

Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
I agree with PINO Trump: the United States is a fat, dumb, foolish country. It’s led by fat, dumb, foolish Republicans who nominated this obese obscenity of lying, walking meat to be the country’s leader, and conned fat, dumb, foolish hoopleheads into voting for him.
Now this fat, dumb, foolish cocksucker and his regime are pillaging the nation.
As always, when Trump speaks, he projects what he’s doing onto others.
Look! Quick! PINO Donald J. Trump admitted that he was a fool.

It’s been so long since he’s told the truth by calling himself a fool that confusion was rampant over what was going on around the world.
Fortunately, the net knew that Trump was right, and was telling the truth: he’s the one who signed the 2019 agreement with Mexico and Canada.
And he’s a fool.
This was stolen from Mastodon resident Wiley Miller @Wileymiller, creator of the comic strip, Non Sequitur.
Can you spot a pattern here?
4-14-20 – Trump declares he has total authority over state decisions.
12-8-23 – Trump declares he’ll only be a dictator on Day 1 in office.
2-18-25 – Trump declares himself King.
Visit Wiley Miller for more. It’s well worth it.
As observers watch the Trusk Regime’s Great Shitstorm of 2025 and the Great Undoing, we await the Reciprocal Wave. History, economics, science, have all demonstrated again and again that for every action, there are reactions.
This is an era of networks. The age of the old factory plants have faded. What we have now are multiple assembly locations. Subassemplys are built and then shipped into other countries, where they’re added to other subassemblies. Those subassemblies are folded into a final component which is then shipped to an assembly plant for final inclusion into finished goods, such as a car. This is true not just in the automobile and aircraft industries, but in many electronics industries, medical device manufacturing, and pharmacueticals. Wasn’t governments who did this, either; this was the capitalists, although they worked with governments to make it so, often encouraged by tax breaks and subsidies.
Likewise, the farm-to-table model is a simplistic concept for much of the food that reaches our tables. While we do have local economies with organic farms and farm-to-table can happen, nature still commands where some things grow.
The Trusk Regime has issued orders. Broken treaties. Damaged alliances. Withdrawn from marketing and trade agreements. Bullied allies and threatened and launched tariffs.
Tariffs will drive up prices. History has demonstrated it. Higher prices bring inflation. Inflation causes less buying. People just don’t have enough money to buy more.
Less buying equals less retail volume. Lower volume means less income for businesses. Businesses compensate with increased prices to sustain operating and profit margins.
But less sales volume is less business. Less tax revenues at all levels.
Less sales translates to less need for employees. Job layoffs and terminations follow.
To ice the cake, the Trusk Regime has cut Small Business Administration funds. Too much DEI for them. Without those loans and grants, small businesses will close. Unemployment will climb. Fewer businesses means increased scarcity and less competition. Prices rise out of that equation.
That is just the tip of that egregious economic situation. Think of what that does to consumer confidence? Imagine the impact on the stock and commodities markets, and the strength of the dollar.
But you don’t need to imagine that. History is full of these things happening. They have been studied. The cause and effect is well understood. With less tax revenues and less Federal funding coming down, roads and infrastructure fall into disrepair. So history says. Hello, if you were paying attention, you know that was one of the things Trump 45 promised to do and failed to do. And, if you’re paying attention to your history, you know that President Joe Biden delivered on that promise with a bi-partisan infrastructure repair act.
The things you can learn from history.
If you’re willing.
Beyond food scarcity, high prices, and small businesses shuttering, visualize what that does to small towns and cities. Imagine what happens to farmers and their businesses with their markets closed to them in China and elsewhere.
There will be backlash and more reciprocal impacts. Unemployment will rise. Homelessness will increase. Begging on street corners will climb.
The Trusk Regime has already made that situation worse by shuttering the USAID. Through it, charities helped with lunch programs. Religious charities depended on money from the USAID to help communities cope with homelessness, unemployment, and scarce resources.
But Trusk cut that. That now traditional source of help will not be there. Forced into starvation and desperation, violent crimes will rise. That’s a fact right out of history. So will an attitude. What do I care if the world burns down? I have no future in it. Because they can’t afford college. Even if they can get more education, to what end would they put their degrees with businesses terminating employees. They will begin to work as part of an under-the-table gig economy. Take low paying jobs to get a meal.
Imagine the impact of increasing homelessness and growing unemployment will have on new car sales and new home sales. But you don’t have to: history has shown us the impact.
The Trusk Regime has already made that situation worse by terminating hundreds of thousands of Federal employees. You don’t think that’s not going to affect the unemployment numbers, consumer confidence, and the economy? People without jobs don’t spend much money. The Trusk Regime likes to offer a scenario where these hundreds of thousands of newly unemployed individuals go out and get a new job.
Where?
Especially since the Trusk Regime also cut government contracts. Schools, businesses, and communities were depending on those contracts. Some of them were still rebuilding from natural disasters. The money had been allocated by Congress. The Imperial Presidency said, no. So those projects have stopped.
They’re not hiring anyone.
That’s what Project 2025 and the Trusk Regime wholly ignore. We experienced all of this things and built networks of state, local, and Federal government with rules, regulations, and experts to deal with these problems. The Trusk Regime decided it was fraud and waste and took a chain saw to it.
Now we wait. The Great Reciprocal Wave is coming. Its form is uncertain. Could be open warfare. Massive rioting. A military coup. Other factors of the Great Undoing will come into play. Like health crises. Say avian flu. Flu, RSV, and COVID-19. New diseases. So it could be another pandemic.
This is all just a tiny piece of it. Natural disasters will begin. Tornados will tear through towns. Wildfires will start burning. Flooding. Places will be evacuated. Productivity will fail more. Scarcity will increase. Tax revenues will plummet. The economy will sag. The fires will burn on with no to little help from the Trusk Regime. They don’t think those federal agencies were useful.
Hurricane season will begin. Storms will wreck whole areas. Scarcity will increase. So will demand. Inflation will rise. Tax revenues will plummet. Homelessness will increase.
What do you think that will do to the insurance companies? Not sure? Ask the good people of Puerto Rico, Oregon, California, Florida, Texas, and other states affected by natural disasters in recent years. They’ll give you a history lesson.
While you’re talking to them, ask, too, what it did to their health and their healthcare systems. Ask them what it did to their local economy and local inflation. Ask them what it did to their state of mind.
The Trusk Regime thinks that cutting federal agencies like FEMA is a good move. They think local citizens ‘on the ground’ in those locations will be able to ‘make better decisions’.
Yes, because the people of Asheville, NC, for example, have such a deep familiarity with recovering from disasters. *head shake*
Making decisions about how to help communities is only a small element of what FEMA does. They keep stockpiles of emergency food and water supplies on hand. They keep emergency housing on hand in the form of trailers that can be moved in to solve the housing problems for a while.
Those stockpiles will still exist. But with FEMA cut or its personnel cut, who will manage those inventories? Who will ship those supplies?
And we know that this will happen.
Because history taught us. You can learn a lot from history, if you’re willing. Just cast your mind back to 2005, Hurricane Katrina, and New Orleans. Twenty years ago. Pause to remember Michael D. Brown of FEMA fame and the disastrous job he did because he didn’t have experience. “Heckuva job, Brownie,” President Bush told him.
So you can learn from history. But right now, instead, voters decided to fuck around and find out. They were willing to take an ax to all of these programs, agencies, federal employees, alliances, trade agreements, and expertise.
Well, here it comes, brothers and sisters. You’re about to find out.
Here comes the Reciprocal Wave. I’d tell you to brace yourselves but do I need to?
History has already told us.
Feb. 10, 2025, is a wintry Mundaz in Ashlandia. White sky holds no promises. White sky offers no sun. White sky offers no solace.
No precipitation is falling but we’re hovering at a toasty 23 F, ten degrees below our average low for this calendar date. Snow that fell last week still has a meaty white presence on the ground. The pine trees have finally shed that winter weight. Last week’s snow and ice had many pines bent to half of their height.
As for today, ‘they’ tell us that the sunshine will overcome the white sky and take us to 43 F, ten degrees below our normal average high.
Sorry that KC Chiefs were so dominated by the Philly Eagles in the SB yesterday. Unfortunately, PINO Trump predicted they’d win. That doomed them. As we’ve seen repeatedly demonstrated, Trump bestows the kiss of death on everything.
The Neurons surprised me with today’s music. It started as a tangent off some floofcourse between me and my felines. I asked them, “What’s wrong now?” Their answer came as pouty stares and circling watchfulness, which just dumped Les Neurons into bafflement. As I shifted to news reports with growing, heavier sighs, I thought, “Too many problems.”
A song began in my morning mental music stream. “What’s wrong, what’s wrong now? Too many problems.” As it pulled up volume and melody, I hunted the who, what, whens behind it. Unable to answer those myself, I turned to the net. It educated me that the song was “Nobody’s Home” by Avril Lavigne from 2004. I guess I heard it in the car. Back in that decade, I moved to Ashlandia and began doing regular I-5 commutes from my place in southern Oregon to visit with my team in Mountain View, between SF and SJ on the peninsula. Guess I heard it then.
Hope you can get positive that something good will come about and it won’t take a miracle from some deity or an eternity to happen. Coffee and I have embraced again. Off we go, into the wild white yonder, a fresh start on another day.
Cheers
Good mornin’! It’s Sunda, February 9, 2025. Sunshine is crowding the window, pressing its rays up against the glass. We started the AM at 25 F in my locale but the sun soon had us soaring past 33 F. ‘They’ tell us 43 is possible. Don’t know if their fingers were crossed behind their backs.
The sun has been working its magic. Trees and bushes are pushing their heavy lids of snow back and stretching and flexing into their normal postures. Seeing sunshine, both floofs clamored to escape the house. Checking on them later, the two sat, eyes closed, soaking up rays on the patio’s sun-warmed cement. After being sun-doused, they returned to the house. One is now napping on a bed while the other is in a chair in sunshine snoozing.
What a night of dreams. Another military dream was among them. Classic of these dreams, I’m in the military again, and again coping with a uniform malfunction. In other words, I was out of compliance and trying to solve that. It’s my version of being pantless in school. But a twist arrived when an officer accosted me and asked, “What are you doing?” I figured he was going to ladle grief on me for my uniform. I whipped out an explanation and told him I was trying to rectify it. “Why?” he responded, surprising me. Then he added, “You retired.”
Oh, yeah.
That sunshine had me thinking, I hunger for a bouncy, energetic song. Something as an antitdote to PINO Trusk’s destruction. Drifting back into time, The Neurons surfaced with a Who offering from 1972. Although the video is silly with them miming playing their instruments and singing, the infectious blending of instruments stirred the kind of hope I felt when I was sixteen. That — and coffee — is just what my spirit ordered.
Coffee saved me again. Brekkie is done, cats are fed. Time to gen up other activities. Hope your day serves you well. Cheers
Daybreak’s first peeps brought awareness. Today is Saturday. Were I a child of the days back then, I’d be up with joy, heading into the kitchen for a bowl of cereal and into the living room to check out cartoons. Maybe it’d be Bugs and the Roadrunner. Johnny Quest. Speedy Gonzales, Top Cat, Deputy Dawg.
With awakening today, I thought, February 8, 2025. Taxes have been prepared but not filed. We owe money at this point so why pay now? Wait till the bill is due. Not acutally my philosophy; this was my spouse’s input.
It’s 25 F outside. Sunshine and clouds take turns showing themselves. Snow flurries fall. The road looks slick with ice. Snow is still the landscape’s dominant feature. Much melted off yesterday as the snow turned to rain and rain turned to sunshine. The temperature climbed into the low forties before retreating into the mid-20s overnight. ‘They’ tell us today will bring partly sunny skies into Ashland and a high in the upper thirties.
Today’s song is from a movie. The movie is is based on the 1979 book The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship and Espionage by Robert Lindsey. A friend of mine was the book’s editor, and he told about how the manuscript came to be in his hands and his conversations with the author, insights which I lapped up. The movie was released in 1985 and starred young Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton. I’ve posted about the hit song that emerged from it before. Suffice today to say that after reading news yesterday about PINO Trump and Musk — PINO Trusk — activities, The Neurons plucked the song from memory and has it rolling in the morning mental music stream. Key to the song’s position in the MMMS is the line repeated throughout the song, “This is not America”, which is also the song’s title.
Unfortunately, through an accumulation of actions and a confluence of misguided thinking and behavior, what we have now is America. It’s not the place visualized by our founders. Nor is it the nation which survived a civil war and two world wars. No, this is an ugly vision of America, and what many feared would happen. Too sadly, it is celebrated as ‘the right direction’ for a segment of the population.
I ran into coffee in the kitchen and consumed. Sunshine has lifted the light and temperature outside and the falling snow has faded. Ice has melted on the streets.
Things are looking up, for the moment, here in Ashlandia.
Cheers