I was distracted yesterday with the thoughts that wrought that memory.
Last two days of the year are workout days. My legs are sore.
Fantasy football resulted in two disasters yesterday. So, second place in my league, and seventh in the other Yahoo league.
Obviously, most of the pods are on holiday break, but there’s been a few things I’ve filled back in.
I need to get to the doc to get this weird finger thing I’ve got going on checked.
More later, maybe.
As I was procrastinating about going to work out today, I was looking for something to listen to on Apple Music.
The first summer after my dad died, my wife and I were holed up at my mom’s house riding out a hurricane. I noticed that it was my mom’s first anniversary day as a widow. Both of the dogs had died, so she was living in this huge house by herself.
Knowing how flaky the electricity could be at that house during storms, we were cooking up a lot of the things in the fridge that’d probably go bad if the power was out for a few days.
I hadn’t brought up the date, but I could tell that my mom was a bit down. Finally there was a moment where I noticed she was crying.
“It rained that day, too.”
I started typing this with a bit about the frozen things falling outside, with a bit of a lament that it’d be over soon, and that what I’m hearing is the only frozen precep in the forecast for the foreseeable future.
Coffee retrieved, and th sleet has stopped.
The stockings aren’t hung by the chimney with care. We don’t have a fireplace, and such barbarism won’t be allowed long here in the Beltway Swamp. The only acceptable burning odor allowed is the strangely-legalized weed.
Keep Virginia Blue. Just like Harry Byrd intended.
Could have been his dad, too, who was also loathsome.
So, what else is up?
Bad Saints’ loss last night. I missed most of it because I was fitting in the last bits of work.
At least they’re not the Giants.
And maybe I should get past the irrational annoyance I had about them with the weird defense and boring offense gone.
But it is difficult to do when it’s the Saints on the receiving end of a drubbing.
So. What else is going on? I looked to see if I had something I wrote probably around the time my dad died (late 2010). I changed my mind about capital punishment. This is a power the state should not have. Yes, I take into account the Church’s teachings on it, but, perhaps reflexively, I think it’s just a power the state shouldn’t have.
If someone is truly awful, he can stay incarcerated forever. I don’t care. See Sirhan Sirhan. You know, the guy that the Libertarian coming into Trump’s cabinet thinks didn’t kill his father.
Do I care that he’s never going to get out of prison? Nope. Not really.
But news yesterday had two stories that really had me being okay with them being killed.
The first was these two from Georgia. That one conflicts me even more, as they didn’t kill anyone, which is the standard for all executions.
The other was the case of what happened in the NYC Subway. I selected that story because it doesn’t have some of the photos that were on Twi^H^H^HX. Yeah, he can die. I understand I shouldn’t feel that way, but I do.
There was also some stuff last few days about North Korean soldiers being killed in Ukraine. Naturally, the NeoHippie Putin apologists question the numbers, and whether it even happened.
No, it did happen.
And they’re slaves fighting for Putin. They can’t flee without being shot.
Slaves.
Keep that in mine, Auburn.
But I think I’ve poured out enough for now. Time to go enjoy some Christmas cheer.
I wrote last week about how busy I was.
Wednesday I attended this:
I showed up just as Matt Welch was delivering his opening.
I was there, and think my opening vote might have timed out…..I said Matt and Nick won after trying to vote undecided at the open.
While I have voted for some Democrats in the past as a statement against a particularly bad Republican, the Democrats have done some absolutely batshiat crazy stuff, really, since about 2005. I put a lot of it on the reax to Katrina. That was a massive failure of local, but especially state government. For every reference to “heckuvah job, Brownie,” there was a spooky silence about Kathleen Blanco.
Things didn’t really start moving there until LTG. Honore showed up.
Sarah mentioned Harry Browne during her open, but Katrina should have driven the point home that government doesn’t work.
Yet that’s the Democrats’ prescription for just about anything.
Health Care
Disaster Relief
Monetary Policy
COVID
You name it.
Another 6K GS-11s will solve it.
And they never do.
Bubuhbut OrangeManBad!!1!
Yep. And I didn’t vote for him. But you all did vote for vaccine mandates, lockdowns, the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, the Inflation Reduction Act, a completely open border, continuation of Trump’s tariffs…..
You need something way more compelling to convince me that voting for Biden is a good idea.
This is what I posed on the Substack discussion of it:
Random asides: Substack makes copypasta way difficult…almost as difficult as some of the data protection features I’ve seen recently to stop data spillage. Also, the text-prediction stuff on iOS has gotten pretty damn good; I’m able to type full replies using the predictive e text much of the time on my phone. As with the Crypto scammers I dealt with on WhatsApp, I will get information out. You can’t hide things, no matter how hard you try.
This was the night before the Fami Willis disqualification in Georgia. The two debating the Reason editors-at-large were from The Bulwark, which is something I’ve really not paid much attention to. You don’t like Trump. I get it. I never voted for him, and, in spite of all the things the Democrats did to him, the LP’s basic endorsement, etc., I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
But how does it make you feel?
Ambivalent? Do I hold some hope that Trump/Musk/Vivek will get things trimmed down? Maybe a bit? Am I very confident about it? Nope.
But I do enjoy getting into Reason events. I wish I could have stayed longer, but I had an early morning.
Hi!
Yeah, I’ve been incredibly busy all week. Maybe that really affected my attention, but I generally do feel okay about some of the things I’ve pushed back on with work.
I do think there’s a hard push to do things in the most stupid, expensive ways possible, but there’s not a ton I can do about that.
I still am tempted to stick with the halve-and-grow-back-as-needed approach to just about everything.
That approach has worked for me in so many instances. But, like, the vendor says you need to buy this really expensive stuff!!1! Noted. It’s not your money. You were hired to make things work effectively, and the vendor “requirements” aren’t your requirements. You have to make the product work, not sell hardware or software.
It’s even more of an issue when one vendor is selling both.
But to do proper work requires doing engineering using tried-and-true practices, scream waterfall scream, but it works. Yeah, I know getting someone important to sign off on your engineering work takes time, but you’re spending other people’s money. In the case of tax money, it’s money that’s been I forcibly taken.
Do the right thing. You have to look at yourself in the mirror.
That admonition leads me into the news section of things. Yes, I’ve been paying attention even if I haven’t said a lot…..
The UHC murder case. Lots of speculation from some really terrible people. Oh, it was justified because he’d been denied care by UHC. This is what you get when you’ve got for-profit insurers denying care. Any reasonable person could understand why he did what he did. Except he wasn’t insured by UHC, had been involved with psychotropic drugs, was from an affluent family, and…. Senator Warren, I will continue to ignore you, still, as best as I can. Maybe some Pow Wow Chow can distract me. The Substacker, formerly of The Old Grey Lady, and Space Cowboy Jeff’s tax write-off, I will refrain from raw-dogging anything to do with you.
Daniel Penny was acquitted. I’d just assume avoid NYC until Alvin Bragg is gone. While I hear things that NYC is better than it was last time I was there, they elected these people, and deserve the consequences.
Looks like I am going to go to the final Shmoocon. Never got a response on the sponsorship tickets, btu I’m pretty sure there is one available for me through a friend. If they ever get back to me on the sponsorship, I’ll stick to my promise….and have probably two tickets to move. But I am going. Room booked. It’s earlyish this year, so it’ll be cold. Given some of the past experiences, that seems absolutely appropriate. 2009 was such an odd experience, but it’s something I’ll remember as long as I live. Or was that 2010? I don’t remember. Pretty good con content, and it snowed. Hard. So hard that the atrium between the budlings collapsed. I helped push a DC cop out of a snow bank. I’ve barely spoken to some people with whom I was formerly close because of things that were said over the then-new Twitter. I really can’t see anything I’d written about it back then. Now thinking more about it, it was probably 2010, because I was definitely having issues that’d lead to my MS diagnosis just a few months later.
Drones. I haven’t been outside to glance at the sky in the past few nights. I’m outside most often early in the morning when I’m going to and from the gym. I haven’t seen anything. Obviously, there’s the information coming out of New Jersey, which coincidentally was where War Of The Worlds was set, Governor Hogan up in MDDR, etc.. I don’t know. Well, they ought to be shot down!!1! Um. By whom? And what about damage that happens on the ground because of the downing? I don’t know. I’m not sure that putting anyone in prison would fix it, assuming they’re competent to stand trial. But like the Chinese balloon that was shot down over the Atlantic Ocean after it’d cruised across the US, open up, y’all. But I’m also trying to still work my way though the Star Wars movies simultaneously. Are they like clones?
This morning, saw something that reminded me of the reasons I’m very much down on the reinvented Libertarian Party.
If anyone reading is interested in knowing why this is an antisemitic trope, I’ll assume that you’re savvy enough to STFW, and find out.
And I think I’ve written enough for today. Off to do some of the other things I need to do today.
Or just a bit more. (Since I finished this year’s compulsive streak.)
Busy week, obviously.
Missed the The Fifth Column thing this morning because I was trying to follow whatever’s going on in Syria.
It’s another example of the right-about-everything-all-the-time crowd missed hard.
Nobody knows exactly what’s going on.
But it’s pretty evident that it’s not because of anything the US did…certainly nothing to benefit the hated Military-Industrial Complex.
Other stuff?
There’s something burbling on the job front I might have to figure out. It’d likely be out of DC or MDDR, which isn’t ideal, but it’d be something different to do for a few years.
I would just assume stay where we are, but a lot of that is going to be dictated by my wife’s work.
And I’m okay with that. It’s cool that she’s probably out-earning me these days. I can be finished, and try to enjoy some of my time to try to relax.
Certainly my parents missed out on that; fourteen years since my dad died today.
Instead of being sad about things, I’m going to go watch football.
