Cults.

I have found that Republicans fit into three categories right now. The first are the die hard Republicans that will vote Republican without regard as to whom they’re voting for. They’re the ones sinking boats with Trump flags, changing their Facebook or Twitter header image to an American flag or an image of the Declaration of Independence, or running around not wearing a mask because of their freedoms. One can not debate this type of Republican. They are part of a cult. If Trump told them to drink the Kool-aid to get on the comet, they’d drink the Kool-aid and bring an overstuffed carry-on for the nearest Hale-Bopp. I know too many of this type of Republican and I’m steering as clear of them as possible. They’re loud, they’re irrational, and they’ll probably turn violent. Think Ted Cruz. Trump could set his wife on fire and he’d still kiss Trump’s ass.

The second type of Republican I’ve encountered voted for Trump in 2016 because after all, “what did they have to lose”? They admit the man is a nut job but they can overlook things like kids in cages and nearly 200K dead people from a controllable pandemic because their 401K is doing just fine. Some of them probably don’t have a 401K but whatever that 401K may be it’s doing just fine and besides, some of them can secretly think their own thoughts about non-white people and not feel too bad about it. One can have a discussion about the merits of Trump and where the Republican party is today but it’s probably still going to be a losing proposition for the non-Trump voter side of the discussion. Think Susan Collins here. She’s making plenty of dough, she gives looks of concern and occasionally furrows her brow. She worries about kids in cages and dead people from COVID but it’ll all be OK because it’s always OK and she’s white and privileged.

Then we have the third type of Republican. They know that Trump is bat shit crazy and the worst leader ever known to this country, and they only voted for him in 2016 because Hillary was just too shrill and seemed like she thought she deserved the post. They see what Trump has done to this country, and the things he’s said about their friends or family in the military, and while they do not like Biden, they’ll probably vote for him in 2020 because nothing can be worse than what we have right now. They’re not for Biden, they can’t stand the Democrats, but they definitely do not want four more years of whatever this mess has been during Trump’s term.

I’ve had to significantly distance myself from the first type of Republican I described. Having these people in my life has contributed to a state of depression and self doubt that I have not known before 2020. I have always strived to maintain relationships with folks I consider “good people”. They don’t have to think like I do nor do they have to vote the way that I vote, but they still have a strong foundation built on basic human decency and a good moral compass. I really doubt these things to be true for the folks that fit into that category. They don’t care about human life, they don’t care about the planet, they don’t care about “the good of the all”. They care about themselves and that’s it. They lack compassion. They lack empathy. And my thinking they had it to begin with really amped up my self-doubt. How bad at am I at judging the character of people as to whether I want them in my life or not?

I struggle with this.

Stepping away from family and friends of this nature has helped me somewhat, but it still makes me sad. When we start having family gathering again or start meeting up with friends somewhere (after this pandemic is at a place where it’s safe to do so), I won’t be able to reconnect with the people from whom I’ve distanced myself. My memory won’t allow me to do this. My doubts will not allow me to do this.

This might be amongst the worst fallout of the Trump administration.

12 September 2020 by Why. 0

Doing Things.

With the weekend upon us we have nothing in our plans. My scheduled flight for the weekend has been cancelled due to inclement weather in the forecast. We’ll probably watch our weekly Star Trek movie on Sunday night. And on Saturday we’ll go for a ride somewhere.

I like going for rides in the car. I’ve always liked going for rides in the car. But we’ve gone on so many rides this year, mostly because there hasn’t been much else to do with the current COVID-19 situation, I know the northern half of Illinois like the back of my hand.

I’m hesitant to spend too much time in adjacent states, though we do dip into Indiana or Wisconsin once in a while. With such an uneven approach to pandemic precautions across the country, upon entering Chicago we’re reminded that we’re suppose to quarantine for 14 days upon arrival if we’ve been in a “COVID-19 Hot Spot”. Wisconsin, Indiana, and Iowa occasionally make that list and with Big Brother watching us the way it does in 2020, I don’t want our license plate reader showing up on an Indiana camera and then someone wondering why we didn’t quarantine when we got back home.

My husband and I are always extra cautious. We always wear masks, we wipe down everything with sanitary wipes, we have buckets of hand sanitizer in the car, and we don’t eat in restaurants. I’m sure there’s more than one french fry under the seats of our Jeep Cherokee.

I never thought I’d see the day where I’d be bored of going for a ride in the car, and I’m not really bored of the practice, but there’s only so many times one can drive across the prairie on Illinois 47.

11 September 2020 by Fun and Games Dept 0

Changes.

Even though it’s been 19 years, I still remember the events of 9/11 as if it was yesterday. I remember standing in the video editing room of the advertising agency watching the events unfold on a television monitor. I remember scrambling to get the radio station to full time news coverage. I remember the sinking feeling in my stomach as the buildings came down.

Most of all, I remember thinking, life will never be the same again.

Those thoughts have been proven to be true. It’s felt the country has been completely off the rails since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the results of those attacks have snowballed into a country that is barely recognizable 19 years later.

Much has changed since 2001. Some of it good, too much of it bad. There is now an entire generation that has never known a United States that wasn’t at war.

I still get a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes when I think of the brave people that last their lives on that day, and their families and friends that had to carry on without them. I feel the same way about the country I once knew.

We all lost that day.

11 September 2020 by Ponderings and Musings 0

Proximity.

Truman is not a snuggler. He’s content being in close proximity to us but he’s not one to flop on top of us any snuggle in for purrs and a nap.

When he settles in next to my desk during the workday I know this is his way of showing love. He digs at my closed door until he’s allowed entrance and then he’s on the floor, sprawled out next to his little cat house.

Contentment by proximity.

10 September 2020 by He's A Feline. 0

Restore.

The Linux partition and the Mac partition on my trusty MacBook Pro got into a squabble today and shut the whole thing down. I rebooted my Mac and nothing would start up. It was like the hard drive knew nothin’.

I am on attempt number two at restoring Mac OS. Five minutes left as I type. Wish me luck.

9 September 2020 by Geek 0

Star Trek Day.

Taken in July.

On September 8, 1966, “Star Trek” debuted on NBC. Produced by Desilu Studios, the series was given the green light not once, but twice, by the head of Desilu at the time, Lucille Ball. Each year, September 8 is designated as “Star Trek Day”.

I first discovered Star Trek in reruns in the late 1970s courtesy of CKWS out of Kingston, Ontario. I used to watch it each afternoon from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM. The antenna had to be turned, and during the ending credits I had to turn the antenna back the other direction so my Dad could watch the evening news during supper. With the right atmospheric conditions, I could vividly enjoy Star Trek from the Canadian station on the Zenith color television surrounded by a good sized wood cabinet. Turn it on early, it took a minute or two to warm up.

Of course, I have enjoyed Star Trek since discovering it in the late 1970s. Earl and I were just talking about which movies I saw on opening night, and which I waited until they were available on television or VCR tape. My first Star Trek movie on opening night was “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier”, in Acton, Mass. I remember audibly gasping when the Enterprise-A whisks by in a typical “beauty shot”, but with less-than-stellar special effects now well known to that particular movie. A guy next to me said, in his best Boston accent, “I know, right?”

The most important thing about Star Trek to me is the hope it provides for humanity. The “classic” spin of the series up through Star Trek: Voyager shows us a future where humans are most interested in exploration and scientific discovery. We’ve moved beyond money and greed and the humans of the 23rd and 24th century work more toward a common good for the entire Universe.

It’s a lovely thing to strive for.

I’ve been distracting myself from the 21st century this year by watching more Star Trek and chatting with other fans of the franchise. I am a verified member of Starfleet and I like to think that the needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few, or the one.

So happy Star Trek day! Live Long and Prosper. Enjoy this experience we call life, and all it has to offer with Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.

8 September 2020 by Geek 0

Doomscrolling.

I’ve never been hip on the latest terms or slang. I recently asked Jamie if he “dipped” when he did some gesture that involved bending and throwing his arms and shoulders to one side. He laughed at me because apparently it’s called “dabbing”. Wait, did he “dab”? “Daub”? Now I’m thinking about playing BINGO.

I subscribe to a couple of motivational newsletters that come out on a regular basis, and one of the newsletters talked about the concept of “Doomscrolling”. During these American times of the pandemic, the crap politics, and the planet falling apart, among many other things, the Internet has provided humans a way to infinitely scroll through their smart devices and search for bad news. We get a certain amount of a dopamine hit from social media in general, and this bad news gives us the same type of hit as good news. As long we’re getting that dopamine hit, we continue to scroll.

The issue is, all of this bad news is stressing us out. Because the bad news generates more clicks and swipes, which in turn increases ad revenue streams for the social media companies, said companies continue to algorithmically fling this type of news in our direction, basically turning social media into an “Outrage Industrial Complex”. We combat this Doomscrolling by adding to the noise, countering or repeating this bad news with our own digital screaming, hoping that we’ll change someone’s mind or make things better by yelling into the chamber of the Outrage Industrial Complex.

This is not the way the Internet was suppose to work.

Some time back I took all “infinite scrolling” apps off my smartphone. If I couldn’t get to the bottom of a web page, or the end of a social media stream, the app didn’t belong on my phone. About 10 years ago Apple took away the ability to directly send a tweet or a Facebook update without using the actual respective application away from iOS. Today, if you want to update your Facebook status or tweet something, you pretty much have to go into an application designed to suck you in with their Doomscrolling algorithms.

This is not nice.

For my 30 day self challenge in September I have resolved to look at Facebook for no longer than three minutes per day. I basically see what the blood relatives are up to, wish my the appropriate friends a happy birthday, and then I shut down my Facebook connection. And I do this from my computer, no mobile devices allowed. I still want to get rid of Facebook completely by the end of the year, but so many of my family and friends rely on the platform as their only interaction method I feel like I’m missing out on important milestones in their lives. I really miss the days of when folks maintained blog like this one right here, but those days are apparently long gone. I am grateful for those continuing to do this old fashioned blog thing.

Twitter is a little trickier for me. I use Twitter as a way to stay in touch with those I share a common interest, namely aviation, tech, and Star Trek. I’ve tried using a third party Twitter application like Tweetbot or Twitterrific but there’s two issues with these apps; like Twitter, they encourage infinite scrolling and Twitter has neutered their third party API to the point that you can barely glean what’s going on in the twitterverse if you’re not using the official application. My primary use of Twitter, aside from my dorky interactions with others, is to see breaking news and use that information as a catalyst to look elsewhere for more reliable sources. It kills me that users think anything of actual news comes across Twitter or Facebook. These streams may provide a hint as to what’s happening in the world, but it’s up to us to find a reliable source to confirm what we’re seeing on the streams as we’re doomscrolling through the latest round of woes.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m working on improving myself through some professional and other motivational newsletters and other mailings. These things inspire me. They’re not recipes, they’re seeds of ideas that we nurture to grow in ways we want them to grow.

I need to focus more on this and less of the doomscrolling through the “Outrage Industrial Complex”.

Happy scrolling!

7 September 2020 by Ponderings and Musings 0

Exploring.

My husband doesn’t mind when I go off the beaten path when we’re out on a ride exploring The Prairie State. Usually I stick to the county routes, but today we took a few township maintained roads. A couple of them lacked pavement; the Jeep Cherokee handles the gravel roads just fine.

We made our way through the Otter Creek Wind Farm in LaSalle County. A little bit of research online reveals that Otter Creek Wind Farm went online in March of this year. There are 42 Vesta turbines spread across 10,000 acres of land rented from 76 land owners. The 158 megawatt wind farm puts out enough electricity to power about 60,000 Illinois homes per year.

We stayed on township maintained roads and stayed off the private driveways that go up to the turbines. They’re quite similar to the ones we used to pass by in the North Country of Upstate New York. Underground lines from each turbine carry power to a centrally located substation. The substation is tied into power lines that have crossed this area for decades. This is a natural tie-in to the local grid.

I have always been fascinated by electricity and I’m encouraged by the renewable energy efforts in Illinois. Wind farms are especially prevalent, but we also have solar farms scattered across the prairie. I know some folks don’t like the turbines dotting the landscape, but they’re nearly silent and they harness a renewable resource to keep our ever growing list of electric-dependent devices working.

There are some encouraging aspects to the 21st century!

5 September 2020 by Geek 0

Entitlement.

There’s a lot of chatter on the airline and aircraft forums I follow on a daily basis around a woman who wrote a hateful, profanity laden, degrading note and handed it to the flight attendant as she deplaned after a recent flight. She was upset that she was asked to wear her mask over her nose.

I will not dignify the incident by posting the note here; it’s vile. 

Instead, here’s a photo of a woman in the Ukraine who was too hot sitting on a Boeing 737 and decided to do something about it.

Please note she popped one of the emergency exits open and decided to get a breath of fresh air. Ms. Pink Pants is banned from this airline for the rest of her life.

The tendency to say whatever we want to whomever we want on social media, usually with lessened social graces, has permeated into our normal interactions. Any sort of societal norm or contract seems to have been discarded. Folks are just doing what they want, where they want, and feel they can say whatever they want.

Another example of a society in decline.

When I say this, I’m occasionally reminded that not everyone is like this and this is absolutely true. The issue is one of two things, incidents like these are becoming entirely too commonplace or it’s become too easy to publicize asshattery like this. Either way, it’s still contributing to the decline of our society.

I’m often reminded of the passage from “Angels In America”:

Before life on Earth becomes finally merely impossible, it will, for a long time before, have become completely unbearable.

4 September 2020 by Why. 0

About J.P.

Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.

Weird? Eccentric!

All The Places

Visit my Linktree
December 2024
S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031