This Ain’t No CNN.

Rant.

I haven’t been on Facebook in a while and I hadn’t ranted on Facebook in a much longer while, but I couldn’t keep my mouth shut anymore.

It’s been decades since I’ve sat in a social studies class, and even when I sat in a social studies class I wasn’t really that enthralled with the subject. But, I do remember that gas prices in a capitalistic society are determined by supply and demand, the free market in general, corporate greed, and probably too many taxes. No one in the US government issues a decree declaring what gas prices will be. Demand a year ago, in the middle of a worldwide pandemic was low. Now that folks are out and about (since COVID is “over”?), demand is high. Because of worldwide angst, supply is low. The US Government is releasing barrels of reserve to help with the supply. Supply and demand + corporate greed (you don’t see oil corp profits declining, do you?) = higher prices at the pump. If you need to blame someone, blame an oil exec while they fan themselves with money on their million dollar yachts. Yes, prices are absolutely painful. Yes, there’s a lot of turmoil in the world. Yes, all governments involved in all of this could do a heck of a lot better, but when you drive a large vehicle that requires a lot of gas, it’s going to get pricey in times like these. Trade in for a Chevette or plan your trips to the market a little better. And yes, this all sucks.

Bullet Proof.

Lura Sharp Elementary school, built in 1939 and having originally housed grades K-12 until 1969, still stands today. There have been many upgrades and improvements to the structure over the years. Asbestos has been removed, windows replaced a few times, the light brick has been fixed up, new bushes, an annex in 1956.

It wasn’t until over 70 years later that bullet proof glass and a reinforced safety partitioning of the impressive main lobby took place. The building that once welcomed fresh air from Lake Ontario through side doors propped open now has metal detectors, intercoms, and worried students behind her walls.

These improvements to this well established building are a horrifying commentary on the direction of our society today. Our children should always feel safe within the walls of any school. Our children should always be safe at school. Barricades, fences, bullet proof glass, and metal detectors is not the answer.

Better gun laws are the answer.

Nope.

How can I sit here and type about the wonders of the latest ABBA album or the corporate greed around the latest season of “Star Trek: Discovery” and its distribution or any other trivial thing in my life when a Wisconsin jury decides a man killing another man is not guilty of all charges?

I don’t recognize the United States of America anymore. I really don’t.

TNSD.

I don’t know if TNSD is a thing. I made the acronym up; it refers to “Traumatic News Stress Disorder”, but I don’t know if someone had the same idea as me to call the constant barrage of bad news inflicting PTSD like symptoms TNSD. Maybe I should patent it. Capitalism.

We have Apple News as part of our Apple One family subscription. Apple touts the personal curation of the news feed, but it’s constant bad news. I don’t trust many news sources; everyone has an agenda. Who to believe? I end up reading something from the BBC. Someone without an investment in the success or failure of the United States.

I’m so very tired of news outlets and social media amplifying stupidity. I’m incredibly tired of the stupidity.

Let’s stop being stupid. Maybe the bad news will simmer down.

Device Not Ready.

Contrary to the title of this post, this is not about technology. In this post, I am the device.

Now that the 2021 local elections are over and everyone is weeping into the beer because things ahead look scary for anyone invested in politics, the news media is going to do its best to whip the populace up about the 2022 midterm elections. It’s what they do. They thrive on chaos to drive ratings.

I am not prepared to deal with this. I have said since the beginning of this year that my gut tells me were just in an intermission between chaos cycles, and I am not mentally prepared for what the midterm elections will bring. There’s nothing great about the U.S. Government at the moment, it’s really just less awful than it was. For example, I hear much more about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell than I do about Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

We’re going to continue to get creaky old people shoved in onto our ballots because other than the presidency, there’s no term limits. Code words will continue to be bandied about to shake folks into a frenzy. There will be hollering and screaming and lots of exclamation points on social media. Caps lock will abound and people will continue to say stupid, idiotic things because Fox News told them to.

It’s disheartening. It’s depressing.

Build a nest egg best you can and get as many safety mechanisms in place as you can to maintain your personal standard of life. I’ve expressed this morbid thought before, but I’m happy to be a middle aged guy who remembers what the country used to be like and I’m thankful I’m on the back half of my life. A terrible thought for “The greatest country in the world”.

Cock Fights.

Virgin Galactic’s Sir Richard Branson and former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos are duking it out as to who can get to “space” first this month. I put space in quotation marks because they’re not orbiting the planet or anything; they’ll both be getting to the very beginnings of space and very briefly leave the Earth’s gravitational pull.

While I certainly understand the “cool” factor of flying to space like this, I’m not sure I understand the scientific benefits. When SpaceX provides a ride for astronauts to the International Space Station or launches satellites or brings payloads to wherever they need to go, it’s for science stuff. Or, in the case of Starlink, they’re making the Internet available to remote locations. And that’s rather cool (aside from the pollution it’s providing for astronomers). When the likes of Sir Richard Branson or Jeff Bazos go up, it’ll be to say “look what we can do” and is essentially an expensive amusement park ride. Yes, there is innovation required to make these events occur, but just imagine how the world would benefit if the funds for these joyrides were used to help combat hunger or homelessness.

I really like Sir Branson and Mr. Bezos are just trying to outdo each other, much in the way muscle cars were raced in the mid 20th century. With these two I don’t really care who gets to “space” first.

I just wish the human race could win from these endeavors.

Hacks.

I’m not going to get into a solid review because I really don’t know what I would write about the experience thus far. Well, I’m actually enjoying the experience and I look forward to the next episode, but this show is different than what we’ve watched in the past. I now get what folks mean when they say it’s a “dark comedy”.

I’m talking about the show “Hacks” on HBO Max. We just finished episode three. I haven’t invested enough time to find out how many episodes there are in the series, but it feels like it’s like an eight episode run or something.

Photo from rollingstone.com

Jean Smart stars as a Las Vegas stand up comedian who’s act needs a little punching up. She’s been doing this bit for decades and her agent gets her a young writer to help bring her act into the 21st century. Except neither character is having it.

The pacing is slow but not tedious. The dialog is witty, but the moments between the dialog are just as fun. The humor is not your typical tried-and-true guffaw. For lack of a better word it is a little dark, but I still find it very enjoyable. We get HBO Max for as long as we have our AT&T account, but I would subscribe to HBO Max for this series.

I’m at a lost for words to describe it further, but I recommend you take a gander.

Absent.

Senator Kyrsten Sinema, courtesy of azcentral.com

Senator Kyrsten Sinema did not show for today’s Senate vote on the creation of a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Insurrection at the Capitol Building. Earlier this week, she spoke about the importance of this commission but apparently she did not find it important enough to warrant her vote. She didn’t even show up for work today.

I’m new to Arizona politics, and of course I understand the wild west is much different than the solidly blue stomping grounds I used to inhabit. I’m good with that. I’m good with learning, understanding, and growing as an American.

I’m not good with supporting a Senator that is a no show. I’m not good with with supporting someone who chooses to not do their job. I’m not good with supporting a coward.

I tried contacting Senator Sinema’s office but my call would not go through. I ended up writing an email instead.

I hope the Arizona Democratic Party has a better option when Senator Sinema’s term comes to an end. Her theatrics and complete disregard for doing her job are really not worthy of my vote.

More information at azcentral.com (sorry for the paywall).

Texas.

Photo from an image search about Texas Power on DuckDuckGo.com

Ah, Texas. It’s been just a week or two since my husband and I drove across the panhandle as we made our way from Chicago to Tucson. It was fairly early in the morning when we crossed the Oklahoma State Line along I-40 into Texas. The temperature was well below freezing and the roads were covered with ice. The bridges were particularly fun to navigate. We made our way to Amarillo at a crawl as it seemed that whatever state agency maintains the roads and bridges along Interstate 40 had absolutely no interest in doing anything about the slick roadways. There were at least a dozen tractor trailers off the road in various spots. To be fair, your neighbors in Oklahoma had the same approach. Now I understand why you guys freak out when Mother Nature decides to take the temperatures to the low side. You act surprised (though it happens every year) and you don’t do a damn thing about it.

Apparently that was just a glimpse into the way Texans feel about winter weather.

For most of the state, the Texas power grid is independent from the rest of the continental United States. I’ve known this for a while but I didn’t know why. This week I learned it was to escape federal regulations and oversight on power grid maintenance. By maintaining power independence, Texas doesn’t have to do things like winterize power generators or build in costly redundancies, both required along the rest of the United States power grid. After all, Texas doesn’t see that kind of weather.

Except it does.

Our friends in the Houston area have been without power for tens of hours. Like 30-40 hours. No power. No heat. And probably no running water. In the freezing cold. This is not uncommon for The Lone Star State this week, millions of Texans have been in the same situation since this cold snap began. The Texas power companies have been instituting rolling blackouts to keep up with high demands, except the blackouts don’t roll, they just black out and not come back up. Our friends slept in sub-freezing temperatures in their house Monday night. They honestly didn’t know if they would survive.

What was it Trump said about “third-world shit hole countries”?

There is nothing great about the “greatest nation on Earth” when its citizens, no matter what state they live in, are freezing to death in their homes, especially when the powers that be have willfully decided to privatize and rely on good ol’ American capitalism for essential services such as electricity, water, and heat.

I will never understand why Texans elect representatives who put them in this situation. I feel terrible for the Texans that are having to live through this ordeal, regardless of who they elected. I just pray the folks down there will remember this catastrophic event come Election Day and start voting sensibly and start taking care of one another.

By the way, the power outages are not due to “windmills freezing up”. That’s a lie being propagated by the usual conservative “news” outlets and idiots on social media. All forms of power generation in Texas are freezing up due to a lack of preparedness for this type of weather. Only 5-10% of the wind turbines in The Lone Star State are having an issue right now. So please, let’s put all of that to rest and deal with the real situation.

Texas needs to get its act together.

Results.

My husband started to tell me the results of the Senate vote on Trump’s impeachment and I politely asked him to stop the conversation. We already knew the answer, the Senate would not do the right thing; all of sudden they were more concerned about going on recess so they slammed through a solution as quickly as possible and after all, the folks at the Capitol that died are dead and not coming back so why worry about it now.

During the Trump Reign of Terror I kept an eye on the news because I wanted to know if my marriage was going to be invalidated or if Martial Law was going to be declared and I wanted to look my best for either occasion. Since President Biden has taken office I have calmed down on following the news. Yes, the Democrats have the majority across the board right now but they’ll be weak and worry about optics more than results and not do much with it and probably lose the majority somewhere come 2022. Biden is signing Executive Orders like hall passes and fixing a lot of things that the Orange Moron did. I’m OK with undoing stupid stuff, I’m not really on board with using Executive Orders to do everything else. The branches of government should be working together to make this a better country for all of us. Unfortunately, it appears those days are long gone.

I sound cynical. I’m actually disengaged. Things are getting better but we shouldn’t be digging ourselves out of this hole to begin with.

I’m not surprised at the Senate’s acquittal. I expected it. Few in government are actually in it for the right reasons and I just don’t have the energy to follow their script anymore.