sean – Page 27

Four

I called my grandfather to wish him happy birthday. Ninety-two. Holy crap.

I have little illusion I will last that long, despite having roughly a quarter of his genes.

But he didn’t smoke. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen him drink, and that was only beer, mainly while fishing.

But I’ve pretty well decided that I’m not working tomorrow. I probably should have taken today off, but I really didn’t think I had anything else to do today.

Other than shiver. After I finish writing today, I’ll call the maintenance for the fourth time today to see about getting somebody out to fix the heat in our apartment.

Unacceptable.

So, prompt….

Name a book that you never forgot about

I’ve been thinking lately about The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

A classmate an I, being the two new kids in our advanced English class, had it as one of the make-up summer reading assignments to start school in Bad Newz. (Yes, I saw both Vick brothers play high school football…)

One of the things we hit on, even though I don’t recall seeing it in any of the analysis materials we found, was that it was a piece of Socialist agitprop.

Obviously, the two of us had spent considerable time as kids in Germany worrying that the Soviets were going to come through the Fulda Gap at any moment.

But the main character’s life was absolute hell in the meat packing plants in Chicago (and all of the health concerns for which the book is famous), but his life improved when he joined a union, and became a Socialist.

This was the mid-90s. I’d seen recently-liberated Eastern Europe. The workers’ paradises there, well, weren’t paradises at all.

But that was different, of course. It could be Slovakia, but it could also be Denmark.

Not so much.

I went to Denmark, too. Denmark wasn’t at all similar to Mukov. Not even close.

So I guess there’s an example where in-person experience outshines the academics’ stories.

I’m trying to think of some of the particulars of the book, but few of the disgusting particulars are coming to mind. The joy of Jurgis after finding the opioid of the academy, on the other hand, does.

Three

Virginia Election reax

Of course, what happened in the Virginia election yesterday has been all over the worldwide media. Results (from AP).

What’s happened here in Virginia over the past, really, twenty years is an example of out-of-state newcomers really changing what the guidance and goals are.

Obviously, my wife, and my entry into the DC area is partially a result of it.

But there’s really few things worthwhile here anymore.

So it’s time to leave soon. Oh well. It’s not like I have any particular affinity for NOVA.

I was really thinking about leaving Virginia, actually. Yesterday’s results might cut down on the urgency on that. The craziness is resolved, somewhat, at the state level. Next year, I expect the Republicans to take back the US Congress.

But will it really matter? What will happen during the lame duck session of Congress between election day next November, and the time the new Congress is sworn in in January 2023? I don’t know.

The Machiavellian instinct I have says that all of the worst things that were in the stalled portions of the “Infrastructure” bills in Congress right now. But I do think some of the senators not in completely off-the-rails states will think twice about ramming things through, even those who’ve lost their reelection bids.

Maybe the blow will be lessened somewhat in Virginia, but that requires more faith than I have.

Another big take-away? Both the Clinton and Trump political machines are completely destroyed now. Youngkin won keeping Trumps at more than an arm’s length (and given Younkin’s college basketball background, that’s pretty far) McAuliffe was Bill Clinton’s DNC point-man, and he ran interference for Hillary. The country’s moved on.

If that means that Trump was the last of four-consecutive Boomer presidents, good riddance. (Biden is “Silent” Generation; Kennedy does a segment on her Fox Business show about which is older X or Joe Biden?)

It appears that the Republicans also took back the House of Delegates, swinging from a five-seat deficit to a fifteen-seat advantage. Yikes.

But I guess we’ll see what more shakes out in the next few days. I was up way too late watching results, so I’m going to slink off to take a nap.

Two

Day two, and I somehow didn’t have a prompt for today.

Today has really been a matter of recovering from yesterday’s ordeal, unfortunately.

Yesterday was an….ordeal.

Late Sunday night, my oldest friend, who’d promised to drive me in to the city to get this procedure done called out sick. Like coughing up blood sick. I don’t think it’s the dreaded COVID, but probably not a good idea to have him in the hospital, regardless.

So mad scramble to figure out getting a ride to and from. My wife can’t drive in the District, so find something else…..

Let me call my brother.

He drove me in and out. Not really a good way to express my gratitude for that. He’d actually never been to our place….which turns out to be about fifteen minutes away from his work.

But get to the hospital at 0800, check in, do perp, they take me back, and I go night-night.

Similar to the one a few years ago. Hopefully there’s nothing weird on the lab results, but I won’t know for about a week, probably.

Home. Sleep off the anesthesia, light dinner, normal twice-weekly work fun, and football.

Today was waking up barely in time to sign-on for work on-time, working a full shift, then going to vote.

Fingers crossed that the candidates against whom I voted lose.

But I’m feeling sort of okay, and, thankfully, don’t have anywhere else to go until I get my teeth cleaned Saturday morning.

But back to the election, kind of where I am with the whole process, now, is voting against the worst people. Considering Virginia has open primaries, I often get two opportunities to do that — once in the controlling party’s “open” primary, and again in the general election.

At the same time, I understand the appeal of just refusing to participate. I can’t remember at this point the last time I felt good about casting a vote for a candidate.

We’ll see what the results are.

One

It’s November. I’m doing what I do, writing, for the month. This is Year Twelve of writing every day. I’m also not shaving my upper lip, which I’ve done for probably about the past five or six years.

Why do I keep doing this? I don’t know. My psychologist has identified it as one of the few compulsions I have in my somewhat-unusual case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

The number of things she’s been able to help me with in the almost three years I’ve been seeing her are nearly impossible to tally.

So, yes, there’s been some dissuasion towards this, but I keep doing it because, the November session, at least, sort of focuses me on the end of the year.

While I’ve gotten better, personally, many, many things have gotten a lot worse this year.

In the first entry last year, I wrote, “I’ve been trying to stay a bit optimistic about what’s going to happen, but I am worried.”

I think that was justified.

My wife and I are trying to figure out how to begin extracting ourselves from the DC swamp. I think we’ve got the start of a plan, but there’s still many lower-case Js to dot, Fs to cross.

I have about two-thirds of the month’s writing planned. Let’s go. Yes, that includes you, too, Brandon. O.o

Fifth Saturday

Yeah, that’s today. I’m prepping for a medical procedure on Monday, and wishing I could go to the Sayulita Super-spreader event. Money isn’t an issue for a change. My cantankerous body, and my employment, on the other hand, are.

Oh well. There’s going to be a lot of things I need to do before the end of the year, still, but I’m ummm…optimistic, maybe? There’s a resignation that’s come across. Do what you will; I don’t care. To paraphrase Ray Lewis, I’m a Machine. You can’t hurt me.

I’m supposed to finally get my next infusion five days late at the new site. It’s jumbled my schedule for getting a flu shot, but I’ll deal. I still haven’t gotten my reimbursement from what I paid last year, either. See the first ¶.

I am a bit disappointed that when I catch the dreaded COVID, I won’t die, but probably also won’t be able to get any sizzurp.

Trying to figure out when, exactly, I should start the writing on Monday. I think I’ll probably do it early. I have3 to be at the hospital at 0800, and I’ll be under sedation, so writing later in the evening probably isn’t going to happen.

We’ll see.

Until the kickoff, I’m away…..

On Slackerdom

I am this morning, having woken up, then shutting my alarm off. Considering how much work I owe for this pay period, I’m in no particular hurry to get going; I’m tired.

Not sure who I’d like to see win the football game tonight. One of the podcasts I listen to has a Cardinals’ fan, which was an oddity to me for a long time. When I thought about them in about 2016, I realized that I’d actually never met a Cards’ fan. Not once. But then there was a woman I worked with who actually was; she’d grown up in the “Valley of the Sun,” and they’d been out there most of her life, so it fit.

Enough of that. I wanted to show something that came across on Twitter the past couple of days.

This is a perfect example of what the LPMC folks don’t understand.

If you don’t like a private company[s policies, deny them your business. You can leave. Subtle nudging, as I think I did, goes a long way toward making people think about what they’re doing. It doesn’t require any sort of loud pronouncement.

LPMC campaign strategy is similar to the underpants gnomes.

The LPMC strategy is:

Phase 1: RON PAUL

Phase 2: ???

Phase 3: Profit!

But the bigger thing that I think they’re missing is that you deprive private organizations that don’t align with your values your money.

I don’t care if you think you think you’ve got the most important, compelling message in the universe, if you don’t like how an outfit operates, deny them your content. You can leave.

If your message is worthwhile, a worthwhile audience will find it, regardless of where it is.

If you think your audience isn’t discerning enough to follow you to a place that adheres to the values you claim to admire, your message speaks for itself.

No Bother

I relistened to the debate I mentioned here. If you’d like to watch the debate, it’s here.

Again, the resolution was this:

A willingness to intervene, and to seek regime change, is key to an American foreign policy that benefits America.

This was an Oxford-style debate. The “winner” is the one who changes the audience’s opinion the most.

Before the debate, I cast my vote as undecided. Following the debate, I gave my vote, much to my dismay, to Krystol.

After listening again, despite Horton’s seemingly-irrelevant interjections, I reluctantly opposed the resolution.

But, on further consideration, there’s not two, but four separate options.

Do you have a willingness to intervene? Yes or no.

Do you have a willingness to seek regime change? Yes or no.

So, the First Gulf War would have been: Intervene, yes. Seek Regime change, no.

Afghanistan in 2001, or Somalia in 1992? Intervene, yes. Seek regime change, not particularly at first.

Panama 1989? Intervene, yes. Seek regime change, yes.

Libya in 2013? Intervene, for the most part, no. Seek regime change? Absolutely.

Egypt in 2013? Intervene, no. Seek regime change? Not particularly, but it happened, and we were okay with it, even though it meant the Muslim Brotherhood.

Iraq 1991 – 2003: Intervene, yes. Seek regime change? No

Rwanda 1994: Intervene, no. Seek regime change? No, just stop the massacre.

Libya 2003ish-2013: Intervene, no, seek regime change? No.

	RC	NRC
Intervene	YY	YN
NI	NY	NN

By and large, however, I’m opposed to intervention. I didn’t support the Second Iraq War until I heard Tony Blair argue for it in front of Parliament.

But breaking it down into the separate combinations….

Are there times when America should intervene, and not seek regime change? Sometime, absolutely.

Are there times when America should intervene, and seek regime change? Yes.

Are there times when Americas should seek regime change without intervention? I would say that that’s pretty rare.

Are there times when America should stay as far away as possible? Yes.

That neither of the debaters noticed the problem with this resolution is actually pretty incredible, now, in retrospec.

What are Saturdays for?

Kind of my question of the day, though this is the last somewhat-normal one I’m probably goi8ng to have for the rest of the year.

My wife told me yesterday that she doesn’t want to go anywhere for the holidays. I’m good with that, but I would like to really do holiday food stuff. I might get some pushback on that, but…..we’ll see.

I want comforting food as the weather gets cold.

Something to enjoy as things wind down here on the edge of the DC swamp. I think both of us want out. Enough, already.

I’m listening to this after gulping down copious amounts of Lorenzotti Coffee.

What else…

I need to finalize my writing prompts for next month. So far, I have only a few.

Obviously, I’ll write a long entry to start, probably written early because I expect to be undersedation for a medical procedure at the end of the day.

Day after election day.
Veterans’ Day.
Birthdays.
Thanksgiving.
Christmas Shopping, plans.
What is the most out there movie or book that you can’t get enough?
Do you have goals that you want to accomplish? What are they? What is your plan to achieve them?
What I have accomplished in the last 10 years?

I’ll probably also combine a few shorter queeries I have in to one larger entry.

So if you have ideas, I’m open.

I’m excited to do this.

What’s Old Is New

Rather uneventful week, thankfully.

I don’t know what to do, really.

I do have some more ideas, thankfully, that might work well.

We’re still looking at buying a house. This is in spite of bad news coming out about where the housing market’s probably headed.

I’m hoping we can get to the point where we’ll be able to almost pay cash for somewhere.

Maybe I’ll be at the point where I can just pay outright, and not have to really worry about a lot.

I need to figure out what to write about next month. I’m also curious what I wrote about, if I wrote, during my first trip after leaving radio.

Oh Bother

Me, that is.

I have two things I need to write about.

I really meant to write about this (Voluntary Vixens Ep. 96) late last week, but I forgot. I guess my initial take is along the lines of where I am with so many other things lately.

People get so accustomed to preparing (for anything!) one way that they don’t take into account changes that’ve happened in the world.

The Emergency Preparedness information is certainly familiar to me. It sounds like my youth background is very similar in terms of the Boy Scouts.

But things have changed.

The US Army deactivated its last MASH unit in 2006.

There’s no need to do a ton of things in the field anymore. If shit really goes down, they get you to a place where you can be cared for away from the imminent danger.

The US just pulled out of Afghanistan after twenty years. If a servicemember was injured in the field there, he/she would be stabilized for helo transport to a place that’d be acceptable for transport to a full hospital somewhere else.

The corporate press here combined information from the first Gulf War in 1991 with the modern wars’ statistics.

We’re pretty damned good of keeping track of people these days. If someone is hurt or killed, they’re not just left on the battlefield like they were previously.

What I’m saying with the emergency preparedness efforts is: understand what modern tools entail. I traveled to NYC earlier this week. I had two credit cards, a debit card, my paratransit card, a $20 bill, and a phone. When I got back to DC the next day, I had the same.

Did I ever want for something that would have been in the gargantuan wallet I used to carry? No. Would that have been the same in 2005? No.

Out of curiosity, I decided to search back, and see if I’d mentioned Bob Zubrin here before. Yes. July 2014. What he was writing about was his inspiration for Martian exploration based on the historical examples from polar exploration.

You have to go light, and you have to be able to move. If there’s something you need along the way, you can probably find it if you look around.

This is almost antithetical to the ultra-prepared crowd.

Will you be able to get somewhere safe? Almost certainly. So unless there’s something you will die without, pick it up along the way.

It’s very difficult to communicate this sort of thinking.

Now I should write about the trip and the debate.

First, I did not carry my vaccine card with me. No, you don’t need to scan my card. Sorry. You can see a photo of it in my phone unlockable to anyone who doesn’t have my thumbprint. If they hadn’t let me in, I probably would have disputed all the charges for the trip with my credit card company.

But they were satisfied, so it was a non-issue.

As for the debate, itself, I registered my vote as undecided at the outset. As I wrote Saturday, I really was.

As a refresher, the resolution was: A willingness to intervene, and to seek regime change, is key to an American foreign policy that benefits America.

Despite a couple of notable questionable assertations, the neocon of all neocons cleaned the floor with Horton.

While Krystol didn’t really do a ton to support it, he did spell out some instances of American intervention that have benefitted humanity.

As my friend and I discussed later, were Grenada and Panama really black eyes for America? Did either really talk about those? No.

I was also thinking about where we didn’t even do the bare minimum, to loan Bradley Fighting Vehicles to end the slaughter in Rwanda.

The default position should be one of non-intervention

But can positive things come from military action? Absolutely.

I think a lot of that would be short of regime change.

Neither of them really argued to that. Horton was digging up things completely irrelevant to, well, anything.

I get earwormed by Duran-Duran’s “The Reflex” when I hear him speak about the Middle East; he’s reflexively pro-Shiite.

On balance, is the world a better place because the Shah was removed?

I don’t think so.

I’ve volunteered to discuss it with a few podcasters I frequently consume. We’ll see if any of them take me up on it.