Even aside from the politics of the day, the MAGAts, the new American Nazis, and everything involved with our deteriorating and collapsing society, THESE are the clearest sign that we’re devolving into a dystopian nightmare.

My money says that the Venn diagram comparing Cybertruck dudes to MAGA cult members is a perfect circle…

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Filed under Curiosities, Los Angeles, Photography, Politics

October 19, 2024 · 22:53

We Voted – Your Turn Next!

While occasionally I’ll drop some snarky political comment on this site, for the most part I deliberately keep the political rants to a minimum. This is large part because once I get started, I’m not sure there’s any bottom any more to that toxic subject. Over on social media it’s a different story. Anyone who used to follow me when I was on Twitter, or follows me now on Facebook, Mastodon, Spoutible, Bluesky, Threads, or Tribel knows that I’m pretty far to the left (blue/Democratic/liberal) end of the political spectrum, and unapoligetically so. So it’s no surprise that I voted a liberal, Democratic line up and down the ballot. I will never, EVER vote again for a Republican, from President to assistant junior dog catcher, not even if there’s a gun to my head. And if TFG inexplicably gets back into the White House, that’s where I expect to be in four years. Our elections will be about as fair and honest as those in Russia or North Korea.

While California has extremely pro-voter policies and practices (everyone gets an absentee, vote-by-mail ballot, you can drop them off in any one of thousands of secure locations or mail it back and there’s a whole system of text messages, emails, and voice mails that keep you in the loop on whether or not your ballot has been mailed, received, or counted) other places might be less friendly to making it easy for folks to vote. Yes, that really, really is because the GOP-controlled government in those states is actively working to prevent folks from voting because almost universally these days, when folks are free to vote they’re not fond of the fascist and totalitarian policies being pushed by the Republicans and the billionaires supporting them. Reality’s a bitch. If you’re in one of those areas, even if it’s hard, please do what you need to do to vote and get your vote counted. Nothing’s ever going to change if you don’t.

The next twenty days will be excrutiating for me and a good chunk of the world I suspect. I don’t expect unicorns and rainbows if Harris & Walz get elected, but I’m quite certain that the tenth level of Hell and economic nightmares will be on the menu if TFG and Vance (who is worse somehow) are allowed access to power.

Let’s all make good decisions.

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Filed under Paul, Politics

October 16, 2024 · 23:41

Knuckleheads

With a title like that you might expect this post will be about a certain Presidential candidate with a single-digit IQ and serious dementia issues, California drivers, or the Three Stooges, but NO! It’s about pumpkins, in keeping with the rapidly approaching holiday. (If I had titled the post “Orange Knuckle Heads” then that would narrow it down to just the politician and the pumpkins.)

I spotted these in the local Ralph’s last Sunday and while I’ve probably seen this particular kind of gourd in the past, I didn’t know that they were named “Knuckle Head Pumpkins” ($7.99 each, but I’ll bet you can get them for half of that at an actual pumpkin patch).

There’s total overcast here tonight so no new comet pictures, after the May Gray and June Gloom has finally turned into a full blown case of October Something-That-Rhymes-With-October grayout.

The Ralph’s also had the more conventional type of pumpkins, at least a couple, which probably indicates that they were selling well while these were…lingering. That’s not fair, these have a ton of character! I’ll have to see if they’re still there next Sunday morning.

This one seems to have some of those “warts” that have popped – are the warts hard like the pumpkin rind or soft like a huge blister such as you might get on your foot after a long hike? I didn’t poke them to find out – I didn’t want to get a reputation at the local Ralph’s for being a pumpkin poker.

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Filed under Photography, 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