I posted this morning about last night’s problem accessing and viewing streaming television via Prime on my Roku. Yes, and I uninstalled and re-installed, and researched.
‘lo, I came home and acted on a whim to see if Prime now worked.
Yep.
They — Roku, Prime, or others — fixed something last night. All that I did was probably for naught. If I had more patience, it probably would have resolved itself today. But I couldn’t resist trying to fix it.
In the Air Force, we used to refer to problems like these on our C130s as a Lockheed fix. That’s a problem that ‘seems’ to take care of itself. After, you know, we worry about it for a while.
Once again, it’s Mai 17, 2025. This time, it’s Saturda. It was a rainy night and a drenched morning in Ashlandia. Irritated me a bit. What’s new? I’m often irritated. In this instance, I’ve been cleaning the garage and had stuff outside and was out of time/energy/daylight. So I asked Alexa, “Will it rain?” They responded with comments about clouds and temperatures. My wife and I asked the machine point blank three times. Same answer each time.
Two hours later, Alexa has a notification for me: it’s going to rain soon. Like, WTF? Shoes and suitable clothes donned, I went outside to rearrange things and cover them with tarps. Yes, I was irritated.
It’s warmer and sunny now, but don’t look for too much heat in Ashlandia today. 55 F and cloudy, the high end of the scale will read 61 before it starts dropping again.
Meantime, when I went to relax with some streaming last night, Prime was no longer available. That WTF moment led to a WTF hour of testing, uninstalling, re-installing, researching, etc. Nothing fixed it, and I could not find information about a greater trend or problem among the masses. No, it seemed to be me alone. No, I could not fix it. Several background pieces: I used Roku to stream television in several rooms. Prime was received fine on those Rokus. Yes, Roku was updated. Yes, the Prime app was updated. Yes, the Internet connection was solid. No, an outage for Prime wasn’t reported. Yes, I rebooted the system. Yes, I uninstalled and reinstalled Prime. Many others have been through this fiasco in the past. Most report nothing worked but the system mysteriously and abruptly returned to normal on its own. I’ll see if that’s the case with us later today. I recognize that this is basically first world blues.
Several songs challenged for supremacy in the morning mental music stream. First, another blogger wrote about a song Connie Francis sang. That inspired The Neurons to shift another Connie Francis song, “Stupid Cupid”, from 1959, into the morning mental music stream. I was three when it came out but Mom played it regularly on her stereo, so I knew it pretty well.
Next, inexplicably, The Neurons introduced “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter“, a song which was released the year before Mom was born. It’s been covered by so many singers and acts. The Neurons sampled several before settling on an old favorite by Willy Nelson.
Dropping into the day’s rhythm, though, reading the news, I ended up with Teddy Swims performing “Bad Dreams”. That song was raised because of Trumpgames. PINO Trump is warning a business, Walmart’s, not to pass on the costs to consumers. “President Donald Trump warned Walmart on Saturday against raising its prices, writing on Truth Social that he will “be watching.” Because, you know, Trump knows that high prices are bad for business, but they’re worse for him because he triggered this unneeded trade war. So his solution to higher prices is to tell corporations to tell their shareholders and employees to tighten their belts for the good of Donald Trump. That’s what it comes down to. He raised the prices and he doesn’t want to face the consequences for what he’s done. As always, he wants to dodge the truth and avoid responsibility. It’s one of his standard routines. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with Walmart and their prices, given that Walmart and the Walton family, support Trump and the GOP.
Two, of course, Trump’s warning contradicts how he sold tariffs as a tax which other countries paid.
“She is a liar. She makes up crap … I am going to put tariffs on other countries coming into our country, and that has nothing to do with taxes to us. That is a tax on another country,” Trump said.
So riddle me this, PINO Trump and MAGA: if another country pays the tariff, why is PINO Trump warning Walmart not to raise prices to cover the tariffs?
Well, we know why. It was Trump lying when he accused Vice-President Harris of lying. That is his way.
The other aspect of Trump’s recent craziness is his roll on the new “F55 fighter.” He mentioned the aircraft during talks in Qatar. As with many things Trump says, this is from another reality. No one else was aware of a proposed “F55”. Nor did anyone know about the F22 Super which Trump referenced. Yes, it’s all bad dreams when leaders skid off into surreal rants about things which don’t exist. Trump does so often. That’s why it’s rich bad dreams materials. Who know what the nutter will say next? What was pretty funny was how right-wing leaning media sources touted this as absolutely true, despite baffled defense industry experts. They either never learn, or these media sites are actively promoting lies as facts in order to support Trump. Yeah, no shit, right?
Here we go: Teddy Swims with “Bad Dreams” from 2024.
I’ve cozied up to a cuppa coffee once again. Time to rock and roll, kids. Cheers
See the news on the new Air Force One? Course you have. You’re not living under a rock.
First, it’s like saying you got a new car when it’s 14 years old. Also, it’s like a deal from a friend of a friend. People, including me, are questioning the legality of this. I’m pretty sure by now that the Trump Regime will do what they want and dare the rest of the nation to stop him. Republicans won’t. DOJ sure as hell won’t. So, you know. There’s gonna be new used Air Force One.
I was more interested in collateral ideas. I’m sure the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, and others will check it over for surveillance equipment. Will they also check to ensure it can’t be taken over from afar? Remember that Trump comment about a ‘killswitch’ on the F35s the US was selling to other countries?
Feels like Trump stirred that pot long ago, but it was only a month. I know, in Trump years, one month equals five years . I base that on the feeling that I’ve aged about twenty years since he took office.
I wonder if Qatar ever considered adding a killswitch to this aircraft gift to Trump — I mean, the United States. Could you imagine that scenario? “Fed up with Trump’s mangling of the global economy, the Saudi royal family pressured Qatar to employ the killswitch on Air Force One. After the aircraft lost power and control, it crashed into the Earth and exploded into a fireball. There are no reported survivors.” I can see a movie or novel in it.
On the other hand, Qatar, the country giving Trump the plane — sorry, the country giving the United State the plane — is telling everyone, “Hold on, this isn’t a done deal. We’re just thinking about it.”
We’ll see. You know how it is with Trump. One minute, he says he’ll never change his mind. Next thing you know, he’s saying, never say never. The aircraft news might be old news by next month.
IBM made news with the announcement of a ‘historic’ investment in manufacturing in the US. It made headlines and has the Trump Regime pretty excited.
Less coverage was given to IBM’s plan to ramp up operations in India. Working with new operations in Singapore, Brazil, Mexico, Europe, and Australia was a large part of my work for several years while at IBM. This was part of their offshoring investments to reduce overhead and personnel costs.
In other IBM news, IBM announced the ‘layoffs’ of 9,000 US employees. Many are being replaced by AI. As noted by many experts, a return to manufacturing in the U.S. won’t automatically translate to better employment numbers.
And keep in mind: the same replacements by AI are being planned at Amazon, Dell, and other U.S. corporations.
The old joke used to be that companies often required employees to train their replacements before they were released. Now it looks like employees are building their replacements.
An email arrived. Tricare4U received and processed a recent claim.
Uh oh.
I expect to have a bout of acute passworditis soon.
Many Americans suffer from passworditis. The condition is brought on by websites not accepting passwords despite meeting all their stated requirements. Symptoms may include deep depression, a desire to drink heavily, incoherent screaming and swearing, high blood pressure, and a feeling of deep exhaustion accompanied by a temptation to go to bed and pull the covers over your head.
I also sometimes expire these symptoms of passworditis while using WordPress, but that’s about ‘features’ which act in capricious ways.
Tricare4U is part of the Defense Department’s healthcare labyrinth. I’ve been using Tricare variations since 1995, when I retired from the Air Force. Dealing with any Tricare issue is rarely fun and never easy. Logging on is usually the worse part. This is done through DS Log On.
As my friend Jill would say, GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
The passwords expire every 60 days. Installing a new one is a pain from hell. They have nine requirements. All are reasonable requirements. My new password meets all nine requirements. I know that because all nine requirements begin in red. As you fulfill one, it turns green. .
I must fill it into the new password box. Everything is green.
Then I add it again to confirm the password. These again show colors when it all works.
Despite everything showing as green, i.e., good to go, the submit button to complete the password change won’t come up. I stall out at that point every friggin’ time.
I used three different browsers.
Closed all windows and rebooted my computer.
Cleared my cache.
I have made twelve attempts in sixty-five minutes. I remain mired in password hell.
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
I’m shutting it down for now. More coffee is required before I try again. All this to see what they say about my claim. Will I owe? What obtuse reasoning will they use?
Sigh. Not a fun beginning to my Twosda. It’s not good for my health. Ironic?
Cold spring night ended with sunshine breaking apart the clouds like Jesus taking on the money changers. Blue sky smile down on us. Sunshine is tasked with warming us to 68 F, up from 46.
Papi likes having the pet door back on. He’s resumed his unique style. A paw is inserted into the space betwixt the flap and its flame. He pulls the flap toward him to enlarge a space. Then he sticks his head through. Creeps on in. Seeing me watching, he pauses. Confirms who I am. Greetings are exchanged. He comes on for some pets, treats, and cat nip. A little later, he reverses course. Heads for the sunny backyard.
But. A but always crops up. In this but, Papi still beats on the back door. Even though the pet door is open. I have applied some erratic noodling to it. I believe that the beating is his communication system. Like drums or smoke signals.
Papi sending smoke signals. Alarm inducing idea.
Papi was telling me that he wanted his water dish refilled and outside. I’ve pulled it in at night. Don’t want to encourage other wildlife to hang around. I’ve set up a water bowl for them in another area of the yard, around in the front, away from the doors. Papi detests drinking water in the house. Likes drinking it outside. We all have our foibles.
On to politics. Ugh. No. Full coffee saturation is required before I go there today.
All kinds of music occupy the morning mental music stream. Like rock concert going on in there. First up in heavy rotation was the Animals with “House of the Rising Sun.” Brought on by seeing the sunshine rising, brightening, filing the world, including our house. Then there was Chris Isaak. “Baby Did A Bad Bad Thing”. That was in response to some news article I read. Next came Aerosmith. “Walk This Way.” That came after my wife returned from her exercise class. I was reading, thinking, gaming. Wasting away the hours that make up a slow day. I finally said, “I got to get moving but my get up and go seems to have got up and went.”
So here is my morning mental music stream. Brought to you by The Neurons. The Neurons: when you don’t know what to think.
I enjoyed watching and listening to this video of The Animals. It brought back elements of another time and delivered smiles to me. Hope you find it the same, seeing those young individuals and the more primitive conditions of television and pop culture.
Listening to Chris Isaak has been tarnished by a “Friends” episode that featured Isaak as a guy dating Phoebe. He sings a few high notes. She starts laughing.
Coffee is at hand. Time to coffee up and go be me. You go be you. Let’s do the best we can. Come on, let’s walk this way. Cheers
A Democratic Party insider told me who the party supports as candidate for the 2028 nominee for POTUS.
“John F. Kennedy.”
I raised a salient objection. “He’s dead. Worse, he’s been buried.”
“True, true, true.”
“You’re not talking about a clone.”
“Of course not. That’d be silly. No, we’re thinking, AI.”
“Articial Intelligence?”
“What else? Listen, if corporations are people, why can’t AI be people?”
“I need to think about that,” I answered.
“Okay, let me tell you more. See if I can convince you. What we did is create an AI that’s modeled on President John F. Kennedy’s thinking. We fed all the interviews which we could find, all his papers, speeches, books, diaries, and journals, along with biographies about him, into a quantum computer. It then developed the ability to replicate JFK’s thinking and speaking, giving us a virtual entity who is just like him. It’s uncanny. Wait until you see it.”
I was shaking my head in skepticism. “It’ll never work.”
“We think it will. He polls very well.”
“I don’t think people are ready for AI to be elected to any office.”
“No, no, turns out that almost 80 percent of likely voters who were polled said they could support AI for president. A majority of voters think that AI is more principled and intelligent than many politicians holding office or running for nomination. In fact, more people are willing to vote for AI than a woman.”
“That doesn’t surprise me, but what about his assassination over sixty years ago? Surely, that’s a drawback.”
“No, no, no. Many people have always believed that JFK wasn’t really killed, that all of that was just a fiction to get him out of office.”
“Even if they believe that, it’s six decades later. He’d be over a hundred years old. Do you really think that people will support a candidate who is over hundred years old after what we endured with Joe Biden?”
My source grinned. “We told them that JFK was cryogenically stored. He’s only fifty years old.”
“They believe that?”
“You’d be surprised what they believe. Just to seal the deal, Elvis Presley is endorsing JFK.”
“Presley?” I laughed. “He’s been dead since — “
“No, no, he wasn’t dead. He was in storage, too. Trust me. We’ve done the research. The numbers support this idea.
“Presley and Kennedy are still alive. Along with Walt Disney and Jackie O. All are alive. They’ve all just been frozen. The time has come for the truth to be told.”
My source leaned forward. “The people are ready for Camelot’s return. JFK will kick Trump’s ass. Remember, you heard it here first.”
“Easter is a week away,” my wife said. “You need to get a haircut.”
I just got one last month. Her observation annoys me. I spent twenty years in the military. Keeping your hair cut and neat was, like, an actual regulation. After being freed from military constraints, I’m not interested in being so neat and tidy when it comes to hair. I will lose this discussion, though, and cave. Being neat is extremely high on my wife’s list. She is also adept at being severe and disapproving.
“Want to hear my sister’s text?” I ask.
“Go ahead.”
I read my sister’s updates from Pittsburgh. She’s buying her daughter a new phone. Several features on her present phone are failing. Replace it before Trump’s tariffs add hundreds, she reckons. She used the same logic to replace her eight-year-old ride. She also cashed in her small 401K and put it into certificates in December because she believed Trump was going to trash the economy. She tells me about my other sister’s financial worries.
Four sisters share Mom. Two of them are extremely responsible. The other two are not exactly flighty but they seem to have many crises and make choices that cause more problems. I probably would make more choices that aren’t wise ones, but I’m married to a diligent person.
My sister also comments about how expensive everything is, and how hard it is for young people like her twenty-something daughter these days.
My conversation with my wife swirls into a new zone. “Mom should be using red-light therapy to help with her healing, injuries, and inflammation.” My wife and I both champion red-light therapy. It has helped us in numerous ways. Besides that, NASA, soccer leagues, and the NFL are all red-light therapy true believers.
My wife tells me that Jan approached her for help with another person. The other person suffers Renaud’s disease in her feet. She’s been warned that she might lose her feet if she doesn’t get treatment. The woman doesn’t like going to the doctor. Almost has a pathological fear about it.
Renaud’s has plagued my wife for years. She once showed me her finger. White as a candle, bent and misshaped, horrifying to look at. She aggressively applied red-light therapy and resolved the problem.
“I told Jan to tell her friend about red-light therapy,” my wife says. “She can at least buy a belt and try it.” Pros and cons are discussed for a few more minutes. My wife complains about friends who were told about it but haven’t tried it. She doesn’t understand their reluctance.
I text my sister to ask her if Mom has tried red-light therapy. Then I get online to make a haircut appointment.
There are some things which must be accepted and done.
This aggrieved me. Everyone wants photos of things sent these days. I consider the trend of wanting photos part of the inexorable enshittification of modern society.
My wife was non-committal about her take on it. Sympathetic noises were made. I suspect she wasn’t paying attention.
Breaking down, I dragged out my phone, opened it to the camera app, and took a photo of our Lifepro Near Red-light Therapy belt. Yes, it took about twenty seconds. The time is not the point.
The belt had ceased working. We’d purchased it in October of 2023 through Amazon. It has a lifetime warranty.
The RLT impressed my wife and me. She used it to cope with painful back and shoulder flares caused by RA. I regularly used it to reduce swelling on my legs, ankles, and feet, where I’ve been dealing with lymphedema. I missed using it.
After the belt quit working, I went into my Amazon records and contacted the sellers. Happiness responded for them. Seeing that it was ‘happiness’ answering made me suspicious. We’re in a world where a documented liar calls himself the most honest man in the world, a world where the same man has cheated throughout his life but is supported by people as the Second Coming of Jesus. It has made me a little cynical.
Happiness asked for the order number and date of order. I provided that. Now they wanted a photo and directed me to a form.
The photo was part of an online form I needed to fill out. Grumbling about it, I put the order number in — again — click/copy/paste, filled out all the info, repeating many of the things already done, and then attached the photo. It took almost two minutes. Yeah.
Returning to email, I replied to Happiness and told them that I’d submitted the form. They thanked me and told me my issue would be reviewed and they’d get back to me in two to four days.
I expected to be given a return number. Told how to box it up and where to send it.
Instead, they sent me a new product. This wasn’t from Happiness but from Lifepro Support. Gave me a UPS tracking number and everything.
“What trickery is this?” I asked myself.
The replacement arrived yesterday. Brand new.
I wanted to verify some things for myself. I connected the new cord to the old belt. The cord has three separate segments which can be plugged in and unplugged, etc. This allows you to plug it into a UBS port or plug it into the wall. I always use the UBS port. Through my tests, I confirmed that it was only this segment of cord which didn’t work.
I wrote Lifepro Support to inform them that it was only the one piece that wasn’t working. That meant that I now had two working belts. Asked if they wanted me to send either back.
No, they responded. You can send it back if you want. or keep both. If you do want to send one back, tell us and we’ll give you the instructions. They thanked me for my honestly.
It was a good experience. Happiness and Lifepro Support always responded fast. They were friendly and professional, and the company stood behind their product. When I began, I thought I’d be chewing my nails in frustration by the end. I’m pleased that this wasn’t the case. Kylie, Jae, Renee, and Chad did a great job. The entire process took nine days.
Anyone remember President George Dubya Bush’s war on Iraq?
He wanted to attack it and was looking for a reason. Polls show the public divided about it. Administration officials like Colin Powell said that Iraq wasn’t a threat.
Then we had 9/11.
The Bush Administration was quick to try to connect 9/11 and Iraq, and then began painting pictures of fictional ‘weapons of mass destruction’. They worked hard to sell the need to invade Iraq because of the imminent threat Saddam Hussein posed. Intelligence was cherry picked. The press got involved. Stories were planted by journalists favorable to the administration. Then the administration would quote those newspapers and stories to convince people that even the ‘liberal mainstream press agreed’ that war was needed.
Any of this sound in any way familiar? It should. It was a marketing campaign. The Trusk Regime is doing something similar. Floating the idea. See what sticks. Repeating it, repeating it, repeating it so people become familiar to it. As using military force gains traction as an idea to ‘keep America safe’, the logic behind it becomes twisted. Intel will get cherry picked or made up completely. People not really paying attention to WTF is going on will begin agreeing, “Yes, we need to do this. We need to use military force against this growing threat.”
Use your search engines and the net’s ability to store and recall information to check the polls and reporting of the period before the invasion of Iraq. The pattern was clear then; it’s clear now. Part of the sell back then was how easy such a military adventure would be for a power like the United States. Remember them telling us how short the war would be? How they mocked people who pointed out there wasn’t an exit strategy? Recall, they told us the war would pay for itself.
Trump wants to attack places. Maybe Greenland. Maybe Canada. Perhaps somewhere else. Putting the nation on a war footing will improve his popularity and strengthen his hold. Because if we’re ‘at war’, then criticizing or challenging him can be called out as detrimental to the war effort. Look back at how popular Dubya became for a while. And that was done without AI and bots. Ponder how effectively bots and AI can be used to sell a war on social media these days. Think of DOGE and Elon Reeve Musk’s potential role.
Yemen was a trial balloon to let his military advisors and senior officials a taste of it. More will come.
Michael Seidel, writer 