Archives for August 2022

Monday August 29, 2022

I sat watching the NASA feed on YouTube, waiting for Artemis I to launch. I listened to the techno speak. There was a leak in  Engine #3. They couldn’t get it up to the right temperature (or maybe down?). They had to do something with the Flare Stack. Of course! I was becoming an expert once again. Okay, I had no idea, but it was thrilling.

I thought about the time we gathered in grade school and watched Alan Sheperd go into space. It was a dingy black and white TV. We cheered. He said it was a beautiful view. He was looking through a periscope. The optical lenses of which were provided by Dad’s company, Perkin-Elmer.

Dad laughingly told stories about the NASA engineers coming to PE asking for a periscope. “Why don’t you put in a window?” Oh no, they said, they had done the calculations and the capsule couldn’t withstand  a window. The PE folks couldn’t talk them out of it so they built the periscope. The next flight, Grisham’s, had a window. By the third flight, Glenn, they had three windows. Eventually they had five. Dad would laugh and end his stories with “What did you want? They were NASA engineers!”

I marveled at the various shots they had of the launch pad and the rocket. Especially, the close up of the base of the rocket. What a huge machine! Sitting there, the only thing that informed me it wasn’t a still picture were the whiffs of smoking vapor emitted from various places. The pull back view showed three large three legged towers. Were the black boxes on the towers cameras? I thought about Uncle George and how he had designed and built the original camera to track the rockets as they left the launch pad. Perkin-Elmer shipped the camera down to Cape Canaveral. The NASA engineers took it apart to see how it worked. They couldn’t get it back together again. Uncle George had gone back to his home in Minnesota by the time they contacted him. Aunt Jean took the call. NASA wanted to fly George down and were willing to pay him $700 a day to put it back together. That was a lot of money. George was out in the garden and told Jean to tell them No. He had to get his tomatoes in. Once that message was relayed they never called back.

What a world we live in. think of all the progress we have made.

Sunday, August 28, 2022

It is clear through multiple reports and personal knowledge that if anyone else had taken one classified document home, whether by accident or design, they would be arrested. So why hasn’t Donald? And, what would it take?

From the reporting I’ve heard he is clearly in violation of the Records Act and the Espionage Act.

There are reports that some of the human sources listed on the stuff Donald had at Mar-a-Lago have now been snuffed out. If that is true and the killing is linked back to the fact that the person’s name was obtained from the information lying around in Florida is that enough to get him thrown in jail?

This is not a clear cut thing. In the past few years many of our assets have been eliminated. Notably, China that found and killed some 300. The analysis at the time was that their spy agencies are getting better.

But Mar-a-Lago has had several breeches and one spy reporter said that any spy agency that didn’t have someone in that place carrying out spying it would be considered lying malfeasance. We do know of two attempts by the Chinese, a woman posing as a Rothschild with a Russian speaking background, and some young man from a reality TV show that said he had the run of the place. This does not count the staff and guests, any of whom could have been recruited by numerous spy agencies.

In other news, there have been at least five Republican members of Congress complaining about the ten thousand dollar student loan forgiveness program who have had hundreds of thousands of dollars of government loans forgiven.

And then there’s Shaq. OMG, why doesn’t he just shut up? Now he says he believes the Earth is flat because he’s been on a lake, and something about it not moving left or right. I don’t know. I don’t get it. This after he repeatedly said the way to not spend so much on gas was to put twenty dollars in the tank every time you got to half empty. 

We watched some football last night and one team was from Florida. There were ads for DeSantis and Rubio touting all they had done to help people. Rubio especially commenting on how he had helped vets. He didn’t mention how he voted against the Vet bill. DeSantis didn’t mention how he made abortions almost impossible to get in Florida. Wonder why? Lying pieces of excrement.

I hope the anger holds til November.

Thursday, August 25, 2022

Big talk about Biden’s $10,000 stiudent debt relief. Also, Dems wins in elections. And Trump taking papers.

Most of the talk misses the bigger picture.

To wit:

Why is Trump still wandering around and not in jail? Anyone else would be.

The Dems made significant inroads, but Republican cheating and gerrymandering are still huge problems.

What if everyone was allowed to vote?

The student debt was created by Republicans and used by them to balance their budgets. Oftentimes, they or their big-time supporters got the benefit of fleecing the poor with these outrageous loans. But the real question here is why has tuition gone up so much, and why haven’t WE done something about it?

Housing is an issue too, but that is because big corporations and rich individuals have bought up all the lower cost housing and bumping up the prices. If we were to let all the empty housing be used there would be no crisis.

If we went back to the system we had before on student tuition or if we forced all these private institutions to use their squirreled away money to pay professors and reduce student tuition … If we ended the outrageous system of tenure and paid the people who are actually teaching in colleges and universities …

If we had a system of voting that distributed congressional districts fairly …

If Trump was treated like everyone else …

If media outlets were forced to defend their outrageous statements or be charged …

Hey, I’m just one man. I can only kick so many butts a day.

Wednesday, August 24, 2022

As a kid I remember the burning cheeks of embarrassment when I was called out for not knowing what a word meant or not understanding something. “You don’t know what blah blah blah means? Ha ha ha ha.” Now? the answer is simple, “No.” or “No. Do you?” Followed by a “Can you explain?”

I am constantly surprised by the lack of instruction in today’s latest gadgets. “Buy this, scan the QR code and you’re ready to go!” Yeah? Can you explain how to turn it on? What is it used for? Yes, I see girls in skimpy bikinis having an awesome time with your product, unfortunately they don’t show me what to do.

Take the drone I bought. there’s a “Pro-Mode” wherein you can adjust the light settings, etc. Great. I can see those settings on a panel of horizontal slidebars, but I can’t find how to actually slide them. There are a ton of videos where someone shows me how to enter Pro-Mode, and then they say, “adjust your light setting and exposure,” but they don’t show you that. Specifically, how or where it is done.

Or the 360 camera I bought. Actually, I bought two. One clips onto your front via a magnet. The other you can raise on a pole, which will not show in the final video because the camera has overlapping front and back cameras so it can eliminate the pole, called “an invistick.” Cool. I downloaded the files to my Mac. The movie looks pretty ordinary to me. WTF? Oh. You need to download it to an app on your phone? Maybe they paste the front and back movie together in the app? Yeah, guess so. What? No app for a computer? WTF – again.

Oh and then there’s “Bullet Time.” What’s that? You think they’d tell you but no. “it’s what they did in the Matrix.” Okay. Cool. What is that? Oh the camera moves around the subject – that’s what you mean? Cool. Oh just go to and set “Bullet-time.” (Good luck finding it.) And then I get a thing that looks like a surveyors chalk line holder. No chalk, just a red string about three feet long. On the end of the string is a screw for the camera. Okay. Now what? Well, yeah screw the camera into the holder pull the string out…Wait? How do you set the length of the string? Let’s watch some cool looking young women demonstrate. “You just pull the string out to the desired length and then you …” Wait. How did you set the length? Fifteen or twenty minutes later you find all the people asking the same question and finally someone says, “There is no way to stop the string from retracting. You either pinch the string or you whirl the camera around your head fast enough so it doesn’t retract.” This is high tech? Give me a break.

Now, maybe I’ll go back and discover instructions issued by the company that tell me all this. Maybe.

Oh, and I did all that in “bullet time” but no video. Great.

But, as Arlo Gutherie says, “This isn’t what I came here to talk about.”

What I want to talk about is a morning epiphany I had. It’s kind of a “Give it to Mikey…He likes it.” Kind of reasoning.

It started as I wheeled out the recycling. “Why,” I asked myself, “does Donald Trump have so many lawsuits after him?” And the answer came to me much as the conclusion to the last Robert Redford film about the guy who robbed banks, in which Redford concluded that the guy “just liked robbing banks.”

“Donald,” I concluded, “likes it.”

“Likes what?

“Likes being thought of as ..”

And here was where the epiphany came in.

“He likes being thought of as a great business man, as a student at ‘one of the best’ colleges, as President, etc.

“He doesn’t really like the duties of the job, any of the jobs that is. That would explain why he pawned of the work to others. Remember he had his sister doing his homework. He gave Jared the huge portfolio of responsibilities. When covid hit he did nothing except hold press conferences and put a bunch of money into jump starting the vaccine process (after it was already underway, but there was no plan after that.)

Wasn’t it Mary Trump (or someone) who worked for him, and could figure out what everyone else in the organization did, but not Trump himself. 

Trump likes to be THOGHT OF AS whatever, but he doesn’t want to be that person. let someone else do the work. That was Sarah Palin’s thing too. 

But there’s another side to this kind of character. He knows it’s not true. At any moment he could be unmasked. This leads to brave puffed chested denials, and lying, and cheating, and subterfuge. Anything to avoid the truth. That you are a fake. To be genuine would require work and Donald has never done that.

Now we get to those classified documents. What’s the count? 300? 700? “Secret,” “Top-Secret,” and “Compartmentalized Top-Secret” Remember Hillary was found to have four documents in 30,000 and they were marked with a “C” for “Classified” and the right went crazy that she said she didn’t know what the “C” meant. They were things that were normally classified because they involved a head of state meeting. That was the extent of all the hub-bub. Now? Not a peep out of those folks. Well, not exactly. It seems Mr. Trump has met the requirements to be charged with espionage and Rand Paul says, let’s repeal that law.

So one has to ask what did old Donnie plan to do with this stuff? Well, let’s apply what we know about him and see if that yields any fruit. He’s only in it for himself. He demands total loyalty and subservience, and thinks people who served in the military are “suckers.” He has tried repeatedly to make deals with Russia. He has laundered money for Russians, and he has had meetings with Putin while President that no one seems to know what was discussed. His actions gave away Northern Syria to the Russians and Assad. He gave away Afghanistan to the Taliban. He killed the nuclear deal with Iran and now they are months away from having a nuclear device. He set the table for what is happening in Ukraine. So, what was Trump planning to do with our top-secret documents? It’s pretty obvious. Sell them. 

So let’s see 300 documents, do I hear 700? Most people get thrown in jail for taking one home, and they get 4 1/2 years in jail. So let’s say it’s five years and do some math. 300 times 5 is 1500 years; 700 times 5 is 3500 years. And espionage? That’s like life in prison or execution – right?

Moving on. Florida. There’s a trial, I don’t know if it has wrapped up yet or not. A man killed 17 people. The murders have been described as horrific and grisly. I don’t know the details. However, the defense has tried to raise an “it’s not his fault” explanation. They point out that his mother was a prostitute and it is supposed she became pregnant from one of her clients. She was alcoholic and this damaged the baby’s brain. The kid was adopted and the adopted mother ignored his situation for a long time. At three years old he was drawing disturbing pictures; something he continues to do to this day. So please, give me a “every soul deserves a chance” speech. Isn’t this an argument for why some pregnancies should be terminated? Am  being harsh? Maybe, tell that to the relatives of the 17 he dismembered.

Okay. That’s it. Have nice day!

Tuesday, August 23, 2022

The legal wrangling continue.

Trump filed something, I don’t know what they call it: a brief? a motion? Asking for a special master to review the documents taken from his home in Florida. Interestingly, he could have filed in Palm Beach, but instead went 67 miles up the beach to get a judge who is an anti-vaxer to hear his arguments. People who have looked at his complaint, who know something about the law have said it’s a long rambling twitter bitching. Fortunately, for you, I have recreated the complaint here, stripping out the lies, the non-facts, and the whining.

Also, in the case of revealing the contents of the affidavit, something Trump and the fright have been clamoring for, the judge has said that there may not be much to show because of the threat to witnesses and the possible revealing of sources and methods. Fortunately, for you, I have recreated a copy of the possible redacted affidavit.

In a little mentioned legal thingee (technical term you may not be familiar with) there’s been a ruling in the Mueller Report. Remember Volume 2? The one where Mueller pointed out the ten possible crimes of the then Prez? Bill Barr in his infinite legal wisdom said he looked over the “facts” and they didn’t warrant further action. Hey, guess what? He lied. This according to the judge who has now rued Justice can go ahead with a case on those ten counts. It’s not clear to me how they know he lied, and – btw – that he had no intention of doing anything. But, the way is now clear to proceed.

I am so ready for the Orange One to be arrested. Cuffed and placed in the back of a squad car. I hope they aren’t too gentle with him when they put his fat ass in the back seat.

That is all carry on.