Tag: history

Twosdaz Theme Music

If that’s the garbage truck, it must be Twozda. Indeed, it’s the garbage truck and Twozda, October 7, 2025. Beautiful 67 F with blue skies forever and sunshine flooding over the trees and mountains. 81 F is in range as today’s top end.

Trump news has me itchy with irritation. With the government shutdown underway, stats and data useful to decision making and trend spotting is MIA. Air traffic controllers and the military are being asked to work without pay. ATC is a stressful job. The military can be as stressful. Working without pay adds to that stress. Financial institutions are helping both segments cope with the loss of income but how sustainable is that? Beyond those areas, home foreclosures under Trump are on the rise. Mortgage rates are high. Insurance costs are soaring and will go yet higher as the costs of replacement materials increase. Local taxes and service fees are increasing to replace revenue losses and the loss of Federal assistance under the Trump Regime. Food prices keep going up. Going into the holiday season in the United States, the vaunted last three months of the year, home to Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Kwanza, and Hannukah, prices of gifts and food are expected to take deep bites out of budgets. Couple that with other factors, and an ugly quagmire is being put into place.

The Trump Regime doesn’t help any of it. As tax revenues fall and farmer suffer from losses because of tariffs, the Trump Regime wants to bail out the farmers hurting from Trump’s destructive tariffs and trade wars. It’s a classic downward spiral. Contributing further, Trump is cutting off renewable energy projects. That takes a chunk out of the economy, as those projects usually contributed to state and city local economic booms. Unemployment will rise. Meanwhile, his moves to instill manufacturing will take time. And if people are unemployed and counting pennies to get buy, who is going to buy the goods that the factories make? He’s killing the market.

Finally, uselessly deploying troops to cities are estimated to cost about twenty million dollars a day per place. Trump thinks that tariffs will replace tax revenues but if people are buying less and less because the cost of everything is rising, WTH does he think is going to buy? Coupled with all of this, the government shutdown and shaky economic and weakening economic forecast will drive higher costs to pay off the Federal deficit, and it has already caused companies to put spending and hiring plans on hold.

It is a fucking mess, and will just get worse. Healthcare premiums are set to soar under the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’. Read that in the mocking tone it deserves. With healthcare premiums increasing, people will cut insurance. More people will get sick but get help less often, usually until it’s dire. This leads to increasing healthcare costs and lower productivity. Lower productivity generates higher costs. All this is historically documented. The Trump Regime refuses to acknowledge those history lessons.

Stack on: tourism is down and will keep going down as Trump’s military presence grows in cities and his ICE agents aggressively attack people. Those are bad optics for tourism, and the soft data tells us that foreign visitors are shunning the United States as a tourist, education, and business destination. Additionally, the Trump assault on universities and colleges are reducing enrollment. That means those institutions will need to cut overhead and personnel. And, again, as Trump cuts Federal funding for government-backed research, activities in those projects will significantly drop or go completely idle. That’s more lost jobs. More lost local revenue. More lost Federal revenue.

It’ll all come crashing down under its own weight. Our questions are, how bad will it get? How long will it take before all these pressures come together to fuse the political will to work against Trump. So far, the GOP is completely MIA in this. This is their mess, but it will crush all except the wealthiest. The wealthiest, like Trump.

Reminder: this is the Epstein shutdown. The fear releasing the files. Releasing the files might generate the political will to move on from Trump. And the GOP is happier with him and they in charge, wrecking the world, than revealing who he is. As if we don’t already know. I guess they fear the validation of who he is, who they worship, and support.

All this stirred The Neurons to play “On the Dark Side” in the morning mental music stream. This song was from a movie called Eddie and the Cruisers, about the life and times of a fake rock band with heavy focus on the tortured soul lead singer, Eddie. The real music is performed by John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band.

Enough venting, enough from the dark side. Hope grace and peace resurfaces for us all and doesn’t hold out too much longer. Time for coffee. Time to write. Here we go, out into the day. Cheers

3

The Indicators Dream

I don’t know what age I was supposed to be in this dream. I felt younger, maybe in my early middle age. Anyway, I arrived at this cluttered, jumbled location. Busy with people, we were being asked to make choices. Like many others that I overheard and witnessed, I didn’t understand exactly what was going on. Acting on haste, I checked some small pails.

The pails were plastic and different colors, like red, blue, yellow, green. They reminded me of pails which children use in a sandbox or at the beach.

In these pails were some sort of small black squares. Each had tiny white letters and numbers but were mostly blank. Nobody seemed very sure about what they were or what we were supposed to do with them, but everyone was certain that we were supposed to take some. I wasn’t sure how many to take but grabbed eight. Then, following the flow of people doing who had also made their choices, I went along the line until we came to a long messy table, one of many. Above the table, three slender, black metal slats ran parallel to the table. Many already had multiple black squares attached to them. With observation and trial and error, I discovered the metal squares were magnetic and that we were supposed to attach them to the slats. Okay, I did that.

When I did, the black squares became alive with information. Watching, I realized that they were displaying information about the people who put them up, like, for me, as example. Each black square was giving out vital signs about different body functions, is how it first appeared. Most accepted that but I saw that some were just displaying dates, but not in the usual format. Pressing the dated squares showed me events from that day. As I did that, I began understanding that the white letters and numbers gave information about what was embedded and contained codes and patterns.

Assimilating this, I began excitedly talking about my realizations. Other people were disinterested, dismissing the squares. But I grasped that the squares’ functions were actually based on their relationship and placement with each other. Calling them indicators, I started telling people, “Don’t you see? If you can go back and find the right indicators for yourself, you can know your full history. Not only that, but it can also show the future for each of us.”

Moving the squares around showed me that I was right. Pressing back against the crowd, I tried to go back to the buckets to look for better black squares.

Dream end.

2

Flooding the Zone

The troubling trend of false news isn’t new. Trump is a false news god. Been practicing it since he was a young one still dodging military service with bone spurs. But now, the shit is getting deep. Earl has a good post on it that I’d like to share. Cheers

Don’t Believe Me, Just Watch
Don’t Believe Me, Just Watch
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Fridaz Bumper Sticker

Pretty damn shameful that Trump said it. More shameful that more Americans are unaware he said it and that they’re unaware of Trump’s attitude toward his fellow citizens, the We the People he’s supposed to serve. A Republican, California Sen. Brian Dahle, saw the quote repeated on a Gavin Newsome tweet and chided the California governor for it, denouncing it as inflammatory. No word on what Sen. Dahle said after learning it was a repeat from Trump himself. Given the moral courage most Republicans like Brian Dahle have been showing, I expect continued silence.

2

Fridaz Theme Music

Thickening, layer, dark wool clouds lay seige to diminishing blue sky patches. Hi. Welcome to Frida, October 3, 2025 in Ashlandia. Rains which came yesterday will continue today, chilling the 50 F air and keeping it from getting much higher than the mid-fifties. Autumn is here, and winter is coming.

My wife and I chatted about this as we drove on errands. “I like days like this,” I said, appreciating, at that point, a cloudy sky with a blustery wind and lazy, low angle sunshine. It was about 68 F but felt warmer because the breeze carried in summery hints, like leftovers in the kitchen. Then I laughed. “But that’s how it happens with every season. There’s a sense of gladness and appreciation for the new season. Then.”

“Then you get tired of it,” my wife finished for me. “Summer sunshine is great, and the hot air feels wonderful for a while but then, OMG, it’s hot day after day and you get tired of it. Now fall is here, and it’s great but in another month, we’ll be complaining about how cold and wet it is. That’s human nature.”

After perusing news and skating through details of how Trump is wrecking the United States, I wonder when the MAGA will awaken and turn on him. Well, we know that answer. It’s been established that the vast majority of them won’t turn on him until they are personally aggrieved. They’ll wait until they can’t afford healthcare because premiums are skyrocketing. Inflation won’t bother them until suddenly they find themselves unable to buy the food they’re used to because tariffs and trade wars force them to go without. The shutdowns to colleges and universities and Trump’s decision to curtail the war on cancer won’t hit them until they or a loved-one are suffering cancer’s effects and they wonder, why can’t we fix this. Polluted skies and water won’t bother them until it’s their air they can’t breathe, their water they can’t drink. They’ll remain indifferent about Trump’s anti-vax campaign until their children are sick and dying, and they’re wondering, why? They won’t be upset with what’s happening to the immigrants until suddenly there are fewer people to wait on them, to provide services, or there’s less doctors, nurses, and healthcare providers and they can’t get appointments because trained professionals are no longer available. The MAGA won’t care until the military rolls into their town under Trump’s law and order banner and they discover themselves being thrown to the ground or locked up and held for days even though they’re citizens. They won’t care until the private voucher systems states are instituting start turning out ignorant children and they wonder, what’s wrong with schools these days. They won’t care about Trump gutting tourism with his fear and bullying tactics until there are no longer tourists providing tourist dollars and businesses are closing, leaving empty buildings and unemployment in their wake. They won’t care about the lack of infrastructure funding until their bridges collapse, killing friends and family, and inconveniencing them. They won’t care about free speech until Trump turns on them and warns them, “How dare you criticize me?”

Yes, so The Neurons turned to an old faithful for these MAGAts. They’re acting like zombies. The Cranberries came up with a brilliant song for ’em: “Zombie”. Zombie vocalist Dolores O’Riordan wrote the powerful song after a bombing conducted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Provisional IRA) killed and injured people.

There were a lot of bombs going off in London and I remember this one time a child was killed when a bomb was put in a rubbish bin – that’s why there’s that line in the song, ‘A child is slowly taken’. [ … ] We were on a tour bus and I was near the location where it happened, so it really struck me hard – I was quite young, but I remember being devastated about the innocent children being pulled into that kind of thing. So I suppose that’s why I was saying, ‘It’s not me’ – that even though I’m Irish it wasn’t me, I didn’t do it. Because being Irish, it was quite hard, especially in the UK when there was so much tension.

— Dolores O’Riordan in 2017, on writing “Zombie”

h/t to Wikipedia.org

She sings, “What’s in your head, in your head, zombie, zombie, zombie?” Because a zombie is an unthinking creature who is just going along with what’s happening, never awakening to its impacts. That’s what’s in my head this morning, pouring through the morning mental music stream.

Peace and grace seem to be a long way off. I’m searching for some way to lure them in. Maybe a ritual. I hope they find and hold you. Until then, I guess I’ll depend on coffee. Think I’ll indulge in another gulp now, while I can still afford it. Cheers

0

1982

Daily writing prompt
Your life without a computer: what does it look like?
View all responses

I’ve lived without a computer before. It actually wasn’t terrible. Yes, I’m now spoiled. Personal computers have been life changing.

But jump back to 1982. I was in the U.S. Air Force, stationed at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, an island that belongs to Japan. Commodore’s VIC 20 had us abuzz about computers. While we could easily see how it would make many things easier, shopping wasn’t yet on the menu. Nor was getting news updates. It was only toward the end of 1983 that I began learning about the concepts of ‘bulletin boards’, the Internet, and the worldwide web.

So back then, we watched television. Movies were watched via VHS tapes. That was the latest, greatest tech move for us, and such devices were still running close to $1,000. But we had one to help us weather the lack of entertainment inherent in being overseas. Remember, this was before satellite TV, too, for all practical purposes. All that stuff was just coming out, as were microwave ovens. They were also huge, bulky, expensive machines, but we purchased on of those, as well.

It’s hard to believe how fast everything changed. In late 1983, I bought my first CD player. It played one CD at a time. Returning to the U.S. from Japan, we gave our VHS player to my wife’s parents, and bought ourselves a new, smaller one with more features, including a remote control. That was the same year that I bought my first computer, a small but heavy Kaypro. Running at 4.77 megahertz, with a tiny green screen, it ran on CP/M and offered minimal RAM and two floppy drives that used 5 1/4 inch disks. It was a wild scene. We learned how to add RAM, make things faster, and double our floppy disks’ storage. Ten megahertz machines were being touted as possibilities, along with 64K of RAM and a 5-meg hard drive and 16 color monitors! Wow!

Back before that, we read. A lot. Books were checked out from the library, and research was done at the library. I subscribed to multiple magazines, such as Writer’s Digest, Autoweek, and Road & Track. Went for walks, played sports, read newspapers, which were delivered daily. When I lived in San Antonio, Texas, I subscribed to both the San Antonio Light and the Wall Street Journal. Even with the computer and VHS player coming along, and the CD player, and DVD players, most of that didn’t change. We still visited malls to shop, and used Sears and Spiegel catalogues to make orders, calling in to toll free numbers to put the order in. Board games like Risk, Life, and Monopoly were popular with us, along with Trivial Pursuit, and card games like Tripoli and King on the Corner, and Solitaire.

No, the big change came when the Internet finally fired up. My experience with it began in 1991, when I came back from Germany. Slow as hell, to be sure. Connections through modems which had to be hooked up. LOL. That changed fast, too, as built-in modems came along. I was both a Compuserve and AOL subscriber. Email was a new, exciting idea.

Then, suddenly we went to 256 colors and beyond on our monitors. The mouse became popular. 100 megahertz machines were being sold. I remembered buying and installing a 100-meg hard drive, and laughing. How was I ever going to use that much storage? It seemed so excessive. By then, our floppy drives were down to three-inch little colorful things. Now, we’re like, floppy drive? What the heck is that?

Going online was a wild scene back in the mid 1990s. Weren’t many websites in those early days. The games were something else. Research, news, and sports all became much more accessible. Then, boom…social media. That’s when things really flipped.

I’ve gone a few days in 2025 without my computer and without the Internet. Like before, we read, played games, and went for walks.

Just like it was 1982, just forty years ago, when I was younger, and so was the personal computer.

9

Thirstdaz Wandering Political Thoughts

Keep asking. Trump has a history of lying and making false promises.

Keep the pressure on. Don’t let Trump worm his way out of being confronted with facts and truth. He is a liar. Truth, facts, and history are his kryptonite.

We knew the truth about TACO’s relationship with Project 2025 in 2024. But, per his usual, Trump lied his way out of it, claiming that Project 2025 was a Democratic Party disinformation campaign.

That’s Trump. Lying. Blaming others. But now he’s openly embracing this ‘disinformation’. See how he lies?

Trump Flaunts Project 2025 While Teasing Permanent Cuts To ‘Democrat Agencies’

Likewise, adhering to his established pattern, while running for office, Trump trumpeted that he would release the Epstein files. Now he’s spinning it as a hoax by the Democratic party.

“So, this is a Democrat hoax that never ends. You know, it reminds me a little of the Kennedy situation,” Trump said in the Oval Office, referencing documents related to the assassination of former President Kennedy. “We gave them everything over and over again, more, and more and more. And nobody is ever satisfied. From what I understand, thousands of pages of documents have been given.”

Do we need to ask about his healthcare plan? That’s been completely dropped, despite his continual insistence in his first term that he was just about to release. Such a plan was never released.

Back to the future: Trump’s history of promising a health plan that never comes

How many times must it be shown that Trump is a liar purveying in false promises before people believe?

Now we’ve arrived at the 2025 Government Shutdown. Trump, Republican, is in the Offal Office. Republicans control the House and Senate. Back in 2013, he proclaimed that shutdowns are on the president.

Yet, since making that claim, Trump has been in the Offal Office for the last three government shutdowns. In his own words, that shows how weak he is.

Just as he did with Project 2025, TACO is trying to lay the blame on the Democrats. Yet, there’s one fact that can’t be overlooked.

That should tell people who wants this shutdown and who specifically are responsible: Donald J. Trump and the GOP.

Stop believing his lies. Stop accepting his promises. Don’t accept his blame game. He is an agent of destruction, a hollow man without empathy. Don’t let him tell you otherwise any longer. The facts are in.

He’s shown who he is. Make him face the truth.

3

Thirstdaz Theme Music

Rain, clouds, cool temperatures, and colorful leaves. It is indeed autumn in Ashlandia. 51 F now, 62 F on the way. This is Thirstda, October 2, 2025.

Gonna be a busy day for me. Slew of health and dental appointments scheduled. All were scheduled through different agencies back in June and July.

Remember when Donald J. Trump lied to everyone about Project 2025 while running for POTUS in 2024?

“I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it,” he wrote, describing attempts to tie him to the proposal as “pure disinformation.”

He wrote in another post, “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

Trump’s Past ‘Project 2025’ Remarks Resurface as He Touts Conservative Plan

Now he’s loving and embracing that ‘absolutely ridiculous and abysmal’ things. That’s Trump, con man and liar to the core, as many of us knew. That’s one of three areas where he keeps exceeding expectations during his term: lying. The second area would be making up things, and the third is bragging about himself. In all other areas, he’s an absolute failure and disaster.

But of course Trump lied about his relationship with Project 2025 during the 2024 elections. Its flat-out regressive plans were massively unpopular with voters in polls. Trump couldn’t stand that. He knew that without lying, such as his lies about immigrants eating pets, he would never be elected.

Speaking of Trump’s lies, Daily Beast has an update.

Trump Shamelessly Blames His Enemies for Carnage He’s About to Order

“Well, there could be firings, and that’s their fault, and it also could be other things,” Trump told OANN’s Daniel Baldwin. “We could cut projects that they wanted, favorite projects, and they’d be permanently cut.”

So Trumpian! So TACO! MAGA will swallow it whole, because that’s what they do. Low and under-informed voters will dully go along with that thinking because they don’t pay much attention and still don’t get what a greedy and selfish con man and liar Trump is. But the world knows. You know, and I know. Just as we know that the Epstein file is wealthy with the many terrible things Trump did as Epstein’s BFF, which is why Trump fights the release of the files and the truth that’s on display in them.

Today’s theme music comes straight out of thinking and reading about news, coupled with my busy day. As all the plans and appointments were regurgitated through my thoughts, The Neurons bounced up with a Grateful Dead song. Here’s “Touch of Grey”, with its chorus, “I will get by. I will survive.” Perfect song for the growing Trumpswamp.

Well, still waiting for peace and grace to pop back into our lives. Till then, I’ll coffee up and work on getting by. Hope you get by and survive, too. Cheers

0

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