Humor, facts, truth, history, reminders…and Melania.
History
The Art of the Deal
Pretty bad people…
Behold, TACO’s Arch
Ah, memories…
USA…not first for Trump…
The Net’s Take: This Week with Trump
Internetus Interruptus
Our Internet connection was down this weekend. Started Saturday and dragged through Sunday.
We use Ashland Home Net. Owned by the city, we want to support our city. The service has been reliable. Like everything, though, there can sometimes be outages.
The net went down Saturday afternoon. We gave it time to come back up. Didn’t. So — reboot system. Still no connectivity.
I called our service provider and left a message. It’s a small organization and they don’t have someone in the office at night and on weekends. But they check their messages and get back to you.
They did get back to us on Sunday. We were out. I had my cell phone with me. “Private number” it said. I ignored it. Later, I listened to the message, which was Ashland Home Net telling me that they couldn’t find a record of our account.
*grumble grumble*
When we were home after our Easter festivities with friends, I pulled our records to call Ashland Home Net and give them our account number. The folder had notes from previous issues and fixes. This included one from 2023: “Netgear router inadvertently reset (button on side — beware).” I had the Netgear instruction pamphlet attached to the folder.
Aha.
I pulled out the pamphlet, followed the instructions, and got us back online.
I also called Ashland Home Net and gave them our account number, just to close that loop. And they called back, apologized for not being able to find us, baffled by that side of it, confirming that we were online again and weren’t experiencing any more interruptus.
Normal online life resumed.
Monday’s Wandering Thoughts
I always like headlines like this:
All 32 NFL teams (including the Broncos) ranked by 2026 strength of schedule
I thought, wow, they’re including the Broncos when they say ‘all’? Man, that is deep.
I expect to see headlines soon like ‘All of the planets (including Earth) in order according to their distance from the sun.’
‘All four seasons (including winter) ranked by temperature.’
Or, how about, ‘All five oceans (including the Pacific) in square miles.’
Going back to the NFL headline, I wonder, why call out the Broncos out of 32 teams? Strange, no?
Stranger still how much I spend thinking about things like this.
A Health Update
Subtle but unexpected health changes recently launched me on a path of exploration and understanding.
First was my teeth.
I began experiencing mild gum pain despite regular brushing, flossing, and using my water pick. That pain disappeared on its own. Concurrently, I discovered my teeth alignment better than before because my small overbite had vanished.
More embarrassingly, I developed nocturnal incontinence, just enough seepage for me to wonder.
Changed gums, teeth alignment, and incontinence seemed unrelated. But the body is a system. Restricting my sodium intake, exercising more, following a better diet ended with weight loss and less bloating. I began bloating years ago without fully understanding what was going on.
Adding up all these changes, I wondered if these disparate changes were related to my reduced bloating. I went on net searches, refining and gathering information, confirming, yes, these were all stacked and related events.
As I read, I gathered that several practices influenced my incontinence. I take Flomax for a benign enlarged prostate, which helps me urinate. I also raise my legs and massage them to combat edema and lymphedema – fluid retention – each evening. I also hydrate just before going to bed.
Research showed that if I changed the order of doing things, I could probably end the incontinence.
- Elevate my legs before taking the Flomax.
- Take the Flomax earlier in the evening.
- Drink less water late at night.
I made those changes, and yes, the incontinence was gone.
The body is a fascinating, dynamic system. Thanks to the net, it’s getting easier to understand.
And manage.
At the Moment
Middle age
Young age
Old age
A childhood time
Post modernism
Pre-industrial
Eras we define
Space age
Information age
Net age
Here we come
Knowledge at our fingertips
Truth is on the run
Thinking
Wishing
Wondering what will be
How will history
Change this age
Of truth
Of change
Of greed?
Sitting on the cusp
Of something
Trying to make sense
How long can this go on
With so many
On the fence?
If you ask me what it means
Uncertainty arises
I think I know what I see
I’m not sure
I like it
Just the Facts, Please
A headline drew me in this morning.
Francis Buchholz, Scorpions’ hurricane-rocking ex-bassist, dead at 71
I enjoy the Scorpions and their music. They had many hits, and a good friend of mine was a power fan of the group.
Poor guy, I thought, thanks for the music, and gee — just a little older than me.
I opened the story and read, stopping at this paragraph:
Scorpions had already been going for years with another bassist when Buchholz, who was born Jan. 19, 1950 in Hanover, West Germany, joined.
Hold on. If Buchholz was born in 1950, how in the world of math is he 71?
I searched his name for the answer. One article said he was 75. Other places said he was 71, born in 1954. At least that math works.
I wondered, what are the facts? It reinforced my worry, erroneous information spreads too easily on the net.
No wonder we seem confused and polarized. In the digital age, you can’t always be sure of the facts — even when you look for it.
Sundaz Wandering Political Thoughts
The Trump Regime announced its foreign policy during this past week, quietly dumping it .
Donald Trump’s bleak, incoherent foreign-policy strategy
Trump’s security strategy slams European allies and asserts U.S. power in the Americas
Anyone who has been paying attention notices that Trump is pretty okay with Russia and is eager to abandon established international protections and orders. The Trump Corollary pretty well spells that out.
Several things are made much clearer for me now.
- The Trump Regime, embraced and empowered by the Heritage Foundation and IAW Project 2025, has decided that the only elected political office that matters is the presidency.
- They’re pulling hard on the unitary executive theory. The POTUS can do whatever he wants so long as he declares it as a threat to the United States.
- Reinforced by the Roberts Court shadow docket, they are confident that this will advance with little challenge.
- Trump and his minions will employ the United States’ military power and reach to do whatever they want.
- This is along the lines of Russia’s thinking. It’s basically an imperial “we’re bigger than you” attitude, so go screw yourself.
- Bombing ships and killing the people onboard was their deliberate statement that the Trump Regime thinks it can and will get away with it.
- They believe the POTUS is bigger than history and law, whether it’s national or international.
- POTUS makes policy and executes wars as he sees fit, in the Trump Regime’s opinion.
- The boat bombings of 2025 were a test as well as a statement to see how everyone else reacted.
- That the attacks are illegal and horrid and counter to law doesn’t affect the Trump Regime at all.
- That they’re purportedly Venezuelan boats and citizens have everything to do with fossil fuels and Venezuela’s reserves, and nothing to do with whether drugs are onboard and destined for the United States.
- The target and efforts were perfect test scenarios for them after they first flexed military power by bombing Iran under the guise of protecting Israel.
- The Trump Regime is aware of blowback from previous efforts to bully other nations and/or conduct regime change.
- That’s one reason why they’re shutting down inroads and making the U.S. hostile to people coming to our nation.
- By aggressively doing so and making migrants, immigrants, tourists, and foreigners less prevalent among our population, they can more easily keep tabs and more heavily surveil them when they’re here, and more swiftly and ruthlessly come down on them. In their minds, that probably equates to being less susceptible to terrorist activities.
- They’re discounting what could happen to U.S. bases and corporations doing business outside of the United State, or what can happen to tourists beyond our borders. It’s another amazing example of how they think with blinders on. They think the threat of military retaliation will keep U.S. businesses and citizens safe in other nations.
- That’s part of their ‘obey or else’ doctrine as Trump has warned others several times.
- The Trump Regime is encouraged by how NATO and others responded to Russian aggression.
- Trump’s economic policies completely align with the Trump Corollary.
- Trump claims that he wants to return manufacturing to the United States. That’s clearly just another promise to satisfy his base.
- By breaking trade agreements and increasing tariffs, the Trump Regime has slowed the flow of goods to the United States.
- Via this slowdown and tariffs, the Trump Regime can now manipulate what materials enter the country, affecting food supplies, consumer goods, manufacturing, construction, and prices. This becomes another weapon for Trump to coerce cooperation from states, businesses, and people.
- Putting U.S. national guard units in ‘blue’ cities along with attacks on the media and the persecution of his political enemies is a deliberate and orchestrated Trump Regime three-pronged strategy.
- Their goals are clearly to mute criticism of Trump and his policies.
- The strategy permits the regime to control the flow of information and to have boots on the crowd to quell public protests and outcry.
- The Trump Regime knows that’s coming. Trump might not know of increasing unpopularity of him and his policies but his regime knows, are they’re expecting it to grow worse, and are planning against it.
- Dismantling the Department of Education and shifting focus from public education to private schools empowers the Trump Regime.
- The Trump Regime is basically following the old communist game plan. Teach them young, and teach only the ‘facts’ which the Regime wants the young to hear.
- This practice creates an easily malleable young population, perfect for expanding military forces.
- The icing on the strategy is ICE.
- By establishing and heavily funding a huge paramilitary organization, the Trump Regime has created a de facto national police force.
- They can then use that ICE force to curtail and restrict travel and enforce curfews in the name of ‘national emergencies’.
- Trump, as POTUS, can declare a national emergency at will. Given the nature of the GOP-dominated Congress, Congress would only make mewling noises about it.
- That would leave relief about Trump’s declared emergencies to the judicial system, where the Trump-friendly Roberts Court rules.
Can anyone say Iron Curtain? Through the ‘Trump Corollary’ and the Trump Regime’s already well-established practices, this administration is creating the Trump Wall. They, with ‘they’ defined as the primarily white fascist Christians of Trump’s base and the oligarchs courting Trump’s favor, believe that this policy will make the United States stronger and more successful by isolating it and using its military power to bully others. It completely discounts twentieth and twenty-first economic, cultural, political, and military history. It also belies the truth about how the United States advanced through education, opportunity, and international military, diplomatic, and economic cooperation. But remember that those successes and advances were often done when Democrats were in charge. This Trump Corollary is a reactionary throwback to a far different time, one well before computers and the vast technological communications systems that now exist.
The Trump Regime is on that, though. By developing relationships through business, profits, and grift with the techno brothers, they’re establishing the framework for shutting down and manipulating the social media information flow. AI will only enhance the Trump Regime’s ability to manipulate facts and the truth…just as foretold in 1984.
Bottom line, the Trump Corollary is a death knell for true freedom, democracy, and equality in the United States. Unless you have the money or power to procure them.
Good luck, people. Good luck.
Sundaz Wandering Political Thoughts
The innertubes muse about the state of Trump and the United States.
Twozdaz Wandering Political Thoughts
Stuff from around the web.
Ha, ha, remember when Kristi Noem said this? My goodness, those Trumpers really lack memories, conscience, and principles, don’t they?
More of the same, Stephen Miller edition…
Trump’s actions are not popular. Is the country heading in the wrong direction? You bet! Will that stop him? No, because he’s locked into an alternate reality.
Priorities, priorities, priorities.
I don’t understand. Why would ICE agents go to a restaurant in a war zone?
Country Star Zach Bryan Divides Fans With Anti-ICE Ballad
Once again, from Trump’s alternate reality…
1982
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.
Michael Seidel, writer 