Twitter 90 Days Later

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.

Andrew Tate

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.

Drizzle Pizzle

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.

Clusterfuck Bombs

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....]

Rain Daze

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.

Baked Linguini

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.

Happy Fourth of July!

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.

More Medical Misadventure

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.

Just Workin'

We've been busy, busy, busy with maintenance and yard work. The summer monsoons seem to be on pause right now, and we are taking full advantage of the dry weather. The problem is it may be dry, but it is still hot as hell and so humid I sometimes think I should be wearing scuba gear when I'm outside. When we first moved here about 10 years ago, summer temps were typically in the 80's with 90's being a rarity. Hitting 100 was unheard of. Now it is in the mid to high 90's every day and 100 is no big deal. We can argue all day whether it's caused by human activity or natural variation, but the result is undeniable. Things are shifting in ways that are not in our favor.

In any case, while we were banging away on our to-do list, the world seems to have tilted on its axis. It appears there was a 12-hour coup in Russia, probably the shortest in world history. In spite of what all the "experts" say, we will probably never know the full story of what actually happened. Most of what you hear in the media is nothing but attempts at mind-reading. I've seen endless articles, podcasts, etc. that speak of what Putin or Prigozhin was thinking. May as well be reading tea leaves or dealing out tarot cards.

Here in the US, the persecution of Trump continues. The DNC and mainstream media really want DeSantis as the Republican presidential nominee because they know they cannot beat Trump. Unless they nominate RFK, Jr. which they will never do. He is too much of a threat to the 0.1% and the deep state. As I said before, the CIA will do to him what they did to his uncle and his dad before he could get within 100 miles of the White House. 

Once again this is Fag Month and all across this once-great land, grown men prance around nude in front of small children. You want to be a fudge-packer that's up to you, but this is nothing other than grooming. Jay Leno once said that if God doesn't destroy Hollywood he would owe Sodom and Gomorrah an apology. I'd say that if God doesn't destroy the USA, he would owe those two infamous cities a full pardon, and it seems that we are already well on our way to ruin. De-dollarization of trade is happening faster than any "expert" predicted, and it seems every day, yet another country gives America the finger. The latest is Mexico, who refuses (rather intelligently it seems to me) to allow Monsanto to sell GMO corn there. Everyone now knows the US is an unreliable partner who, like an abusive husband, can be triggered to violence over anything or even nothing at all.

That's it for now. There's a lawn mower with my name on it.

98 But Feels Like 111

We had a break in the constant rain, so Debbie and I decided to run outside to paint another awning. I checked the local weather to see if the rain was going to hold off long enough for the paint to dry. That's when I saw that the high temp for the day was supposed to be 92, but the current temp was 98. With the near-100% humidity the "feels-like" temp was 111. (These temps are all in Fahrenheit. As a service to my numerous Russian readers that actual temp was 37 Celsius and the "feels-like" temp was 44 Celsius) We looked at each other, shrugged, and headed outside. When we opened the door, it felt like being slapped in the face with a hot, wet blanket. In a couple minutes we were both drenched in sweat and gasping for air. It felt like we were trying to breathe underwater. But we persevered and got the first coat on the awning and the handrail on the back porch. Luckily, the paint we use is rain-proof in 60 minutes. We no sooner put everything away, stumbled into the trailer, and stripped off our soggy clothes that the rain started. I'm still waiting for it to stop so I can go do the second coat.

Speaking of breathing underwater, it now seems that "Biden" knew of the implosion of the Titan submersible as early as Sunday, but withheld the information so everyone would focus on the missing sub and not his derelict son, Hunter. Talk about two-tier justice. And no I'm not referring to Trump. Fuck Trump. I'm talking about the thousands of young black men picked up on firearms charges identical to those Hunter was facing, who are doing a nickel in some federal prison. Yes, yes I know. "It's different!" Yes it is. Hunter is a rich, well-connected white dude and all those uncounted thousands are not.

At this point, I don't think either Biden or Trump will be in the general election. Both are seriously damaged goods. I'd love to see RFK, Jr. on the ballot, but we all know that will never happen. I'm pretty sure that as I type this, the CIA is recruiting a patsy to assassinate him just like they did his uncle and his dad. Meanwhile, the press and the DNC are busy pretending he doesn't exist.

Remember, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean THEY aren't out to get you.

Backsliding

So much for posting every day. Old habits die hard.

We had a busy weekend. Saturday was a memorial for a dear friend and co-worker who died recently (fucking cancer). Rest in peace, Dorothy. Sunday, we had the monthly Moose Legion breakfast followed by our monthly meeting. Then yesterday, I had a doctor appointment that the doctor was an hour late for. 

On top of all that, Debbie is working a bunch of extra days covering for people on vacation. And just to make things interesting, summer monsoon season arrived yesterday, dumping about two inches of rain in a little more than an hour.

The Russia-Ukrainian war is going very badly for the Ukrainians, and by extension the US and NATO. Tank warfare is now officially in the same category as horse-mounted swordsmen. Aircraft have been downgraded to stand-off weapons. Missiles, drones, and artillery seem to be the most effective weapons and whichever side can make the most the fastest wins. All the high-tech shit we've spent trillions of dollars building is being systematically turned into scrap metal by Russian missiles and kamikaze drones. We have the technical knowledge to build drones and missiles and artillery, however we no longer have the industrial capacity to build the stuff at the rate necessary to defeat a major industrial power like Russia or China.

In other words, our global empire is toast.

That means we have a choice. We can draw down our over-seas "presence" in an orderly fashion or we can pretend none of this is happening and repeat the embarrassing fiasco of the Afghanistan withdrawal, only hundreds of times over. We could focus on rebuilding our industrial capacity or we can continue to pretend that we can run an economy by, as the late great Dr. Pournelle used to say, doing each other's laundry.

We could do many things to prepare for the inevitable, but we probably won't. Instead we will march off the cliff fully convinced in our ability to fly.

Enough reality. Back to the bread and circuses. 

Update on the Banana Republic

First, a bit of housekeeping: When I refer to Joe Biden or the Biden regime, I'm talking about the people behind the curtain. I don't think anyone can argue that Joe Biden has agency at this point. My own father suffers from dementia so I am intimately familiar with the signs. I don't care what some so-called doctor says, Joe Biden, the man with the nuclear "football", is in serious decline. Constantly repeating the phrase "the people behind Joe Biden" would be cumbersome, so I'll just say "Biden" instead. OK?

Biden is doing everything in his considerable power as President (something that should have been discussed many presidents ago) to imprison his main political opponent. The news media no longer even pretends to be objective, instead gong full court press for whatever insanity the deep state is trying to push on us. Citizens fleeing the country in fear for their lives landing in, of all places, Russia. As a kid of the Cold War, I feel like I've fallen through some wormhole into Bizarre-o World where people flee persecution in the US and head straight to Russia. Russia! Trump is having problems putting together a legal team because Biden has threatened to disbar anyone who defends him.

I could go on forever with this stuff, but why bother? The country I grew up in is dead and buried.

And yes, I am aware there are some who are convinced that Elon Musk, the Great White Hope will save us all. He won't. Sorry. Uncle Elon is tightly coupled to the government and will do whatever Biden or some faction of the Deep State tells him to do. Sure he revealed what many of us already knew about the collusion between Twitter and the government, but that is looking more and more like a limited hangout. Nothing has really changed on Twitter. Say the wrong thing and your account is suspended. Say the wrong thing too many times and your account is deleted. The government is still issuing take-down "requests" and Elon's team honors them at a higher rate than the previous management. That doesn't sound like anything I would call "free speech". 

Ah well. I'll just go cheer myself up by watching Tucker Carlson's videos. At least until they chase his ass off to Russia.

Boooooooooo-ring!

When I was growing up I had an Uncle that loved to take us kids to this little 9-hole golf course that was across the street from where we camped every summer. I liked hanging with Uncle Gary and I was glad to be able to spend time with him, but damn is golf boring! As boring as it is to play, I can't even imagine why any sane human being would watch golf on TV! There is even a 24-hour golf channel!

As bad as that is, it would make for riveting viewing compared to the live coverage of Donald Trump's indictment:

Here comes his plane... Landing gear are coming down... It's getting lower... Lower... Lower... And it's down! The Trump plane has landed! Now it is taxiing... Still taxiing... More taxiing... Still more taxiing...

[Several hours later]

Here come's Trump's car... Driving... Still driving.. Here we have an aerial view... Notice how the roof of the vehicle is black so that it coordinates with the sides...

[Twelve hours later]

Donald Trump is going to make a statement... Whoopsie! We are out of time! We will have to cut to Rachael Maddow for an explanation of what Trump is about to say. Take it away, Rachael!

I would rather watch paint dry. When I see that in such-and-such time slot CNN has some number of thousands of viewers, those numbers have to be inflated, right? No one really wasted 12 hours of their life yesterday watching this shit, did they?

Encounter with the Medical Industrial Complex

Sorry for the radio silence the last few days. I no sooner got back in the habit of blogging (mostly) every day when I found myself in the hospital once again. It was supposed to be a quick in-and-out for some stat labs and a CT scan. 

Problem #1: why is it necessary to go to the hospital ER for stat labs and a timely CT scan? Please explain to me why the more money and technology we throw at "health" "care", the shittier the actual healthcare?

Oh:

Regardless, like a good little boy I go toddling off to the ER. They do the labs and the CT scan in good time, then we get stuck in a room to wait. And wait. And wait. This is stat?

When it starts getting close to my meal time, we remind the nurse that I am diabetic and is there any possibility of food without my wife having to make a BK run? Sure! Here's a sorry-ass vending machine sandwich. 

Which brings us to Problem #2:

There is no provision for food in the ER holding cells... er... rooms. I meant to say rooms. Debbie could always go to the cafeteria or out for fast food. I didn't have that luxury.

So I finally get my "stat" results. Nothing. The CT showed some slight thickening of my appendix, but otherwise, nada. But out of an abundance of caution I was put on no food/no drink and (big surprise) admitted. Except there were no beds. It would take until after 1am the next day for a room to be "available" (see Problem #4 below). We told them that if they admitted me, I would need someone to hook me up to dialysis at some point during the night.

Problem #3: The hospital has zero peritoneal dialysis personnel or equipment. It's all done through an outside company that shows up when they damn well feel like it if they show up at all. In my case, when they damn well felt like it turned out to be the next afternoon. Of course the only dialysis machine they had didn't work, and someone had to go somewhere outside the hospital to find another one. I was finally on dialysis more than 24 hours late. Which also meant yer another over-night stay. 

For some labs.

And a CT.

Problem #4: While we were there doing nothing for days, we went for a walk around the floor I was on. Empty room after empty room after empty room. Entire wings of empty rooms. Yet I was forced to sit in an ER holding cell... dammit! Room! It was a room! ...for close to 12 hours to wait for a room to be available. Did they suddenly discharge hundreds of patients the night before? I suspect "staffing issues". Refer again the graph above and tell me where the real "staffing issue" is.

You may ask, "What the hell was wrong with you?" As it turns out, not a damn thing. What we were seeing in my drain bags (I'll spare you the gruesome details) cleared on its own.

Can you say "Cluster-fuck"?

The Late Great Carl Sagan

In his book A Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan made a prediction:

And here we are in 2023, our attention consumed by nonsense about aliens crash-landing at military bases while we argue about whether women can have penises and if men can menstruate. Meanwhile, the WHO is implementing vaccine passports and threatening every nation's sovereignty in the event of another manufactured pandemic. Illegal immigrants from the four corners of the globe are flooding across our southern border, and I'm a racist for noticing. The US military's budget is inching closer and closer to the $1 trillion mark (that's just the Pentagon budget; if you include the bits hidden in the DOE, DHS, black budgets, etc. the total is already around $1.2 trillion). I'm old enough to remember when everyone threw a hissy fit when the entire federal budget hit $1 trillion.

But no, don't pay any attention to any of that stuff. We need to focus on little green men.

RFK Jr.

For the first time in a long time, I'm considering dragging myself to the polls to vote. Not that I believe the DNC will ever allow RKF Jr. on the ballot now that the DNC leaders can ignore voters and run whoever they feel like. We're seeing this already with Biden refusing to debate Kennedy and Williamson.

Anyway, I love this video:

All the way through, my only thought was, "The fucking CIA bastards are going to kill him just like his dad and his uncle."

WOKE Jeans

It's been a long time since anything SNL did was actually funny. If an SNL producer is reading, this is what you need to do more of to get your audience back:

When you've lost SNL, you know your movement in trouble.

The Algorithm is Racist!!

 So I'm on Twitter this morning and see a message  warning me that "The following media contains potentially sensitive content." This surprised me given it was a WSJ article about how the price of eggs has collapsed back down to around $1.50/dozen. I clicked "View" and the above photo popped up. 

So what exactly is "sensitive" about this photo? A black couple calmly shopping for eggs is problematic? Why exactly? Because they're NOT looting or destroying public property? 

I think Uncle Elon needs to look a little more closely at his algorithm.

Carbon is People!!

I've been banging on about this for years, but I see today that others are catching on. Once again, it is this: 

Net Zero is a plan to depopulate the earth. 

Yes. It really is just that simple. Net Zero is only achievable if human population is cut back to pre-fossil-fuel levels, which is about a billion. That means seven out of every eight people have to die off. Think about your family, friends, coworkers, etc. Now kill off seven out of every eight people.

That is Net Zero.

[Aside: Crazy Fonda saying we have to cut ourselves in half now seems optimistic.]

Sleep well!

Sick Bastards

So according to some jackass over at the New York Times, the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid suffers from a lack of "kink". I've not seen this movie and have no intention of seeing it, but I'd be willing to bet this movie is lacking many things, primarily originality. But the one thing that a kids movie should always lack is "kink". Just how much of this will us normals continue to allow? This needs to end now.

Well, I'm off to bed. Be sure to tuck in your kids and shoot the pervs.