They re-organized as “Centurylink” so I gave them another shot, despite vowing that particular band of thieves would never get another penny out of me after the Qwest bankruptcy scandal. Something must be going right. It’s a 2-channel DSL billed at $45/mo for 60/6 and always runs a bit higher, with few exceptions. I was starting to think a solid, trouble-free connection was unobtanium. Best part is I’m on the fixed price plan. They say my price will never go up. We’ll see.
Too bad I don’t really need it like alot of school kids falling behind across the country right now.
Summer of Kittens
After getting off to a rocky start, I think Jax, Anna and Marshall will eventually accept the newbies. Jax still growls at them, but hasn’t tried to bite anybody’s head off again yet. I definitely needed something to boost my spirits while struggling to rehab that back injury. We have the empty nest thing here now as well. Pandemic and all things considered, I have never been more depressed, as I proceeded through my 4th orthopedic surgery last February. Kittens to the rescue!
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |
Another One for the Record Books
It was a hot summer the whole way through, then we hit the switch yesterday – literally. “Denver reached 101 degrees on Saturday, making it the latest triple-digit day on record and helping to set a new monthly record high.”
 |  |  |
One of the things I noticed when I first lived here back in 1983 after I joined the Air Force was the weather patterns – or lack thereof. The biggest thing seemed to be the short transition periods of spring and fall. We’ll be back to summer again next week, but this was… wait for it… Unprecedented.
Health Status Update
So I copied the Robocop post link to the Spine Doctor in their messaging system a couple weeks ago, and got a call back asking to try the Gabapentin again. Too early to tell if it does anything, but maybe it will mask symptoms for awhile.
“2 SEP 2020: After experiencing ongoing neuropathic dysfunction due to the nerve root damage, Dr. Donner’s PA (Bob) gave me a new prescription for Gabapentin. With things back to baseline in terms of overall pain and inflammation levels, I can tell the lumbar symptom remaining is pretty similar to the C6-7 injury I got 18 years ago. It produces a constant low-level signal crunching the muscles closest to the injury site, radiating out from there to a lesser degree. At it’s worst before the lumbar surgery, the entire right side of my body was joined in this fashion with moderate paralysis engaging through the scapula to the right shoulder, all the way down my back, though my hips and down the right leg. Interestingly, I have a big, painful callous on the tip of my right big toe from it crunching up subconsciously. We’ll see if the Gabapentin calms it down. I was taking a max dose of that stuff for years back when the C6-7 issue was raging and did not seem to have much luck with it. We’ll try it again…
Big Switch
Fire relief is coming, but it’s in the form of a winter storm, and it’s happening literally overnight. This region is known for unpredictable weather and dramatic temperature shifts, but this one is – here we go again – unprecedented. We’ll see near record highs in the mid-90s today, with temps dropping to the low 30s overnight and snow expected all day tomorrow.
Cameron Peak Fire
It’s been burning in areas west of Ft. Collins at a range of around 40 miles West/NW of here for weeks, now at 5% containment. We are currently in the worst of the plume, looking at literally hazardous air quality levels into the morning tomorrow. Just changed the A/C filter and it was the dirtiest black I’ve ever seen. I’ll be posting a little pandemic/fire HVAC upgrade project I’ve been working on here in the near future.
Thanks for the Confirmation
The never-ending back-and-forth between Trump and the media came to a head yesterday, with more unsurprising stories about POTUS’ comments regarding our military. The debate over truth and reality will rage on, but the facts are clear to those not willfully ignorant enough to ignore them. One of the tried and true principles I apply in many aspects of life is pattern recognition. It holds all sorts of benefits for creatures able to exploit the knowledge advantage it offers. Trump is a textbook case in pattern recognition. Wish I’d seen it sooner.
“it could have been a guy like” his former chief of staff, John Kelly, said the Fuckwit-in-Chief, responding to questions at yesterday’s press briefing. Thanks for the confirmation on that one. We have the McCain comments on video, former assistant SecDef on the USS Roosevelt, and others well documented. It’s a clear pattern, to me. Cabinet officials in denial means just more confirmation.
Do I trust the media? Yes and no – it depends. That’s a big part of the problem now. There are far too many people in this country who either do not or cannot effectively evaluate the information they receive, for various reasons. That creates a pretty big problem when things like voting for POTUS boil down to a binary choice. This state of affairs plays right into the hands of dishonest criminals fleecing the world with credit card and phishing scams over the Internet for decades. Now they run in well-financed state-sponsored gangs brokering botnets from operationally optimized locations across the globe. Cyber crime has risen to the level of global political corruption.
Trump is just a symptom of the digital security apparition invading our lives. Everybody wants to be an “influencer” on social media. But the influence they push may or may not be the direction you want or need, with truth and veracity often difficult to distinguish. I’d still like to see this fucker with 2-in-the-hat.
Switching to Offense
The election season is underway in the cyber realm. I won’t be just deleting and ignoring the cocksuckers this time. Wish I had a government connection suitable for real retaliation.
“we’re increasingly seeing attempts to undermine the legitimacy of our elections from within our own borders.” One of Zuck’s problems is he still does not yet realize the Internet does not have borders.
Baloons
Hot air ballooning is a popular recreational pastime around here. We have an annual meet at the public golf course across the street one day every summer. It was cancelled due to Covid this year, but many people are still floating around on their own. This was the closest one ever came to the house. He was fighting a downdraft the whole way and probably went down in the field across the road a hundred yards east of here.
Proximate Cause
No, I’m not going to examine a currently fashionable Covid downplay surrounding co-morbid reporting rules. This would be far more specific when say for example, someone’s life ends quite suddenly on the wrong end of a gun. Kyle Rittenhouse’ AR, specifically.
Rational people agree the neo-nationalist white supremacy movement is a root problem issue for alot of shyt in this country right now. That’s why he was there, no doubt, no argument. It is (or was) all on Facebook. Now what shall we say was the proximate cause of death for those people? Looks like Facebook, to me.
Ooooo, it’s working Vlad!
And the inanity continues. I don’t know where these lines intersect if I ever did, but consider yourself part of this country’s biggest problems today if you are a Facebook user, supporter, employee and especially that dickhead Fuckerberg, They’ll be shutting down Russian accounts right and left claiming victory for the 1st amendment and the free Internet this election cycle. Too bad the damage is already done.
“The nearly 8,000-word bulleted list of no-nos describes with often explicit levels of granularity how Facebook defines more than 20 different offenses, from harassment and graphic violence to false news and fake accounts.”
Niiiice. How’s that working out for us?
Herd Immunity?
With the government’s un-coordinated, hands-off non-approach effectively spreading SARS-coV-2 unchecked throughout the country, I imagine we are looking at around 3-4 years to reach herd immunity – “if” (BIG if) the herd immunity goal is even possible with this virus at scale. Individual convalescent results are not looking good at this time. “Unfortunately, early surveys suggest there is a long way to go. Estimates from antibody testing — which reveals whether someone has been exposed to the virus and made antibodies against it — indicate that only a small proportion of people have been infected, and disease modelling backs this up.”
The 1st wave reached it’s peak in the U.S. just around a week or so ago as schools and colleges across the country felt pressure to get people together indoors in large numbers. 2nd wave probably comes in about another year or so, depending on how willfully ignorant the re-opening progresses and vaccine efficacy. Don’t be surprised to see an extended hurry up and wait period on this topic. At least they are documenting the inanity. Immunity, inanity, Trump says tomatoe, science says tomahto.
Learn from History
You’d think it would go without saying by now, but here we are again.
“They’re defending something bigger than themselves, which is why it’s so appealing,” Carlson said. “That’s why white supremacy isn’t about ‘bad apples’ or individuals. It’s an ideology. It’s a culture. It’s a movement and a thread in the fabric of American society.”
Chad Wolf is a Servile Little Bitch
“Wolf’s ascent to the top of the DHS also is a result of the president’s unprecedented disregard for the norms of the nation’s confirmation processes.”
This cunt of a cockpig rides Trump’s coattails like a cowboy on a bucking bronco. Margaret Brennan gave him a good grilling on Face the Nation this morning, and all the feral fuckface could do was repeat the non-answer law-and-order talking point. He’s not even legally titled, BTW. Can’t wait to see this cocksucker for the last time.
Unified Theory of Stupid
Mark Agee, Trea’s new sidekick on their Evening Skews, Youtube show recently espoused an amusing hypothesis to explain Trumpism, generally speaking. My analogy would be one of these fire tornadoes we see in the big forest blazes. You get enough shyt flying around fast enough and it starts generating it’s own weather system. Similarly, enough stupid flowing in the same direction and… Q-Anon.
The Q-Anon phenomenon is a real thing, so as Maher wondered aloud whether or not the Dimwit-in-Chief would float a convention reveal of himself as “Q,” we were treated to another round of fear mongering with lurid images of violence and brutality happening now in Trump’s GOP America lacing news feeds everywhere across the globe. Maybe he already forgot who’s been President for the past 43 months? It’s no longer a gaslighting exercise. It’s the biggest gaslight-house ever, presently broadcasting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC.
Trump says “they are people who love America.” The official RNC explanation goes something like this: He didn’t say that. And if he did say that, he didn’t mean it. And if he did mean it, you didn’t understand it. And if you did understand it, it’s not a big deal. And if it is a big deal, others have said worse.
What's the Acronym CDC Stand For?
For all practical purposes, I’m gonna say “Charlatan Dictator Conspirators.” It’s also now looking like FDA stands for “Fucking Dipshit Assholes.” The NIH, with that fuckwit Azar at the helm, shall henceforth be known to me as the “National Idiocy Harbingers.” I still cannot understand how the cancer called Trumpism infected every health agency in government so quickly and completely. This nonsense is just insane.
The current state of our politically warped view on healthcare in this country portends only one thing to me. It’s an insidious, illegal power grab, with the bad part being pure, willful Republican ignorance and arrogance. The stakes have never been higher (cough, cough). It’s gonna take two Biden terms followed by two Harris terms to fix this shyt. The Republican party must no longer be a viable entity on the other side of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. There is no place for pandemic politics in a civilized society.
…or Smitten Old Women
