Can't. Stop. Laughing!

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

So one of the things I love most about Takimag is that I never know what to expect. The other day, I was running through my usual morning routine and bumped into one of the most hysterical articles I've ever read:

These days, [San Francisco] is in deep shit—much of it human....

According to a group called Open the Books—whose partial mission statement seems to include counting turds on city sidewalks—the following are statistical facts regarding the Shitty Streets of San Francisco....

6,676 unexpected human turds have been reported this year already....

There were 13 reports of human waste in front of City Hall; 17 at the U.S. Marshals office; and 67 at the Tenderloin police station on Eddy Street. These public defecators do not lack for moxie....

Open the Books also maintains an interactive Turd Map that plots the tens of thousands of reported open-air human poopings with little brown pin points....

If you’re wondering why city officials simply don’t tuck the homeless away where they can’t be seen, it’s likely because San Francisco’s incredibly cloistered and soft elites adhere to an ideology that forces them to make a public display of “tolerance,” which is why it’s considered bad cricket to complain about seeing homeless people jabbing needles into their own necks and using tree trunks as toilet paper....

Last year, the city formed a “Poop Patrol” to tackle the crisis. Comprised of five workers who each earn $184,000 yearly in salary and benefits, they enjoy the dubious honor of being the city’s first-response squad whenever anyone reports seeing human feces on the streets....

Developers have also produced a phone app called SnapCrap that allows users to point, click, and officially report all instances of sidewalk shittery....

Holy Shit! Did an article for the Onion get posted on the wrong web site? A SnapCrap app? Poop Patrol? At nearly $1 million a year? "Unexpected human turds"? As opposed to expected human turds?

And the best part by far is that the idiot liberals who live there are actually proud of the fact that they live in a city buried in human shit because it makes them woke. I'd think one of the wealthiest (if not the wealthiest) cities in the wealthiest nation in human history could do better. I guess not.

Sorry guys; I'd rather be a racist/sexist/fascist/misogynist deplorable with clean streets.

Mulling Mueller

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

Due to family medical issues, I'm a little behind the curve with this, but hey, if you want breaking news, you probably ain't reading this anyway.

My first thought when the essence of the Mueller Report came out was Trump gets his second term no matter what. It now doesn't matter who the Democrats run, Trump wins in a landslide. At this point, I doubt it would even matter if the economy fell off a cliff; the Democratic Party is dead.

My next thought was, "There goes several American institutions down the toilet." I can't believe anyone will believe anything the mainstream media says for at least a couple decades. I lost all faith in the MSM a long time ago, but even I would have never believed CNN, the New York Times, etc. would have flat out lied, repeatedly, for years, about something as completely stupid as Russiagate. Not selective reporting of facts, not slanting the story, not using weasel words to say one thing while giving the impression of saying something else. That's what I've expected from the MSM since delivering copies of the Flint Urinal... er... Journal when I was twelve. But just flat out lying? And not just once or twice, or one journalist going off the rails, but rather 24/7, cover-to-cover lies? Not in my darkest moments would I have ever believed such a thing would be possible.

Then we have the FBI/CIA/NSA/State Department's efforts to hand the presidential election to Hillary. Granted, the grandiose veneer has been chipping off these agencies for decades, but their attempt to stage a soft coup here in the US, as opposed to the more-typical overseas activities, will wreck any credibility these agencies had both here at home and abroad for a very long time, if not permanently.

And finally, we have the DNC. How hard is it for these assclowns to figure out that Hillary lost because the majority of Americans simply do not like her as a person? Sure, both of the major political parties have gone tone-deaf to the voters and live in a self-referential bubble. But just how colossally stupid do you have to be to a) come up with such a cockamamie story to begin with, b) keep harping on it non-stop for more than two years, then c) when it all falls apart, double down and keep yapping about it. I think Mr. Sanders may soon regret lashing himself to the boat anchor the DNC has become.

The big question is, "Why?" The press, I actually understand. The media has made a killing off of Trump. I read yesterday over at Naked Capitalism (or maybe Automatic Earth) that CNN has increased the fee for a 30-second ad from less than $3,000 to more than $13,000 since Trump took his infamous escalator ride. That is a lot of Benjamins, and bottom line, the press is and always has been about the Benjamins above all else. In the case of the various government agencies, maybe they felt that their budgets would be under pressure if the US and Russia normalized relations, but there are plenty of valid reasons to be cautious, even suspicious, of Russia without inventing something as dumb, and easily disproven, as Russiagate. And the DNC? Maybe the people running the show really are just that stupid? Granted, I've seen plenty of institutions get stuck in a narrative and have difficulty breaking out of it, but at some point the antibodies kick in and the ship rights itself. (Excuse me while I madly mix my metaphors.) Were people working for the party that terrified of the Hillary cabal that they would rather see their party implode than speak up? That is some serious dysfunction you got going there.

Anyway, enough of my blah, blah, blah. Here is a selection of what others have to say:

Matt Taibbi: It's Official: Russiagate Is this Generations WMD

The [New York Times] was signaling it understood there would now be questions about whether or not news outlets like themselves made a galactic error by betting heavily on a new, politicized approach, trying to be true to “history’s judgment” on top of the hard-enough job of just being true. Worse, in a brutal irony everyone should have seen coming, the press has now handed Trump the mother of campaign issues heading into 2020.

...

Imagine how tone-deaf you’d have to be to not realize it makes you look bad, when news does not match audience expectations you raised. To be unaware of this is mind-boggling, the journalistic equivalent of walking outside without pants.

The Automatic Earth: Can We Lock Up Rachel Maddow Now?

Message to Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Kemala Harris, Tulsi Gabbard and the rest of the crew: you can stop asking for campaign donations, because you no longer stand a chance in the 2020 elections. Your own party, and the media who support you, made sure of that. Or rather, the only chance you would have is if you guys start another smear campaign against your president, and I wouldn’t recommend that.

Jim Kunstler: Buyer's Remorse

The Narrative is dead! Long live The Narrative!

That’s what played on CNN, NBC, and The New York Times yesterday as they struggled to digest the parting meal Robert Mueller served to the RussiaGate lynch mob: a nothingburger with a side of crow-flavored fries. Mr. Mueller was careful, though, to leave a nice red poison cherry on top with his statement that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Mr. Mueller, who ought to know better, could not be more in error on that too-fine-a-point. The official finding that no crime was committed is, ipso facto, an exoneration, and to impute otherwise is a serious breach of his role in this legal melodrama. Prosecutors are expressly forbidden to traffic in defamation, aspersion, and innuendo in the absence of formal charges. So, it will be interesting to hear what Mr. Mueller has to say when Jerrold Nadler reels him into the House Judiciary Committee, as inevitably he will, to do to some ‘splainin.’

The Russia Times: "One of the greatest hoaxes in US history": Russiagate Narrative's Peddlers to be Held Accountable?

The American establishment and mass media not only wasted millions of taxpayers’ dollars “fomenting and stoking tensions” between world nuclear superpowers, but also undermining any remaining trust in them, political analyst Charles Ortel told RT. Americans will have to be looking elsewhere for alternative news sources to avoid being duped any further by the chorus of disinformation from the mainstream media, he added.

Taki Magazine: Russiagate - A Bright Shining Lie

After two years of hearing from haters in politics and the media that President Donald Trump was “Putin’s poodle,” an agent of the Kremlin, guilty of treason, an illegitimate president who would leave the White House in handcuffs and end his days in prison, we learn the truth.

It was all a bright, shining lie.

...and pass the beer nuts.

Bob Seger!!

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

Bob Seger was in Tampa as part of his farewell tour. He may be pushing 80, but he still knows how to put on a show. One of Debbie's brothers was there with his wife and son, and one of my cousins came with us as well. We were laughing that it was a good thing Debbie's nephew came along so we wouldn't be the youngest people in the crowd. We had a great time and it was good to see some family we don't get to see very often. One thing with a crowd made up of old people is that everyone was pretty mellow. Not a lot of pushing and shoving, nobody puking, no fights, etc. The layout of the Amalie Arena makes it easy to get around in and find your seats. We were a little surprised by the lax security: we never had to show anyone that we had tickets. I put my ticket in my pocket when we got out of the car and never took it out until we got home. I used to work for the company that provides security; we checked tickets at the screening area, again when you went into the door, then again when you got to your section. It kinda pissed me off a little; I paid $125 for a ticket that never saw the light of day. But bottom line; awesome show. As always.

Tax season is in full swing and boy is it swingin'. I've already done more returns that I did last year and just with the returns I know are coming my way, I will be doing at least that many more. The phone is ringing off the hook and there is a steady line of people walking up on our porch. We always laugh about how nobody ever comes back to our out-of-the-way corner of the park, but we sure are getting company this year.

In medical news, I've gone from having no insurance to having two different insurances. I need to go through the foot-thick file of bills that have been sitting in the file cabinet since January and try to get some of these people off our backs. My pitch to them will be simple: No job, no money, whatever Florida Medicaid is willing to give you is all that you are ever going to get, so take it and be happy. Anyone want to take bets that will work? Heh.

In our continuing series documenting TEOTWAWKI:

The whole Russiagate thing started with Russian hackers supposedly breaking into the DNC's e-mail server, revealing that the entire Democratic Party apparatus conspired to ensure Hillary Clinton was the Democrat's 2016 presidential candidate. At the time I and many others said that it was complete BS; the e-mails had been copied onto a flash drive by someone working at the DNC who was probably sickened by their chosen party. Well, we were right:

We veteran intelligence professionals (VIPS) have done enough detailed forensic work to prove the speciousness of the prevailing story that the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks came from Russian hacking. Given the paucity of evidence to support that story, we believe Mueller may choose to finesse this key issue and leave everyone hanging. That would help sustain the widespread belief that Trump owes his victory to President Vladimir Putin, and strengthen the hand of those who pay little heed to the unpredictable consequences of an increase in tensions with nuclear-armed Russia.

The article goes on at length showing how that conclusion was arrived at. It is written by geeks, but in non-geek plain English. Long but worth the time if you care at all about that little thing called "truth".

David Holmgren is a permaculture guy from Australia. He recently published an apology from the Baby Boomers to the Millennials and whatever we end up calling GenZ. The entire thing is loaded with good stuff, but this bit caught my eye:

While our parents’ generation experienced the risks of youth through adversity and war we used our privilege to tackle challenges of our own choosing. Although some of us had to struggle to free ourselves from the cloying cocoon of middle class upbringing, we were the generation that flew like the birds and hitchhiked around the country and the world. How strange that on becoming parents (many of us in middle age) we believed the propaganda that the world was too dangerous for our children to do the same around the local neighbourhood. Instead we coddled them, got into the chauffeuring business, and in doing so encouraged their disconnection from both nature and community. As we see our grandchildren’s generation raised in a way that makes them an even more handicapped generation, we must be truly sorry for the path we took and the disease we created.

Gen Handicapped. I like it; has a certain ring to it.

One of the indications of a nation in decline is loss of faith in its institutions. For example, every nation in the world has always accepted that any plane deemed airworthy by the FAA did not need to go through whatever equivalent system that country has in place. Now, thanks to the 737 MAX debacle, that will surely change:

With the 737 Max 8 grounded worldwide, the MCAS system is now under scrutiny. A Boeing spokesman said on Sunday that the system met all of the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) certification requirements, but a group of anonymous Boeing and FAA engineers told the Seattle Times that the FAA delegated much of the safety analysis to the company itself, which cut corners to deliver the plane on time.

Typical corporate short-term thinking; rather than risk being "late to market" and lose sales, rush the process, kill customers, and lose even more sales than you ever would have had you just taken the time to do it right. It's the Flaming Pinto all over again, only this time, both a major corporation and a federal regulatory agency will be gettin' an ass whoopin'.

Last but certainly not least, we have a Matt Taibbi two-fer. I knew he had something big brewing when he went into radio silence for nearly three weeks. It was worth the wait. By now, everyone has heard that the Pentagon failed its first-ever audit. The problem is that they really didn't fail so much as make such a hash of their books, teams of accountants were unable to even offer an opinion:

At the tail end of last year, the Department of Defense finally completed an audit. At a cost of $400 million, some 1,200 auditors charged into the jungle of military finance, but returned in defeat. They were unable to pass the Pentagon or flunk it. They could only offer no opinion, explaining the military’s empire of hundreds of acronymic accounting silos was too illogical to penetrate.

When I was a kid, Senator Everett Dirksen allegedly said, "A million here, a million there; pretty soon, you're talking real money" in reference to federal spending. This was later inflated to "A billion here, a billion there...". What Taibbi dug up goes far beyond that:

...the Defense Department a few years ago found about $125 billion in administrative waste, a wart that by itself was just under twice the size of that $74 billion Enron bankruptcy. Inspectors found “at least” $6 billion to $8 billion in waste in the Iraq campaign, and said $15 billion of waste found in the Afghan theater was probably “only a portion” of the total lost.

My favorite bit of the entire article:

Meanwhile, the Air Force, which has a $156 billion annual budget, still doesn’t always use serial numbers. It has no idea how much of almost anything it has at any given time. Nuclear weapons are the exception, and it started electronically tagging those only after two extraordinary mistakes, in 2006 and 2007. In the first, the Air Force accidentally loaded six nuclear weapons in a B-52 and flew them across the country, unbeknownst to the crew. In the other, the services sent nuclear nose cones by mistake to Taiwan, which had asked for helicopter batteries.

When I read that, the first thing that popped into my head was an episode of M*A*S*H with some high-ranking dude explaining that, no the unit could not have some badly needed piece of medical equipment, but they could have a popcorn machine. Just use form blah-blah-blah-stroke-J, cross out "Machine Gun" and write in "Popcorn Machine". I guess whoever wrote that bit was closer to the mark than they knew, only it was form blah-blah-blah-stoke-H, and you cross out "Helicopter Batteries" and write in "Nuclear Missile".

And we trust these people with essentially unlimited firepower. And a trillion dollars a year.

Speaking of a trillion dollars, some people are trying to say Sanders is full of it when he talks about the big banks getting a trillion dollars in bail-outs after nearly wreaking the entire world economy. And it's true that the number is probably no where near a trillion dollars. Taibbi shows that more likely, it's somewhere between $7.7 trillion and $29 trillion. As he points out in the article, the bail-out went far beyond just TARP. There was TAF, TALF, TSLF, TOP, PDCF, Maiden Lanes, interest on Fed Reserve balances, and much more.

Meanwhile, we got the shaft. And the bill.

I think that I posted this before, but I figure that if you made it this far, you could use some suicide prevention. I thought of this video because Debbie is training for her new job, which comes with the possibility of getting a phone call from someone famous. The trainer was talking about treating them like anyone else and not squee-ing in their ear. Sort of the opposite of this:




I think what makes me laugh about that clip more than anything is that in a poll of the 7.7 billion people on planet earth, more would likely recognize Mayim Bialik than Mark Hamill.

And I will close with Dr. Jerry Pournelle's admonition: Remember that despair is a sin.

More Messing About

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

I'm still poking around in the settings for this thing to see if I can make it look how I want it to look. First, an apology: I hate blogs that have big ugly ads right at the top of the screen. I thought I had gotten rid of that by paying money, but alas, paying money only means thatI don't see the ads (or maybe Adblock+ is killing them). Anyone else visiting the site will still see them unless they also have paid money (or possibly if they are running Adblock+). Not sure I understand the reasoning. I believe there is a way to get the ad off the very top of the screen, but I haven't got that to work yet. Or maybe I have. I'm not real sure. The whole setup seems odd.

[Aside: I don't mind the pay-vs.-ads model. I understand that whoever is hosting this thing needs to make money, and I would rather work with someone who is upfront about it rather than do the Google/Facebook trick and secretly collect data on everyone and sell it to the highest bidder. But it should be either/or. If I'm paying, ads should not be inserted into my blog.]

I also don't like how the headers work. I've always had a primary header (Ric & Debbie's Place) followed by a quote. There is a place for a second header line, but it is limited to 20 or 30 characters, and it doesn't allow any formatting. For now, I stuck the quote on the top of the sidebar, but the whole thing is so small, it may as well not even exist. Worse, on mobile devices, the sidebar gets cut off the side and shoved to the bottom of the page.

I'm getting used to the old LiveJournal online editor, but the new one is too limiting unless you are just posting tweet-like entries. If you need to do any sort of serious formatting or [gasp!!!] edit the actual HTML, you are forced to use the old editor. [Update: I just spent an hour I don't have hand editing the HTML for this post because some asshat at LiveJournal has decided that instead of using the standard HTML paragraphing, they will insert dozens of div's and span's in some lame attempt to improve on the standard p-/p paragraph marks. Grrrrr.] I hope the new one is just something added on to make it easier to do quick and dirty posts from a mobile device and not a replacement for the full-on editor.

So yea, the bloom is off the rose and I am once again looking for a blog host that a) doesn't care what I say in my own damn blog posts, b) doesn't require me to run a full-blown mirror server on my machine just to make blog posts, and c) gives me a reasonable level of control over the format of the thing. In other words, I'm looking for Google's Blogger system without the evil.

Speaking of evil, has anyone else noticed how cable news has turned into Orwell's Two Minutes Hate, with the image of Emmanuel Goldstein replaced with Donald Trump's face and Big Brother's replaced with Nancy Pelosi's? The primary difference is that even in Orwell's dystopian nightmares, the Two Minutes Hate only lasted two minutes each day rather than the 24/7 seen on CNN and Friends. I don't know if that many people realize just how deep in the shit we are at this point.

I figure now that the 2020 Presidential Campaign Season (tm) is in full swing, I will try my hand at some predictions. If they fail to come about, I'm sure no one will remember anyway. However, if they come true, please know you read it here first.

Here we go:

If the Democrats run a Standard Democratic Candidate from central casting (Kamala Harris, Joe Biden), Trump will do a Bush-the-Younger and win in a near-landslide after squeaking into his first term with a minority of the popular vote. However, if the actual voters in the Democratic Party can pry the apparatchiks' cold dead fingers off the wheel and put up Bernie Sanders or someone very much like him, Trump will be booted out the back door. What could queer things is if the economy does a 2009/1929 swan dive. In that case, the DNC could literally run a yellow dog, and Trump will still be out.

In any case, whether Trump exits stage left in 2020 or 2024, he will be replaced with a Democrat. That Democrat will be granted exactly four years to fix everything. They will of course, fail. Completely. Utterly. In every detail (see Jimmy Carter). Also, if the economy hasn't already imploded under Trump, it almost certainly will at this point.

In my opinion, whoever/whatever rides in next (2024 or 2028) singing in an exaggerated operatic voice, "Here I come to save the day!!", we will be in for interesting times in the sense of the ancient Chinese Curse If we are very lucky, we get a Vladimir Putin. I don't think we're going to be lucky. I certainly hope I'm wrong, but we've dug ourselves way too deep in a hole. We seemed determined to burn every last shred of good will we have with every nation on the planet. As Elrond said, "Our list of allies grows thin." In fact, I can't think of a single country that can be considered a true ally of the US at this point. A few parasites like Great Britain or frenemies like House of Saud. But allies? Phbtttt. Furthermore, we have completely destroyed our political and social institutions at home. No one has any moral authority. It's all about who can scream the loudest into a bullhorn. That never ends well. The incessant looting of the working and middle class by the elites is just the rotten cherry on the shit sunday.

And no, I don't have a solution. I don't have a plan. I don't even have a vague notion of a hint of a thought about a hypothesis concerning anything that could be done. Other than the old school duck-and-cover

Lettuce Prey

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

We pause to express our gratitude to you, oh Flying Spaghetti Monster, for sharing your bountiful Noodly Goodness with us.

[sluuuuuuuuuuurp slurp slurp sluuuuuuuuurp slurp slurp smack smack]

Ahhhhhhhhh!

Ramen

Guess What Day It Is!!

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

Any day can be Hump Day....

The US in Decline

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

So I'm tooling around the internet, minding my own business, when this pops up:

As numerous US states introduce bills that would require or encourage ‘Bible literacy’ classes in public schools, President Trump has given the proposals the thumbs-up, calling the idea “great!”

Lawmakers in six states have introduced ‘Bible literacy’ bills, aimed at encouraging high schoolers to brush up on the Old and New Testaments alongside their regular subjects.

Um, didn't we already go through all this, like, fifteen years ago or so? Of course Florida is one of the six states, natch, so I guess its time to dust off my copy of The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and get serious about my Pastafarianism. I must admit I've been neglectful of worshiping His Noodly Goodness lately, but I just remedied that by polishing off an entire package of ramen.

Speaking of which, am I the only one who cannot eat ramen without thinking of this movie? Right? Guys? Hello? (sigh....)

Anybody remember when Google's motto was "Don't be evil"? I realize that we all now know that was never anything but a lie, but this is completely over the top:

Google and other online ad companies use intimate personal information like political beliefs, religion, sexual orientation, and even diseases and disabilities to target users for advertising

...

In response to a TechCrunch article republishing the category lists, Google released a statement claiming they prohibit advertisers from targeting based on “sensitive categories such as race, sexual orientation, health conditions, pregnancy status, etc.” They do not explain why multiple categories under each of those headers can be found on their “Publisher Verticals” list.

This is all passed around to internet advertisers through something called "real-time bidding" where basically anyone with the cash can get a list of people who did Google searches for information on AIDS or local drug treatment centers. The US government could care less, of course. Whatever the multi-nationals want to do is perfectly legal, even when it isn't. However, more civilized places like Europe are at least starting to push back. We'll see how far they get before the Great Orange Gollum tries to do a Venezuela on them.

And then we have the whole shit-storm over some Catholic kids in DC wearing MAGA hats. The original "narrative" (a word that is now synonymous with "damned lies") was that a bunch of over-entitled white male punks surrounded a Native American medicine man/chief and proceeded to mock and threaten him. The response of the Tolerance Brigade was the typical intolerance we've all come to know and love, with so-called adults declaring that 16-year-old kids should be punched in the face and thrown into a wood chipper. The entire narrative was shown to truly be a damned lie by the simple act of watching, in their entirety, any of the dozens of videos of the sad-ass episode that were posted within minutes of the actual event. Every word out of Mr. Native American's mouth is a lie; he is no kind of medicine man, chief, leader or anything else. He's some homeless vagrant who also claims to be a Vietnam Vet while never having stepped foot in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the real instigators of the entire dust-up, a bunch of loons who call themselves the Black Hebrew Israelites (think Westboro Baptist Church in blackface), have been... er... white-washed out of the entire "incident" by the MSM. But no matter; the Tolerance Brigade is also psychic! They know exactly what those little MAGA-ty shits were thinking! Even though they did absolutely nothing other than act with a maturity far beyond their years by refusing to be provoked, they still deserve to be punched and thrown into a wood chipper.

So get comfy on the couch, kids and grab some popcorn because the US decline is entering the bat-shit crazy phase.

Medical (Mal)Practice in Pasco County

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

So one of the things I was supposed to do after getting out of the hospital was to "immediately" make follow-up appointments with all 27 doctors who allegedly were involved in my care while I was an inpatient. Obviously, the word "immediately" means something very different in the medical industry than it does in the rest of the universe, because I've been out of the hospital for two weeks and I'm still trying to get see some of the doctors.

But the real treat was when I tried to make a follow-up with my cardiologist, which was "VERY important!" according to the hospital staff. Well, it may have been VERY important, but it was also impossible. We called both of the cardio practices affiliated with Adventist Healthcare (owners of the the local hospital) and were told the same thing: "We don't take self-pay patients. Our fees and test are just too expensive for someone like you to pay." We tried to explain that no, we don't have insurance, but we have somehow managed to pay all of our bills in full for the last eight years. No joy. Cardiologists are different than every other specialty.

Uh huh. Right.

So we tried another tact; we explained we were in the process of getting me on Medicaid as part of the whole disability thing. "That doesn't matter. We don't take Medicaid either."

What?!?!?

There are a few things about this that bug the hell out of me. The first is the sheer arrogance on display here. I've been to pretty much every other specialist in the medical industry and I've never paid more than $150 for an appointment. Who the fuck do cardio docs think they are? Just how much will a simple follow-up visit cost? And why would it cost an order of magnitude more than any other specialty? And even then, how in the hell does some receptionist in the office know what I can and cannot afford without even asking? I could understand giving us a heads-up about what office visits and follow-up test are likely to cost, and that we will be expected to pay for them up front. OK, that's just logical. But to assert on the basis of zero evidence whatsoever that I can't afford it? Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, bitch!

The second disturbing thing is that calling two allegedly independent practices got us nearly identical responses. It was as if they were both reading from the same script. In any industry other than medicine, this would be called collusion and would land the companies involved in court. But not the medical industry. It's just business as usual, like all the hospitals in Michigan colluding to keep nurses wages rock bottom through the Michigan Health & Hospital Association.

Of course, there is also the class/race dimension. How better to keep all us smelly spics, white trash, niggers and other deplorables away from your bright shiny cardio practice than to refuse to even make an appointment? I mean, seriously. You let in just one Medicaid patient, and the next thing you know, you have some homeless guy in the waiting room cooking a rat over a campfire!

Other than that, everything is going about how we expected. More tests, more tests, and more tests and still no idea what caused my kidneys to shut down. Now the kidney doc is leaning towards some massive infection (rather than my CLL drug) as the cause, even though my blood cultures all came back 100% negative, and at no point did my temperature break over 100 (and was mostly at or below normal) through the whole ordeal. Must be some new kind of infection. Possibly extraterrestial. Maybe I should be talking to Scully and Mulder instead of all these doctors....

And still no movement whatsoever on the job and disability fronts, so we continue to live off what little is left of our savings. It seems everyone is more interesting in jerking us around than in doing there jobs. No surprise there. At least we're getting caught up on our reading and movie-watching.

Well, I need to get busy scanning in yet-another butt-load of paperwork to send off to some government office where it can be quickly ignored.

Good Riddance 2018

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

This is late getting posted because 2018 decided to suck right to the very end (and beyond). I have been physically going downhill fast since around the middle of October. I nearly died Christmas Eve trying to take a shower. I probably should have gone to the ER then, but there was no way I was going to force my parents to spend Christmas Day in the damn hospital. I had to do Medical Stuff (tm) the day after Christmas anyway, so while we were in the general area, we tried to get something resolved. The whole thing spiraled out of control until I ended up in the ER. Unlike previous times in the ER, there wasn't any messing around; I was admitted and in a room within an hour of walking in the door.

Long story short: Congestive Heart Failure and Kidney Failure. After nine days in the hospital with endless blood tests, CT's, X-rays, ultrasounds, etc., no definitive answer why everything crapped out. The leading suspect at this point is the chemo pill I've been on for the last 18 months or so for my Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, but we won't know for sure until the results of the needle biopsy they did on my kidney Wednesday come back in a week or so. I could hardly breath with all the fluid on my lungs, so when diuretics didn't really help, the lung doctor did a Thoracentesis on my right lung on Sunday, then my left lung on Monday. Between the two, they sucked 5.7 liters of fluid out of my chest. No wonder I got winded walking from the couch to the front door.

So bottom line is I'm home, I can breathe, I can lay down in bed to sleep instead of sitting up in a chair, I have no idea what caused any of this, no idea if it will just happen again, no idea if I will be able to restart my chemo drug, no idea if the kidney failure is permanent. We have no idea what any of this is going to cost us. (Well, that's not entirely true; I have no intention of paying anything to the fucking bastards ever, so in a sense I know exactly what it will cost me: nothing.) In other words, business as usual whenever we have to deal with the Medical Industrial Complex.

Anyway. New Years. I'd rather forget 2018 ever happened, so I'm not going to waste my time even trying to hit the high points 'cause there weren't any.

And 2019 is starting off with a bang: Neither of us have jobs thanks to the Florida Assholes as Cruises-n-More and the Zephyrhills Moose Lodge. Debbie has a few leads she's working on. I'm working on total disability. I'm done. The pricks can shove it deep and on a slant.

The one big change since the last New Year is that our blog is no longer on Blogger for the first time since I started it back in March of 2004. Google has become nothing but a bunch of annoying busybodies. Look; anyone doesn't like the things I say or how I say them, they are free to go be somewhere else. I have no problem with that. But when Google takes it upon themselves to make it difficult for me to post or for people to read what I write because I used the term "nigger" then it's time to pack it in and go elsewhere. I already get all my news from Uncle Vlad, so I figured why not use him as my blogging platform as well? And the timing was good in that my domain renewal is coming up here in a little bit, so I'll be switching where rdfrost.com points from Blogger to here. I'm not going to bother to try to move over all the old posts; I'll just stick a link down at the bottom of my link list if I ever want to go back and look something up. I'm still tweaking the layout and how things work, but I think it's pretty much in its final form. I wasn't sure about the theme at first, but the Edgar Alan Poe vibe fits my current mood, so I think I'll be keeping it for a while.

As far as what else I expect from 2019, I guess the answer is, "Not much." We still have all the same home improvement projects staring us in the face as we did a year ago. I don't see that changing this year. Not working may free up enough time to get something done, but then we don't have any money to pay for stuff. I'm figuring Debbie will find some sort of job either here locally or one she can do from home. I'm going to push hard on the disability thing if for no other reason than getting on Medicaid will help us more than any job I'm likely to find.

As a country, 2019 could be more stumbling around with no direction or purpose (and managing to kill thousands of innocent people in the process), or it could be the year the house of cards finally comes apart. The markets look like they've lost all connection with reality, our political systems are being systematically destroyed for fun and profit, and even Mama Gaia seems royally pissed off. I try to avoid getting all end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it, but looking around at what is going on out there makes it hard not to slide into the same mindset as Jim Kunstler:

It’s not exactly the end of the world in Washington D.C., but as the old saying goes: you can see it from there! It’s out on the edge of town like one of those sinister, broken-down circuses from the Ray Bradbury story-bag, with its ragtag cast of motheaten lions, crippled acrobats, a crooked wagon full of heartbroken freaks, and a shadowy ringmaster on a mission from the heart of darkness.
The new Democratic majority congress has convened in the spirit of a religious movement devoted to a single apocalyptic objective: toppling the Golden Golem of Greatness who rules in the House of White Privilege. They’re all revved up for inquisition, looking to apply as many thumbscrews, cattle prods, electrodes, waterboards, and bamboo splinters as necessary in pursuit of rectifying the heresy of the 2016 election.

The simpleton California congressman Brad Sherman (D-30th dist.) couldn’t contain his glee, like a seven-year-old boy about to pull the wings off a fly. As soon as the Democratic majority was sworn in, he filed his articles of impeachment to impress his Wokester San Fernando Valley constituents out for deplorable blood. That was even a bit too much for Madam Speaker who reminded Sherman that some scintilla of a predicate crime was required — but surely would be available when Special Counsel Robert Mueller hurls down his tablets of accusation from on high.

Nothing good will come of this. Our country is being run by demented children playing with explosives.

Random bit picked up while hitting my daily web sites:

Saudi Arabia just instituted a new policy: women will now be notified by text message when their husband divorces them. This is considered an improvement over the old policy of not informing them in any way. Remind me again why these barbarians are considered allies, while the Syrians are our mortal enemies? Oh yeah. Oil. And money.

And I think that is enough for now.

Merry Christmas!!

As has been tradition here for many years (but apparently not last year), I give you some Youtube Christmas Cheer (tm):




And just because 2018 was the Year of Total Suck:

[Video removed; dumb move, people.]

Christmas plans are minimal; we'll start at my parents place in the morning with a few gifts, have lunch at the clubhouse, then crash back here and try to escape in mindless TV or books. We really just ain't in the mood....

Ticketmaster and Other Scams

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

Well, nothing horrible happened the last time I tried this, so why not try it again?
One thing using Evernote to write drafts did that I didn't notice right away is change the font size on the post. I wouldn't have expected that to copy over, but it did and I think it makes things a bit more readable. [So of course this time it didn't.] Why everything on the web has to be in 8 point type (and usually light grey text on a white background) has always baffled me since some dweeb started that crap back in 2003. It's even bleeding into real-world printed material. The last channel line-up we got from Spectrum was in maybe 6 point non-sarif text. Really guys?

Anyway, what I was going to talk about was our adventures today trying to buy Bob Seger tickets for his third? fourth? farewell tour. They added a show down here in Tampa, so we thought, "Why not? Now that neither of us have jobs, we have all this money to burn!" Step one was to pay to join the Seger fan club so we could get in line for tickets a couple days early. That was relatively painless and nothing unexpected happened with that part. Then today we attempted to buy the tickets. We made it through the entire waiting-in-the-virtual-line crap, found seats that didn't completely suck, then tried to buy them. According to Ticketmaster, we were not allowed to complete the transaction because we were using a "shared device". First of all, so what if it is? Secondly, it's a PC sitting in my house. It isn't "shared" by anyone. Several attempts later, we switched to my PC to give a try. Same result. Debbie did a complete reboot/reload on her computer and finally managed to buy a couple tickets. Then about ten minutes later, an entirely different section of much better seats started selling. Since when do the shit seats go on sale first? [Update: per Debbie, the cheap seats are shown by default and you have to click twice on the link to show better tickets, because reasons.] Anyway, Debbie tried to grab two of the better seats only to get that damn "shared device" error message again. At that point we decided to say, "Screw it."
Another fun bit was trying to figure out how to determine what the total cost of a ticket was going to be. There isn't a way, at least not before purchase. We found out what was being charged to our credit card only after the fact. Isn't there laws about this sort of shit? And it's not like the fees are immaterial:
Ticket cost - $95 x 2 = $190.00
Order processing fee - $5.00 (Now just what do you think I'm going to do on a ticket ordering site other than order tickets?)
Facility charge - $3.75 x 2 (Huh? What facility? You telling me Bob isn't paying rent to cover the cost of the "facility"?)
Service fee - $19.60 x 2 (I assume this is Ticketmaster, but let's not just say that....)
Standard Mail (10-14 days) - $5.00 (Last I checked, a first-class stamp cost $.50 and arrived in a few days. Ticketmaster must use the Pony Express.)
Total Fees - $56.70 or about 30% of the cost of the damn tickets.
On the upside, we got to watch this really cool animation of a dude walking while repeatedly being forced to stand in the virtual line because we were on a "shared device".
Speaking of assholes, more Moose shit going on. Governor Richard Riddling thinks he fucking Jesus Christ or something, going behind the bar and threatening bartenders and running the bartender meeting last Sunday. This is absolutely prohibited by the General Laws that govern all Moose Lodges, but as he himself has said repeatedly, he doesn't "give a fuck what the General Laws say." I'm giving the state and Moose International until the end of the year to fix this, then I'll be fixing it myself. I'll be damned if I stand by and watch the lodge get flushed down the toilet by some ego maniacal prick.
OK, now lets copy this over to LiveJournal and see what kind of mess it makes.

Off line Editor Testing

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

 

Trying something different; instead of doing my rough draft in the on-line editor; I'm trying out writing at least the first draft on my computer, then copy over to LiveJournal. That way, no matter what happens, I at least have a draft. I've been using Evernote pretty much since the day it was first released for any and everything. I like the editor and it does most everything I would ever need it to do for a blog post. I noticed that LiveJournal has some "off-line" editing tools, but I figured why go to all the trouble of installing and learning yet-another piece of software when I already had something that will probably do the trick. What will be interesting is to see how formatting copies over to the LiveJournal editor. I assume at this point, everything uses some form of HTML for text formatting, but these things never seem to work 100%. Excuse some testing:

This is bold.

This is Italics.

This is a link to some random web page.

This is just some regular text:

And then a quoted text block. (Oops; can't seem to do that in Evernote.)

Let's give this a shot.

Not horrible. There may be some clean-up, and I'll have to do some poking around on the block quote deal, but I think we have a winner!

Cha- Cha- Cha- Changes (Part Deux)

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

Well, just ran into my first big gotcha on Live Journal. An entire entry just went away somehow. Not sure what I did, but about two hours of work is just gone. Anyway, what follows is a bad recreation:

======

Monday night, right in the middle of the House Committee meeting, I told the board of Zephyrhills Moose Lodge 2276 to go fuck itself. I'd taken all the bullshit I was going to take. I'd been telling these jackasses not to make me the lodge Administrator, but it was easier for these lazy assholes to have me slide in by default rather than do the fucking job they were elected to do. It would have been different if it was some kind of emergency situation, but they've known for over 18 months that we needed a new Admin as the old one had taken a full-time job somewhere else and was doing the Admin work on nights and weekends. If we were a more-typical lodge of 40 members up in Elk Anus, Montana, that would have been OK. But we're a $1.3 million-a-year business with over 2,200 members just on the men's side of the lodge. When the old Admin decided it just wasn't working, everything should have already been set. Instead, it all landed on me.

We moved to the sweaty dick of North America for one reason only; keep track of my 80+ year old parents when they were down here in the winter and drive them back and forth to Michigan. All that was the first thing to go out the window. In fact, my parents felt compelled to buy memberships just so they could have fish dinner with me on Friday's. Otherwise, they never laid eyes on me. I never had any time for Debbie. All the work on the house came to a screaching halt. Hell, I couldn't even keep the grass mowed. It was just work and sleep.

Then my health started to go: Massive headaches that no over-the-counter med would touch. Eating was out of the question. Then the chest pains, shortness of breath and swelling legs. The best part was that I really couldn't do anything about it. I didn't have the time to go to a doctor, and the lodge doesn't provide health insurance for its employees, so I've been simply putting up with it. I'm sure that will end well....

A few weeks ago, it finally became offically-offical that I was the Administrator and the real fun began. There is a cabal on the board made up of the Governor Richard Riddling, Treasurer Dan Morgan and Jr. Past Governor Larry Robertson that is bent on revenge against the former Admin and his wife. Like cowards everywhere, they wanted someone else to do the dirty work for them; namely, me. At my first House Committee meeting I was too stunned by the unadulterated juvenile stupidity of the entire exercise to do anything. At the second one, I pushed back. Things got ugly very fast and I decided enough was enough.

So now I'm sitting on the sidelines laughing my ass off watching these fools scrambling around like ants whose anthill just got kicked over. I'm especially enjoying all the cries of, "Come back! Come back!" Yea. Right. It could happen, but only under my terms: One, the three people named above are off the board. That's non-negotiable. Two, I come back as temporary Admin while the remainder of the board gets off its fat ass and hires an Aministrator. Three, once the new Admin is in place, I go back to being the Admin Assistant.

None of that will ever happen, of course, so my feet are up while I enjoy the shit show.

Election Hangover

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

I stopped bothering to vote a long time ago, but I still get a kick out of watching the circus every couple years. Fortunately, I'm not alone. First up; Dmitry Orlov on Russian meddling:


and then some old-school George Carlin:


Look, it really is quite simple. Nothing you do can possibly matter. It used to be that local governments had some control, but Federalism is a long time dead. Any city mayor or state legislater who dares to defy DC will find themselves quickly brought to heel or squashed like a bug. Even at the federal level, we all saw what happened to Trump when he tried to end our pointless wars, normalize relations with Russia and slow illegal immigration. He was quickly set straight by the unelected bureaucracy.

So lower your stress level. Stop voting. Stop caring. Realize that in a thousand years, no one will know or care who was elected mayor of Miami in 2018.

Recycling to Armageddon

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

While we were in Michigan for Debbie's family reunion, I noticed certain of her family members digging through the trash pulling out "recyclables". I tried to explain that since China, in retaliation for Trump's tariffs, had stopped taking imports of American garbage, and that as a result, the nation's "recyclable" garbage was piling up in port cities and "recycling" facilities. A great deal of it is going into landfills. The rest is being shipped to other Asian destinations who don't even pretend to recycle it; they just burn the stuff in open pits. But at least we get to feel good about buying water in little teeny plastic bottles instead of just installing a water filter.

In any case, I thought of that little episode while catching up on my Lee Camp viewing and stumbling across this sweet little bit:



Being an old fart from when all this was called "ecology", I actually know what that little triangle/arrow thingy with the number in the middle means. A triangle was used because it was supposed to represent a three-step process: Reduce-Reuse-Recycle. In other words, step one is quit buying so much useless crap. Step two, when you do buy stuff, think about what it could be repurposed for at end of life. Then as a last ditch effort to keep it out of a landfill, find a way to recycle it. But being Americans, we were quick to realize that there is no profit in buying less shit or reusing our shit. Recycling, however, could be a multi-billion dollar corporate business that is only profitable because the entire population is guilt-tripped into being unpaid labor and most collection is taxpayer-subsidized. The new triangle/arrow thingy now means: Buy! Buy!! Buy!!! Buy!!!! (but only at eco-friendly stores) - Reuse? Are you nuts? What will my hipster friends think? - Carefully sort the result into the proper bins and tell ourselves what wonderful people we are.

The irony in all this is, as Lee Camp points out, we are using more resources and more energy with all this "recycling" than if everyone just went back to tossing everything into a trash can.

Taking the Plunge

Well, I did it. I paid the $20 bucks to see just what I can do with this thing. The first thing was adding the rest of my links over there on the right. The problem is that I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get the Customize Journal Style without going into Help and searching on "link list". That seems like a cumbersome way to navigate, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how else to get to that page.

I'll get it eventually, I suppose. If nothing else, I'll have to ask the support types how to do it.

Anyway; the reasons we've been incognito for four months.

The first kick in the teeth was, of course, the death of Debbie's mom. We're still trying to get our feet back under us from that one. We do a lot of sitting and staring at nothing, not really interested in much of anything. So we were starting off from a pretty low baseline.

Then we had Debbie's family reunion the first part of August (her mom's family, natch). The drive up nearly killed us, then on the drive home, we ended up stranded with a dead car in the big booming town of Pioneer, Tennessee. We scrambled trying to get the car fixed and/or replaced, but we broke down on a Friday around 10pm and couldn't even get a tow until Monday morning. Meanwhile, Debbie's asshat boss was making threats about how she better get back to work ASAP. (More on those shitdicks in a bit.) We finally got the car running and managed to limp home, but we were both now so far behind at work and at home that it all seemed hopeless.

The next bit of fun was my boss announcing that he was stepping down as Administrator and was leaving the job to me. Understand that this has been the assumption among the members and the board, but I've been consistently saying that me as Administrator would be a disaster for the lodge and for Debbie and I personally. So naturally, everyone thinks I'm just being modest. No, I'm being honest, but to no avail. The process moves ahead with the inevitability of a freight train. If you see a mushroom cloud rising up from Zephyrhills, Florida, you'll know what it is. I'm not even officially official in the job yet and I already have a couple dozen people who refuse to speak to me. No big deal; they're mostly whiny pains-in-my-ass, but probably not a good sign about my future in this job.

Meanwhile, the prick owners of Debbie's place of employment, Cruises-n-More, refused to give her the time off she needed to go back up to Michigan to clean up her mom's affairs. Understand that this is a family-owned business. These people think nothing of taking off for months at a time to go take care of precious daddy when he gets a sniffle. (He lives in Hawaii; what a massive burden it must be for them....) Debbie told them back in May that she was going to need some time around the end of October or first of November. Once plans were final, Debbie gave them exact dates. They dicked around for three weeks before telling her, "No." So she quit without notice.

Personally, I wish Debbie had told them to piss off years ago. They've always treated her like shit, especially the sadistic spic bitch floor manager. And because Karma, Debbie already has a line on something making nearly twice what she was making that also includes health insurance.

So Debbie is up in Michigan sorting through her mom's stuff while I'm batchin' it here in Florida working 60-70 hours a week. Which pretty much brings us up to the present. Back to messing around with LiveJournal.

We Are Gone

Part of the reason for the long gap in posting is that what little free time I have has been spent looking into Blogger alternatives.

The short answer is that there are none that do everything as easily as they can be done here. The somewhat longer (and far less depressing) answer is that there are several that come close. One in particular, LiveJournal, seems to do enough of what we need to be able to shove off from this place.

The irony is that I'm going to a Russian site so I can say whatever the hell I like without having to worry if the sensitivity gods at google are going to screw with my post.

Anyway, just in case there are any readers left after my four-month hiatus, you can find us here.

Still Playing Around

A month later, I finally got back to this and I just ran into my first road-block. There is a limit on the size of the link list. It's about four entries short of what I need. That sucks. I use my link list every day. I could purge some links, but I've already got it down about as short as I can make it. There are a couple that can go, but I don't know that I can eliminate four entries. And then what? Every time I find something new to read I have to delete something else?

[sigh]

Maybe one of the paid themes? Paid upgrade? Dunno.

[Later] And the answer is.... Money. Like always. But at least it isn't too obscene; $20 a year and we get a lot more than just a longer link list.The biggie is getting rid of ads. We don't see them because we run AdBlock Plus in our browsers, but just in case anyone else ever pays attention to this thing, I'd rather not have them blasted with ads for boner pills and sex toys.

Testing, testing. Is this thing on?

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

So, I just signed up for this thing a bit ago, so I'm trying to see if this is going to be any kind of a substitute for Blogger. Not that I use all the vastness of Blogger features, but I do use some of them. I'm not all that sure that this will do everything that I want, but maybe it doesn't have to.
OK; that was a fail. My scanned photos are too big, which is no surprise, but Blogger automatically scales them down to "internet size". Lets try a digital photo.

OK; that worked. Just have to remember to scale down scans of old film photos. Not too bad. It's not like I post twenty-year-old photos a lot.


So sticking in a Youtube video is actually easier than on Blogger. Nice.

Well, we'll see what this looks like when it's published.

30 Years Ago Today (well, 35 actually...)

On July 30, 1983, this lady:

met this fellow:

Ok, ok, ok. Stop. Just stop! No singing the Brady Bunch theme!

Anyway.

What was I saying? Oh, yea. So five years later, on July 30, 1988, we did the whole wedding thing:

Then we spent the last 30 years living different places, doing different things, traveling around and meeting all kinds of people.

 

And that more or less brings us up to today.

Debbie, I know I suck at all that romance stuff with the cards and flowers and cute little stuffed animals. I know I have a hard time even saying Those Three Words. But know this:

I do love you. More than life itself.

Happy Anniversary!




PS: Before anyone gets all, "Awwwww, what a sweetie pie!" go back and read this post.