Day 584 – Ya don’t Want to Look Stupid – But

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!