We just returned from our trip (Ed, Lynn, and I) to Utah. Now that Ed is retired, we can visit a lot more places in the US. We saw the national parks Zion and Bryce Canyon. Gorgeous.
I will post pictures for a while each day. It zens me out. These are some images from "Slot Canyons". They are canyons that are 10 times higher than they are wide. It was very cool.
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| The colors were amazing. (PS - they are my pictures, so I am not in a lot of them.) |
When I was young, I saw Mary Poppins (in a double bill with Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar). Well, I loved the movie, and my parents bought me the album. I think they later regretted it. I cannot sing, but I can loudly sing the words off-key.
And my favorite was the song "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious".
"Um-dittle-ittl-um-dittle-I"
I also sang it in my best cockney accent. Which was Dick Van Dyke's. I was sure he was English. (Aside- my English friends tend to make fun of my accent in those moments when I channel dear old Dick.)
Anywho, my mother remembered and sent me this.
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| Took me a second to get it, but I love it. |
Look, I may not be a religious person, but even I know that Christ was about loving your fellow man, providing for the week and hungry, giving comfort to those less fortunate that yourself.
Christ's teachings were wonderful enough for 2.4 billion people to believe they are the words of God.
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| Here is Christ, risen on Easter. He promises love and redemption to those who love God. |
And then there is our "Christian President." Here is his message of hope and love for Easter.
Well, we had a visitor for a few days last week. We went hiking and up to Joshua Tree.
(PS - none of this ties to the Title, but I just couldn't face the world right now.)
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| They moved Marilyn about 60'. Dopes |
Ed and I saw Pat Benatar at an outdoor concert in Palm Springs with a couple of friends. It was a temporary venue, but it was a lot of fun. She is 72, and still rocking. Now, in the bridges of songs, she no longer dances like crazy; she wanders to the back of the stage to get a pull of water and returns to the mic just in time to sing again.
During the concert, very few people in the audience who were sitting stood up and danced along. We were standing room (and could walk to the front) and were having a ball. I thought the sitting folks were just party poopers. Until the end of the concert, when the ushers had a giant traffic jam trying to return walkers to folks.
Oh well, my bad.
This is where we watched "We Are Young". Here is 11 seconds of it.
full set here
My favorites; 1 and 2, showing the scale of floods in Frankfort, Kentucky
Number 3 - One of the Mountain Monasteries in Greece
Remember, this is from THIS MORNING only!!! (PS - Washington Post uses a mix of upper and lower case).
* - WSJ = Wall Street Journal
** - RFK = Robert F Kennedy Jr, Our Cabinet Secretary for Health and Human Services
*** - Could luck collecting that after year 1
**** - CDC = Center for Disease Control
And now off to breakfast
But these agents wanted to enter 2 Los Angeles elementary schools (kids 5 - 10 years old) and grab 5 different children. Unless maybe the captured pets and ate them (joke) this is somewhere between immoral and evil (and definitely not legal as we use the word).
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| LAUSD - Los Angeles Unified School District |
Have you ever watched the trail of ants moving things into their ant hill? There is a semi-orderly two-way path as nats march to the trash, pick up something, and then march back. This keeps going until the item has been used as much as possible, and then they look for something new.
Once they find the path, the parade of ants continues, but with this new change, everything settles back down. Nothing really changed, but it seemed massive at the time.
It's an analogy.
Imagine people in the United States as those ants. And we see a dumpster fire in our little ant progression, and we all carry tiny pails of water to put it out. The water won't change much, but it does make us feel like we are putting out the dumpster fire. (Forget for the moment that there are other ants "accidentally" knocking our pail of water off.)
And then some sadistic child comes and uses a magnifying glass to burn some ants. Well, we think, that was bad luck, but we still go on.
Then, the sadistic child wipes out our little trail to the dumpster fire with his shoe and laughs. For a few moments, there is ant pandemonium until the little kid laughs, skips off to find a new shiny toy, and we ants find our path back. Ignoring what just happened.
Up next, sadistic little kid pees on new ant trail.
So, what is the point of college football? For those of you not in America. The idea of college sports was / is to help foster a sense of pride and belonging in a school. College sports were made for people to attend and cheer on their team together. It is supposed to be a unifying pastime for students from different majors and areas to mingle.
College players played for the "free scholarships" to the school. Even when I was in school (in the days of black and white TVs), we knew this wasn't really true, many were paid under the table - but rules were heavily enforced. AND football players weren't allowed to go pro until after college age. Same with basketball players years ago. And if you changed schools - you could only do it once, and you had to sit out a year.
Rules change slowly and then all at once. First, you could get paid for "name and likeness." A law put into effect after a basketball player sued a video game company when they used his name, number, and likeness in a sports game.
So they passed a law that if a player had his name or likeness used, they could get paid for that. Which lead to alumni "paying" a college star player hundreds of thousands, then millions of dollars to go to their school and then use his likeness to appear in an auto ad, or something equally fake.
And then they allowed players to move teams without waiting a year to play. So players now hop to teams that have a better audience of pros and/or pay them better.
Now, a payment will be extended to all players, albeit more $ can be added boosters.
So what is the point now? To make rich alumni feel superior to others.
This is being built to connect the Santa Monica mountains past Malibu to the hills above Agoura Hills. From that point, there are state parks and national forests past The Valley to the San Gabriel Mountains. It will be great. It also provides access to get in (and more importantly) out for the mountain lions which are tagged, but isolated.
It's cool.
There is something particularly offensive to me that Elon Musk is bringing back the word "retard." He has made fun of people on X (Twitter) as Retards. Retarded. He refers to Peter Navarro as "Peter Retardo".
It's not funny. I don't think it is as offensive as the "n" word or anything; I just think it is a lazy slur that probably seemed hip in the segregated private school, in which he didn't have to attend with servants. It is juvenile and cruel for no reason.
He is a nasty person.
These are pictures of my Aunt Martha, who was a "retard". A word I challenged when people said it when I was young. It killed my aunt to be referred to as a retard. I kind of hate Elon for it.
I was there when she asked her mother, my grandmother, what a retard was. Someone called that in the street. Imagine a mother in the 1960s trying to explain that to a teenage Martha.
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| Yes, that adorable child on the left is me. |
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| My father, aunt, and grandmother. |
Elon is not a good person
"Embrace Fate."
In some way, these words are of a stoic mentality. Stoicism would have us live in the moment. But at the same time, Stoicism believes that we should choose the moral path when faced with a crossroads. To say the bad shit happened WHILE you let it or made it, and then others have to deal with the consequences.
Well, for those people, this affects - Amor Fati. But for those who create the situation, crying "embrace it" is bullshit.
FYI - It is the title of the Last White Lotus, but no spoilers.
Our nitwit President created tariffs by (imports - exports)/exports [ (I-E)/E ], which is to stay, not the best way.
For countries that import no goods from the United States, you get X/0, which = 0%, but we slap everyone with 10% tariffs on everyone.
Now the men with a very good brain, very good. His IQ is huge. Maybe the Hugest. That is what he hears people are saying. A veteran came up to him, and he said, "Mr. President. Thank you. Thank you for putting tariffs on those countries that are raping us." So yes, he has a very good brain.
Anyway, his administration used internet domains as country substitutes (like the USA is .us, England is .sk, Switzerland is .ch). So what happened?
At some point, ICNN Board Members (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) added a domain for the Heard and McDonald Islands (.hm). Did they think about it? No. I used to be on the ICANN Board, and they argued about a bunch of stuff (should the new numbering system be 6 sets of 3 or 4 sets of 4 - keep it at 4 sets of 3?). Should there be an ".xxx" domain or a ".shop" domain name?
So our very thorough Treasury department thought, well, if they have a domain, they get at least 10% tariffs. This is how you came up with the rather stupid plan we have now where an inhabited Island of seals and penguins has a tariff slapped on them. Heard and McDonald Islands (*.hm) in particular.
This has led to several stupid memes but also some great pics of penguins on Heard Island.
For those who are not from the US or who were taught IN the US after 1990, let me give you a teeny-tiny bit of information that every American should know.
During slavery, a Black woman, Harriet Tubman, help create and expand the "Underground Railroad." It was a series of homes or outbuildings that would hide slaves as they trekked from the Southern Slave States to Canada.
The Underground Railroad is famed for helping thousands of slaves to freedom before the Civil War. Removing that knowledge from "history" simply is following the Trump Administration's pulling out of all minority history from the country. This rewriting of history follows the narrative of so many books where overlords rewrite history: George Orwell's 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, the Mockingbird novels, and more.
It aches. (full story is here in Washington Post - it gave me this article without their paywall).
Here is the opening of it...For years, a National Park Service webpage introduced the Underground Railroad with a large photograph of its most famous “conductor,” Harriet Tubman. “The Underground Railroad — the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War — refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage,” the page began.Tubman’s photograph is now gone. In its place are images of Postal Service stamps that highlight “Black/White cooperation” in the secret network and that feature Tubman among abolitionists of both races.The introductory sentence is gone, too. It has been replaced by a line that makes no mention of slavery and that describes the Underground Railroad as “one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement.” The effort “bridged the divides of race,” the page now says.
In our new world in America, if it wasn't done by a white man, it ain't shit.
From the Guardian.
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| Black-bellied whistling ducks – also known as Mexican squealers – strike a pose at Green Cay wetlands in Delray Beach, Florida, US | Photograph: Ronen Tivony/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock |
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| Fish dinner … an osprey takes its catch home at the Sebastian inlet state park in Melbourne Beach, Florida, US | Photograph: Ronen Tivony/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock |
David Hockney is a very famous British painter. He lived in Los Angeles for many years and produced some of his most famous work here.
Examples of his Los Angeles Work:
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| Mulholland Drive |
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| Nicholas Canyon |
I looked at some of the later landscapes, and they are amazing. The painting below is from 2007.
Tariffs have been the topic du jour for a few days now. I have railed against the idea of blanket tariffs. But there are to Trump's credit there are areas where it is important from an industrial sense. First, Japan, then South Korea, and then China have all used very high tariffs on cars to jump-start their own automotive industries. All of them have lower costs of good and labor and were able to protect their home markets while building the industry.
There is an excellent short discussion of this (it is on TikTok so short) here:
The Republicans in Congress just quoted Chief Nazi Propagandist, Joseph Goebbels. In a positive manner!
Despicable. Republican Congressman Keith Self quoted Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, during a congressional hearing.
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) April 2
WTF is wrong with these people??? pic.twitter.com/Hf8yi81XZR
Let us forget what a clusterfu stupid idea tariffs are in general. We can look at this later. But let's look at why this is very bad for most people, and the poorer you are, the worse it will be.
Tariffs are like taxes, which is why the President says that we will raise $6 trillion with them, wipe out our debt, and eliminate income taxes. Poor people tend to buy cheaper and less well-made items, normally imported.
The short answer is poor people can afford things the least.
Let's look at three couches: one from Ikea, one from Wayfair, and one from RH Home. I tried to find the same-looking item for each.
Here is a sofa from Ikea:
Here is the sofa from Wayfair:
It costs $500.00 - With tariffs, it will cost: $810. (made in China)
If you take home $12,000 a month ($75 per hour), the price increase to the consumer will increase the amount you have to spend that month by 2.5% more (increase / monthly income).
It costs $6,290. With tariffs, it will cost: $6,290. This sofa is made in America.
If you take home $16,666 a month ($200,000 per year), the price increase is %0.
We just returned from our trip (Ed, Lynn, and I) to Utah. Now that Ed is retired, we can visit a lot more places in the US. We saw the nati...
