Category: NoJoMo

I know I’ve written about this one before, but I’m going to recycle it.

Book that left a lasting impression. Why?

I was a bit concerned I wouldn’t get through this audiobook before I was set to write on this prompt today.

I finished listening to it yesterday.

The book? How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World.

I’d decided I wanted to read it again, for the first time since probably 1999, as Jo Jorgensen was running for President.

As I said, I voted for Dr. J. this year, despite some very deep reservations about her campaign team ran the campaign.

I handed out Harry Browne campaign literature on campus in 2000. Dr. J. had been his running mate in 1996, but had kind of fallen off the LP screen. She was off in South Carolina teaching psychology.

I had, myself, fallen away from the party after 9/11 happened in my next-to-last semester in college. I’d voted specifically against John McCain, and for George W. Bush, in Virginia’s open primary in 2000, and voted for Harry Browne in the general election.

If you live in a locality that’s been controlled by the Democrats since the Union occupiers moved out in 1876, you normally need to vote in the Democratic primary just so you can have any bit of a vote for some of the local office.

That’s kind of where I was when I lived in Norfolk. Living here in Alexandria, it’s the same sort of thing.

These localities haven’t had an elected Republican in more than a centaury. If you cared about seeing your local sheriff replaced, you had to vote in the Democratic primary.

How I Found Freedom is really not a political book, but it does describe some of the things that really flavor my politics.

Nobody rules you but you.

When I moved up here, I was actually using one of the tactics straight from that book, a book I hadn’t read in twenty years.

Get to zero, then build the life you want starting from zero. I was actually picking through some of my writings from probably 2015 until early this year, really, which was the idea of Get To Zero.

No debt. Few, if any, commitments that would keep me from being free do to what I want to do.

Dr. Jorgensen’s campaign was actually a decent re-statement of what Harry Browne ran on in 1996 and 2000. She’s been on campus, isolated from the world, and some of the things her campaign did this year really show that.

As for other things the book teaches, I wonder how much of it overcome by history. In the world of COVID-19 lockdowns, is there really anywhere where you can go to live the life you might want to live?

I don’t know.

So. News.

There’s this on what Justice Alito said about the lockdowns. I’m actually listening to this at the same time.

The chances of me getting COVID-19 are near zero. The chances of me dying from it are smaller, still.

Is there anywhere where I can still be free?

I really don’t know.

Not a lot to say, really. More recycling from things that were in the Drafts category, but I’d never posted…

I accidentally had a second prompt for my trip to Georgetown.

That happened, and I described a bit of it yetsterday.

Takeaways I didn’t cover yesterday:

With those out of the way, what else do I have to say….?

I’m trying to keep an open mind about the electoral results. This, really, could be real change in Washington. Notsomuch due to the Trump surrogates’ bigotry, but because at least it’s a completely new crowd.

Regardless of what happens, it’s not going to be an administration full of recycled Ford and Clinton folks (which is what we saw with the last two administrations). If an opportunity presented itself to get me to DC to work in the Administration, I don’t know that I’d turn it down. (Though they probably would want nothing to do with me after I didn’t vote for them…..)

I guess I wrote this coming into a recent administration transition.

I didn’t like the Trump Administration, but how much of it is going to stick, really.

I think if he just declassifies a bunch of stuff on his way out, along with pardons of some hated people from the past *cough*Snowden*cough*Flynn*cough*Assange*cough*Ulbrecht*cough*

It’s pretty incredible how much I’ve “come home,” as it were, on many things.

The entire world was lied to.

I, personally, was opposed to Iraq II until I heard Tony Blair pitch it to Parliament.

But a lot of what was given as intelligence wasn’t true.

So. News from today.

AOC wants a “truth and reconciliation” commission to deal with Trump supporters.

I guess she missed the lectures about this in school. Hell, was she even alive when Tiananmen Square?

Or is it a new House Un-American Activities Committee?

Things that don’t fit in with the artfully-crafted narrative.

i was going to go through and finish something I’d started a couple of years ago, but never got around to finishing.

My brain is still swimming around with to do with this next project.

I think I might try to write an record an ep this weekend to see how it goes.

I’m listening to Adam Carolla talk about family Thanksgiving.

As a kid, we were overseas so often I only got a couple of those. The last one I really have memories of was riding down I-95 next to a very excited Golden Retriever puppy who would get carsick.

This.

Yeah, there’s not much I can identify with that.

We were so spread out across the world that it didn’t happen all that often.

There were a few times where we went to the mess hall so my dad could eat with the people he was commanding.

There was often one or more bachelor officers and soldiers who were invited guests to eat with us.

Nobody would have ever even considered bitching about the Mac & Cheese.

I just realized that maybe part of the reason I’m partial to the Lions’ game is because it was playing in the evening in Germany.

But I think the idea of traditional Thanksgiving might be part of what’s got me on the try-all-the-things-people-used-to-rave-about kick.

I realized a few months ago that I’d never actually had Maxwell House coffee.

Part of that could have been the period where I got out of drinking coffee for a while, but my parents were always Folger’s people….until there were other things coming in at the Commissary, and they got a Braun coffee grinder.

My mom, on one of her antique store trips, found a cookbook from the White House. The calculations take a lot of time to cut the recipes down to a consumable size, but these things were saved for a reason — by and large, they were really fucking good!

These things take time to prepare, but I think the payoff is worth it.

I would like to do some things, myself, but it’s not an issue I’m excited to debate.

I’ve written enough, now, I think. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.

Almost finished.

Veterans’ Day

Thankfully, there’s been very little coming into today about remember-the-fallen heading into today. Veterans’ Day is for everybody who served. Memorial Day is for those who died in service of the country.

Michael Malice had a tweet about how all of the World War I veterans in Pennsylvania were voting for Biden to protest the president’s purported comments about the World War I veterans.

(For those scratching their heads, the last US WWI vet died in something like 2011, and the last one in the entire world a couple of years later….so dead people voting for Biden.)

I guess the big takeaway I have is that since 2001, it’s been a state of constant war. The troops never really come home these days.

You get into the discussions of whether that’s intentional; I don’t know. I do know that when my dad was deployed (Army 73-97), it wasn’t any of these situations where you have endless rotating deployments.

Bring them home. Now.

There’s nothing more that will be accomplished.

Bring them home. Now.

So. News. One of the big stories, locally, has been about this former bishop/cardinal/whatever.

What he’s purported to have done sounds horrible. The Church didn’t do the right thing in covering it up. For the allegations that occurred on Church property, the Church’s law reigns. For things that happened in place’s under another jurisdiction’s control, the Church should have eagerly aided in extradition/prosecution.

It’s not that difficult to figure out.

I do hold colleges and universities to a different standard, however. With the exception of completely privately-held schools, they are subject to the jurisdiction of wherever their campus is.

If someone is raped in a dormresidence hall (my indoctrination at my alma mater is still fresh, more than two decades later) , the local authorities should investigate (and prosecute) whatever crimes occurred. This doesn’t fall to the star chamber of a university judicial system, no matter what the US Department of Education says.

I’m stopping there. Bring the troops home. Now.

I’m writing in the middle of the morning while waiting on my doctor for a Telehealth appointment.

I had a periodic MRI a few weeks ago after my last Tysabri infusion.

Looking at my results, I don’t think there was anything remarkable; I’m not having an exacerbation.

But you’d think that on a telemedicine appointment there’d be fewer times when you’d be twiddling your thumbs waiting on your appointment to start.

It’s fine, though. I don’t have any work appointments today, so, whatever.

I didn’t have a prompt ready for today, either. I really don’t know how I missed the first week of the month. I do have most of the month covered, but this one is missing.

So, another prompt from my collection……

How do you feel about the political climate of the country?

It’s horrible. It appears that Biden was elected, but that’s not going to fix anything.

Obviously, I’ve written quite a bit already about things over the past week.

In my session with my psychologist yesterday, I was focusing more on my whole thing with what is the function of government; why do we have it if it’s not doing the things it was established to do?

I’m also still listening to Harry Browne’s How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World.

In addition to some very 70s ideas on intimate relationships, there’s this sense that you can choose to just not participate in things that negatively affect your freedom.

I’m not sure you can do that anymore.

I’m also disagreeing strongly with the ideas on marriage. Maybe it’s something where you presume equality between partners at the start of the relationship.

My wife and I built our financial situation together. There’s been points in our marriage where we weren’t at all on financial parity. Okay. That happens. We made a commitment to each other, and that works for us.

Maybe I write some more later, but I think I’m finished for now. Back to work.

Okay. Another one I didn’t do a prompt for ahead of time.

I have no idea what I was thinking about.

How do you feel about people’s need to post every detail of their relationships on social media? Are you guilty?

I took a long break from the sewer that is Facebook heading in to the election. I finally came back a few days after it was over.

I’d said to myself that I was going to “unfriend” people who wrote things I thought might be intentionally targeted to piss me off.

Didn’t take long to see something

Did I unfriend? No. There’s now a mute function. I will not see that person’s stuff unless I specifically go look for it.

Same goes for whatever relationship changes might occur.

I just really couldn’t care less.

Another “friend” was actively calling oug that there’d been “unfriending” after some stupid posts.

I didn’t do that.

But I am now ignoring.

Maybe my reluctance to actually unfriend is passive-aggressive? (Man, part of me hopes that that’s true….)

Along those lines, really, Microsoft, I don’t give a crap about what celebrities are thinking about unofficial election results.

You don’t care in the least about why I voted for someone with virtually zero chance of gaining enough of a plurality to “win;” why should I care what you think? You’re not at all open to hearing my reasons. You don’t respect my rights; all “negative” rights. Tell me again why I should care at all about what you think.

Oh, that’s right, you’re going to force me to live as you choose, and you’re more than okay with me being killed for not going along with the plan. Got it.

But it looks like there’s probably an effective vaccine for COVID-19. Even if I was one of the people who chose not to take it, Governor Hoodor Blackface (D-VA) would kill me to force compliance.

Land of the free.

(And, no, I would take it freely. But that’s not the point. If you understood that, you wouldn’t think that whatever celebs think about the election would have any bearing on my choice of politicians…)

I guess that today is free-write.

Today is my mother’s birthday, so happy birthday to her. I will call her later on, see if her gifts arrived.

Today’s listen is this.

I’m very much enjoying it.

But I did have some things I’d planned to write about this morning.

I had this come across my email feed over the past couple of days.

It made me angry, and I was having flashbacks to seeing this talk at Shmoocon a few years ago.

Compounding on it was something I noticed on one of the local news last night that plays along with the article.

The President made these claims without evidence.

You spent how many years basically reporting the Steele Dossier?

Well, we got the information from several sources.

Yeah, but you didn’t have any evidence, either. You just had five people all saying the same thing.

But now you’ve added that commentary after a politician’s words, and you’re now covered?

No. Fuck you.

I, of course, had started thumbing together a long list of compaints to cobble together into a long Karenesque letter.

But, no, I’m not going to do that.

I’m just going to leave.

My problem is that I’m not sure that it’s even possible anymore.

I started writing this years ago, and it was sitting in my drafts folder.

I’m not sure if I posted what I wrote then, but I’ll repost it now, and redo the prompt today.

What job would you never take?
Another with the four-letter company where I worked.  What a disaster.
Backstory this criminal recommended me following a contract changeover. I’d butted heads with him several times, trying to get him to provide some justification for whatever hairbrained drop-in solution the vendor who’d picked up his bar tab was hocking….
And, so I took the job. For 77% of what i’d been earning.
But the overall experience was bad. The shitty compensation only exacerbated things. Because I wasn’t in a sunny mood all the time, and continued to call people on their bullshit….. I’m going to stop there, because it’s not all that interesting. (And I had to just delete more snark about it….)
So, that’s an easy answer to that question.
I had a dream last night I was back in radio. Who the hell knows where that came from. I really am not in shape to be doing air work, would have trouble doing some of the techie work, and would never do sales….I don’t know.
Writing early in the morning today because I woke up way early. I’m still in pain. Pfft.
So, what to write about tomorrow? Hmmmm….
The Hall of Fame game got cancelled because the logo painted on the field made the surface too hard to play on. I’m looking forward to Hard Knocks. Have you ever been to see an NFL training camp? One of my three high schools was in Carlisle, PA, which is home to Dickinson College, where the Redskins trained for years.
After the tumult following Jack Kent Cooke’s death, The Dan saw that Norval moved camp back to Virginia, after a couple of years in Maryland (Frostburg?). Either Schottenheimer or Spurrier decided it needed to head back to Carlisle.
I had a Tuesday off, and decided to head up to see camp. Going to go through my old OD archive to see if I can find what I wrote then, and whatever else I can add.

Onto today….

What job would you never take?

We’re still in post-election reax mode, and that might be affecting my answer here.

Don’t ever settle for something that’s beneath your skills.

I really view what happened to me at the four-letter company is me giving 150% effort for 80% pay. Yes, I had an attitude problem. Yes, I was abusing myself with too much alcohol. Yes, my body was going absolutely nuts.

But I shouldn’t have ever done something in my career field for that little money.

I could have made similar money doing something unrelated, and not gotten the abuse I incurred.

But I did what I had to do to take care of my wife and myself.

I can still think. I can still type. I may not be able to see worth a damn, but there’s lots of stuff I could be doing for a similar pittance.

So. News.

I heard something on one of my many podcsts about these folks. (Apologies for audio coming out of link…..)

The pod I was consuming was talking about them being a cult, just like the People’s Temple in Guyana.

I wonder how you get taken away in those things.

You can leave.

Yep. Yes you can. If you really can’t, and this sounds like one of those rare situations, that’s where it’s legitimate for the state to get involved.

Those rights the government is supposed to not deprive, and defend, are life, liberty, and property.

Yes, the prohibition is on the state abridging those, but you can’t transfer the power to someone else to take them, either.

You can’t give someone authorization to kill you.

You can’t give someone the power to imprison you.

You can’t give someone the power to take all your shit.

Does that make me a minarchist? Perhaps.

This is something I’ve had sitting in my drafts I’m folder for who knows how long, but maybe now’s the time to use it as a prompt.

Do you ever feel conflicted when someone you admire comes under controversy?

I’ve been trying to think about this one since I re-read it earlier this morning.

I think, probably, many of the early ones were surrounding celebs getting busted for drugs. I seem to have memories of a deejay quipping about David Lee Roth getting busted with some product out of Panama.

Hmmm….? Wonder what that was?

Growing up during the Nancy Reagan All-drugs-are-bad-mmmkay? era definitely affected my thinking about those sorts of things.

How could that baseball pitcher have been effective when he was doing so much Coke?

See what happened to Len Bias? He did die after smoking crack, and, you know, that often happens the first time you smoke it.

If you have unprotected sex, it’s less about whether young girl pregnant, you will catch teh AIDS, and DIE.

I miss Magic Johnson. Such a tragedy.

Oh. Wait.

How did Bill Clinton not catch anything?

I wonder if that sort of thinking partially explains some of the Wear a damn mask rhetoric.

If you don’t wear a mask, you will catch COVID, and die.

If you had extra-marital sex without a condom in the 80s, or 90s, you would catch AIDS and die.

Yeah, about that….

I was really concerned, even, when Coach [READACTED{ came in to health class, and told us the he was tired of seeing Americans puking all over downtown Heidelberg, so he was going to teach us how to drink (and not get obliterated).

Happy birthday, too, to my brother. I think he would have been too young to deal with the DARE and AIDS-era sex ed.

News. I’ve been kind of tracking this after I saw it somewhere else early this morning.

I am very upset that Rep. CIA is going back to the House. You would think the true-blue leftists might have a moment’s pause about a Senate seat likely being stolen from a successful black guy. *crickets*

Yeah. He’s playing for the wrong team.

All that said, the full stupid seems to have stopped.

Why come the “FOF’s” support growing among minorities? That’s just, well, unpossible!!1! (And, again, I voted for Dr. Jorgensen….)

How did Susan Collins win so big when she was totally supposed to lose? They spent a ton of money in South Carolina, and Lady G still won?

But, at least, it doesn’t look like any of the stupid stuff will happen.

So I can relax a bit.

Yeah, I know, good luck with that.