I got mixed up on my days and didn't realize today was our anniversary until my phone reminded me. Guess I need to set my phone to remind me the day before so I don't get into trouble.
Anyway. Onward!
You make me feel at home
You, you make me feel at home
This love, it grows
No matter where we go
You make me feel at home
Debbie, I want you to know that it doesn't matter where we end up, as long as you are there, it will always be home.
Love you for all time.
From where I sit, Ron DeSantis has nuked his political career. Debbie and I have lived in Florida for about 13 years. We're not really political people any more. I was heavily into it at one time, but... well... running for office cured me of the delusion that voting and "democracy" is anything other than smoke-and-mirrors. But I still kept my toe in so I knew who DeSantis was when he first became governor. Initially I wasn't really impressed. He just seemed like another empty suit. Then he started to make some bold moves that I liked, as well as the vast majority of other people here in Florida as demonstrated by his overwhelming second term win.
Then he decided to piss on all the people who voted him in with the understanding that he would complete his second term, then consider a run at the presidency in 2028. I mean, it is a law in Florida that you cannot run for another office while holding office. Heh. We all know that laws are for peons like us, not Really Important People like Ron. So he started in a hole with his home-state voters and proceeded to dig himself in deeper by attacking first Trump, then Trump voters, seeming to completely forget that MAGA put him in office. Twice.
But he wasn't done digging, or at least the brainless morons on his campaign staff weren't done. In the last couple of months, when it was clear to EVERYONE that DeSantis had zero chance against Trump, his staff released a series of the most tone-deaf ads that I have ever seen in the 58+ years I've been on this planet. The last one even included the state flag with a Nazis black sun superimposed over it and lines of soldiers. WTF! Now donors are fleeing, his campaign is shedding staff like a Bouvier sheds hair in spring, and every poll shows him losing voters in droves.
Bottom line: Ron DeSantis is done. At this point, he has pissed off so many Florida voters I doubt he could get elected dog catcher. He needs to end the madness, apologize to Trump and MAGA voters, finish his work here in Florida (he can start by addressing the property insurance disaster), then find a nice quiet beach and disappear from public life.
On that depressing note, it's off to bed.
I mentioned sometime back in April that I had been Borged by Twitter, mainly so I could listen to Tucker Carlson. So of course, while I'm already there, I may as well do my best to piss off the algorithm and started to follow every crackpot. It's been fun.
Now, there are those out there who would claim Elon Musk is the second coming of Jesus Christ himself, or maybe Moses leading us out of our captivity in the Egyptian hell of censorship into the Promised Land of free speech. Well, I got some bad news for y'all. In my short time on the platform, I already have a list of people I follow who have had accounts suspended, shadowbanned or deleted outright for no discernible reason other than expressing support for conservative politicians or criticizing liberals.
So far, none of this was affecting me directly, but now I think it is. When I first joined, every time I posted a comment or retweeted, I would get half-dozen likes and usually a follow. Lately, it feels like I'm talking to myself in an empty room. I've even run a couple experiments, leaving comment for people I had a lot of interaction with to respond in some way if they are seeing my comments and I get nothing. Then just when I thought I had been virtually nuked, I got a couple follows and several likes out of left field. Who the hell knows?
The bottom line is that Elon is no more independent than anyone else in the social media space. The federal government really has him over a barrel thanks to SpaceX, etc. All conversations are mediated by the FBI/CIA/NSA/DHS. The internet as we knew it back in the 1990's is dead and buried at this point. If you want to communicate with people, invite your neighbors over for drinks.
Later.
I have to be honest. Until Tucker Carlson did an interview with him, I had never heard of Andrew Tate or his brother Tristan. I just don't run in those circles, I guess. What that means is that my judgement of the Tate brothers is entirely based on what I saw in that interview with Tucker, and it is simply this:
Andrew Tate (and presumably his brother) is a narcissistic, misogynistic pig. If I had a teen-age son or daughter, I would move heaven and earth to ensure they would never be within 10,000 miles of a Tate. When someone spends an entire interview bragging about what a great guy he is, all I see is a perpetually insecure little boy who needs to make everyone around him small in order to make himself feel better.
Having said that, I do think the charges against him sound like complete bullshit. Yes, he is a creepy guy who likes to hang around with kids a little too much, but unless someone is accusing him of under-aged sex (and that is not what he is being charged with), none of this is illegal. The key witnesses are denying that any of the accusations are true, so of course the government claims that they must be brainwashed. The entire case looks like a frame job, an attempt to dent the Tate's because they are assholes.
An update to my previous post: the third roofer came and checked things out, and pretty much landed dead between the first two. The first guy told us our entire roof was shit, and the second guy said there wasn't a damn thing wrong with it. The third guy told us that the installation was shit, but that the membrane is fine and no evidence of damage or wear or leaks. So we dodged that $7,000 bullet. At least for now.
Well, it's late. Later.
Today was wet all day. Usually this time of year, it's sunny and hot in the morning, afternoon t-storms, then sun the rest of the day. Not today. It was just oppressively hot and humid with rain off and on all day. Luckily we could still get some work done under the carport. Then we received two pallets of rocks that we are going to use for a bit of erosion control/beautification project. Tomorrow is supposed to be drier, so we are going to try to take advantage and crank out some projects.
A couple months ago, we had a knock at our door. Some ass-clown tried to convince me that my roof was leaking. I knew damn well it wasn't, but it did get me to wondering about the state of the membrane on our roof. It's about 10 or 11 years old and this is Florida. Everyone knows that the weather around here is hell on building materials. I called someone for an estimate and had to listen to a half-hour litany of all the things that the original contractor did wrong and why it caused the roof to fail prematurely. Fixing it would cost us about $7K. We don't have seven large. We don't have $700. So we started looking at the cheapest place for us to borrow money. Meanwhile, the second company showed up. He was on the roof all of about five minutes and told us not to worry; there wasn't a damn thing wrong with our roof. I have a third company coming out tomorrow. He will be the tie-breaking vote. I have a sneaking suspicion that we will not be spending $7 grand on a roof.
One thing that we have learned here in Florida is that if it concerns any type of construction or house maintenance, keep a tight grip on your wallet. Everyone is a grifter.
So it's official. We are sending cluster bombs to the Ukraine in direct violation of both US and international law. The reason they are illegal is simple: a number of the bomblets do not immediately explode (the so-called dud rate) and instead lay on or just under the ground waiting for years or even decades to blow off body parts and kill people (especially children). Just as a real-world example, cluster bombs that we dropped on Cambodia and Laos back in the late 1960's are still killing and disabling people. Our excuse for sending this shit, most of which has been sitting around in warehouses for decades, is that we have simply run out of conventional artillery rounds.
OK, let me get this straight. The most powerful military the world has ever known cannot keep up with Russia in the production and deployment of something as low-tech as artillery shells? Ya know, Russia, that third-world shit hole country that can't do much of anything, other than taking and holding enemy territory, something the US hasn't been able to do since WWII.
Whatever. What I think or what any citizen of the US thinks no longer matters. The dumb fuckers will be throwing around their fucking cluster bombs that will be fucking up Ukrainian and Russian kids for the next six decades or so.
("Don't hold back, Ric. Tell us what you really feel!")
[PS: Debbie says that I have used up an entire month of fuck's with this post. Oh fuck....]
I realized that I haven't posted anything for several days. I'm not really sure why. Usually, it's because we are outside working in the yard, but it has done nothing but rain. I guess I just turned into a zombie for a bit.
On Twitter, I'm still seeing major push-back from the media against Sound of Freedom, a movie about rescuing child sex slaves. How exactly do you justify standing in opposition to saving children from the sex trade? One criticism I often see tries to affiliate various persons involved in making the movie with Q-Anon. Except when the events in the movie happened, there was no Q-Anon. When the script was written, still no Q-Anon. This is just a MSM smear that they throw at anyone they don't like.
Yes, it is true that Q-Anon accused all the world's elites of being involved in trafficking children with the operation being run from the basement of a Pizza Hut in Manhattan. After the Jeffery Epstein story broke, we discovered that the only thing Q-Anon got wrong was the location. But slurs like "Q-Anon!" are shouted by white liberals just as gutter rats such as myself back in the 1970's screamed "Faggot!" at each other.
Well, not much else going one around here.
We've been hammered with several 100+ degree days (that's not the "feels-like" temp; that's actual). We haven't done anything outside all week. We just hid indoors in the AC, which could not keep up in the hottest part of the afternoon. I don't know if our AC unit isn't large enough (hard to believe), or if it's just the thin, crappy walls and single-pane windows (very easy to believe). I guess we just live with it as we have no money to replace either the windows or the AC. C'est la vie.
There is a new movie that is setting box offices on fire. Sound of Freedom is based loosely on the true story of Tim Ballard who quits his HSA job after being pulled off a sex trafficking case. In spite of Hollywood/Disney doing everything they can to suppress this movie, it did $10 million in pre-sales before it opened on July 4th and it still has legs (unlike the latest Indiana Jones movie...). The question we need to ask ourselves is why Disney would try to squelch a movie about stopping child sex trafficking. Given the number of child sex rings that have Disney employees among those arrested, you really have to wonder. Add in the latest spate of Disney/Pixar movies with open homosexuality, trans, non-binary, or whatever other sexual deviance you can think of, and I think parents need to think long and hard about the amount of Disney in their kids lives. (If there are any evangelicals from my former life still reading this, I'm looking hard in your direction.)
That's it for today.
We will likely have another quiet day. There is some "doin's" at the Moose Lodge we will likely go to. Because of my dialysis, we probably won't do fireworks. Instead we will do what we usually do in the evening: watch TV while my dialysis machine grunts and moans.
Speaking of freedom, Twitterers (or whatever the hell you call people who live on Twitter 24/7) are all in a twat because Uncle Elon has instituted limits on how many tweets you can view in a day, etc. The entire point of the exercise is to stop the data scraping of the entire site on a daily basis. This puts enormous load on the servers, making the service slower and, more importantly, exposes every single person to governmental scrutiny. What you read, who you follow, what you say, all of it. So now there are limits to how much you can read in a 24-hour period with verified accounts getting more. I would think that would be obvious; you pay, you get more access. I'm not real clear on the argument that giving people who help pay the bills more access is somehow anti-free speech. Sorry but that makes no sense whatsoever. Is paying a phone bill anti-free speech? I'm more concerned about who is listening in on my phone calls and text messages [waves "Hi!" to the NSA] than I am about the $15 or so I pay every month.
Does that mean Twitter is perfect? Hell no! I've ranted plenty about people I follow being shadow-banned or having their accounts suspended for posting things that run counter to The Narrative. However, what's the old saw about perfect being the enemy of the good? Compared to Youtube or Facebook, Twitter is a haven of free speech.
Speaking of old saws, I'll close with one of Thomas Jefferson's: Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
Because I had so much fun the last time, I thought I would spend more time in the hospital. This was actually a scheduled outpatient procedure related to my kidney dialysis. But what got me was again the complete cluelessness when dealing with someone with diabetes. Even the original time of the procedure (10am) was problematic given that I was not allowed any food or drink after midnight. Then the doctor was over 3 hours late (not his fault, it was an emergency case). I already had an IV line, but instead of putting up a glucose drip like they normally do, they kept giving me glucose injections which made my sugar shoot up, then quickly crash back into dangerous territory. After everything was over, I'm in recovery trying to shake off general anesthesia with my blood sugar in the low 50's. I managed to get some OJ and graham crackers down me somehow and pulled up out of the nosedive, but it was close. Then after all that, a nurse told me it was all my fault because I had taken my normal amount of long-acting insulin the day before. It would have made zero difference either way; I had nothing to eat or drink from midnight on Wednesday to nearly 6pm on Thursday. I seriously doubt taking 26 instead of the normal 52 units of Tresiba would have mattered. In any case, I survived (barely) and fingers crossed, this is the last visit for a long time.
I've been spending more time on Twitter lately (too much according to Debbie) following all the fireworks around schools giving puberty blockers to young kids without parental knowledge or consent. Most people don't know that this sort of thing has been going on for a long time. School nurses have been routinely giving birth control pills to young girls on request without consulting the parents for a couple decades. It's a classic camel-nose-in-the-tent scenario. Public schools stopped educating (proven by over half of every graduating class being functionally illiterate) and became indoctrination centers for whatever whacky bullshit our universities dream up. The solution is simple. Don't waste your time going to school board meetings. Most of this stupidity filters down (along with dollars) from the federal and state level. Either advocate for a massive increase in property taxes or some other funding mechanism like an increase in the sales tax (good luck with that) so funding and with it control of the local school becomes local, or home school. The simplest solution to a broken system is to walk away. Yes, there is a cost, but it has been done by millions of other families.
I see the sun is rising, so I need to wrap this up. Later.
