Twosda’s Theme Music
Twosda, July 8, 2025, has squatted down on us. It’s a cool morning after a quiet night. 75 F now, 95 F later, part of a ‘cooling trend’. We saw 99 at our Ashlandia house yesterday. My wife and I were at to get a few items at its hottest, about 4 PM. Checking the eastern sky, I said, “I think we’re going to get thunderstorms.”
My wife scanned the sky. “No, that doesn’t look like thunderstorms to me.”
A few hours later, the sky darkened. Thunder washed across the sky like an old man clearing his throat and coughing. A few raindrops applauded on the ground. At 7:46 PM, the power went out. An alert telling us about that came at 7:57 PM. They said the power would be back in one and a half hours. They were wrong.
Meanwhile, another emergency text arrived: fire off Pompadour Road. Bottom line of all this, fire crews worked through the night to line and contain the Pompadour Fire, and the electricity came back on a little after 2 AM. I know because things beeped and chirped back to life.
The good part of this is that we updated our power outage equipment last winter and it all proved to work. One purchase was a pair of inexpensive rechargeable light bulbs. Installed over the breakfast bar between the kitchen and dining room, they work great as regular bulbs, giving soft daylight illumination. When the power went out, they were charged and ready to go, giving us needed light at the throw of a switch. Now, with power returned, they’re recharging for the next time they’re needed.
Augmenting those were two simple round little lights. Working off three AA batteries, they’re extremely lightweight but powerful, and were perfect for using to read books. As we both had library books at hand, we picked up our books and lights and read till bed.
BTW, my book was “Hollow Kingdom” by Kira Jane Buxton. Released in 2019, I found this science fiction book about an unfolding human apocalypse, as told by a crow and other birds and animals to be engaging, warm, clever, and moving. I wholly recommend it.
Meantime, we’re talking about the Trump Regime’s heavy-handed military presence at MacAuthur Park in LA.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is condemning federal agents and National Guard troops for descending on a city park on Monday, July 7.
Armored vehicles, mounted officers and armed troops briefly swarmed the city’s MacArthur Park Monday morning before leaving. Bass said 20 children were playing at the park before the troops surged through and shared footage of federal officers running through the park.
According to an X post from the Department of Defense, troops were present at the park to “ensure the safety of federal agents.”
Sorry, I know, writing ‘heavy-handed’ while addressing Trump Regime actions is redundant; everything done by that loathsome, hate-fueled regime is heavy handed. This is especially true when it’s Dog-killer Noem calling the shots. ICE and the military showed up at park, disrupting a children’s day care outing. Now what did that accomplish other than a show of force to intimidate others and blow another wad of Federal funding? Bet some part of the MAGA crowd let out a full-throated cheer but the rest of us simply lowered our expectations of TACO and his chips yet again, just, as they say, you didn’t think they could go lower.
During the power outage, The Neurons plugged a 1983 song by Dio, “Holy Diver”, into the morning mental music stream. “What’s that about?” I inquired of the little gray dude. Shrugging in unison, they chorus-muttered, “I don’t know.” Now tell me, how am I supposed to know why things happen in my mind when The Neurons in charge keep presenting themselves as clueless? And people wonder why I act strange. Well, it’s The Neurons, isn’t it? Anyway, that’s the theme music for Twosda, just to get it out of my friggin’ head.
Right now, I’m fasting. No coffee, water, food, etc., until after my 12:15 ultrasound on my gall bladder. Have the best day you can, okay? I’ll do the same. Cheers
Munda’s Wandering Political Thoughts
If you have a brain, and some thinking skills, the full Trumpasy is all revealed. Just check out the Trump Regime’s actions. Look at the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’. Read again Project 2025.
- Redistribute wealth to the wealthy. They need it to ‘build the economy’. This is called trickle down economics. It has been decisively proven not to work.
- Start shredding the welfare net. Cut Medicaid. Force people to work more.
- Cut all assistance contributed by the Federal government to the states and local communities. Downtrodden existences lead to downtrodden morale. A sick people is a desperate people, and are more easily manipulated.
- De-construct the education system. An uneducatd population is more guillible. Indoctrinate young people into right wing values via vouchers and private schools.
- Manufacture and reinforce negative stereotypes of other citizens, people who ‘are different’, i.e., people who are not heterosexual and white. This is useful for blame games and distraction, and helps neuter political will.
- Weaponize ICE into a paramilitary force. While laws limit what the US military is authorized to do to citizens, it’s a more wide-open field with ICE. Under the guise of rounding up ‘illegal immigrants’, the Trump Regime are also undermining due process and the concepts of ‘innocent until proven guilty’. People are being disappeared as the right-wing social media machine provides cover by declaring that the Constitution isn’t meant to be applied to ‘non-citizens’.
- Establish concentration camps. The first one has been built in Florida, of course. Don’t be surprised if Texas eagerly builds one in the race to be patriotic by refusing others equality, rights, and freedom. Disappearing people and creating concentration camps stoke fears and can be used to threaten political opposition.
- Build a right-wing Supreme Court bias that’s willing to overlook history and precedence, one which will used flawed interpretations of the U.S. Constitution to empower the Executive Branch and wipe out the checks and balance system provided by three equal branches.
- Weaponize trade. Try to force manufacturing back to the United States, even though the raw materials are obtained elsewhere, and even though the capital investments needed for new factories are astronomical. This provides a false hope of new jobs; there will be new jobs but they won’t pay wages needed to live in this ever expensive land, forcing people to work more, no matter their health or situation. This will also increase people’s desperation to work and make money to pay for basic goods and services such as food and housing, as prices see tariff-based inflation bound upward.
- But — also cut limitations on child labor laws. Encourage poor poeple to have more children to provide a larger and cheaper work force.
- Cut or waive environmental laws and regulations to reduce the cost of building new manufacturing facilities.
- Nurture confusion among facts and distrust of the news media. Confusion helps the Regime maintain control by undermining grass root organizations’ ability to effectively organize and protest. It also allows the Regime to turn citizen against citizen in a cold war that favors the Trump Regime’s heavy hand.
- Distract, distract, distract. In this endeavor, natural disasters are your friend; they pull focus from the political arena. Reduce the Federal government’s effectiveness in predicting disasters and helping states and communities. Again, chaos, confusion, and low morale are useful for controlling and manipulating the population. As a bonus, when a natural disaster levels a region, it opens up land and opportunity to rebuild. People with next to nothing can be more easily induced to take less pay for bad jobs.
- Attack other nations; encourage aggression among other nations. Make the world a scarier place.
Yes, this is cynical. It’s not my thinking, but my interpretation of what the Trump Regime and the Republican-filled Greedy Ol’ Trump Party, also known as the GOTP, is doing. Show me I’m wrong. Point to Trump’s actions and demonstrate otherwise. Parse that OBBB for clues that this is not what the Trump Regime pursues.
Time will tell. It’s already told us a great deal in the first six months of 2025.
Munda’s Theme Music
Munda, July 7, 2025, has broken clear and relatively cool, hosting blue sky and 76 F temperature. Expectations for th afternoon heat have been lowered; some say we’ll kiss 100 F, others claim we’ll peak in the mid 90s.
Keeping a weather eye on the global fire situations. With so many large fires going at it on multiple continents, smoke and air pollution becomes a problem for us. Of course, the Texas flash floods disaster remains the headline story. Among the headlines are reminders of shortsighted decisions, like, Officials Feared Flood Risk to Youth Camps but Rejected Warning System. Costs were cited as the reason why an improved system wasn’t installed; they lost out on a million dollar grant a few years ago. Meanwhile, Texas spent $2,300,000,000 on their ‘border wall’ and several more billion on border security. Speaks well for a ‘pro-life’ state where fear and racism won again over practical matters. Those are Texans’ choices, a reflection of their political worries and priorities. It’s a sad state and it’s questionable, with the cuts to the National Weather Service under Trump, whether appropriate alarm would have been given.
In unrelated news, U.S. measles cases reach 33-year record high as outbreaks spread.
The United States has reached its highest annual measles case tally in 33 years, hitting at least 1,277 confirmed cases across 38 states and the District of Columbia.
The milestone marks a public health reversal in defeating a highly contagious, vaccine-preventable disease as the anti-vaccine movement gains strength.
Way to go, Trump, way to go.
I’ve been calling our local healthcare providing, Asante, to establish arrangements for the needed gallbladder ultrasound. The net: 5 calls, 25 minutes on hold, and never spoke with a human. That doesn’t do much to reassure me that the system is working.
Today’s music is a 1985 hit for Eric Clapton, “Forever Man”. The Neurons didn’t establish a concrete reason for its use in the morning mental music stream.
Breakfast has been consumed. Off to get involved with the day. Have a better one. Cheers
Sunda’s Wandering Political Thoughts
Southwest Nebraska medical center announces plans to close, blames uncertainty over funding
The uncertainty over federal Medicaid funding appears to have claimed its first victim in Nebraska.
Community Hospital in McCook announced Wednesday that it will close Curtis Medical Center in Curtis, winding down its services over the next several months.
“Unfortunately, the current financial environment, driven by anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid, has made it impossible for us to continue operating all of our services, many of which have faced significant financial challenges for years,” Troy Bruntz, President and CEO of Community Hospital, said in a news release.
The budget reconciliation bill that the House of Representatives voted to approve on Thursday contains several provisions that experts say will slash Medicaid, which rural hospitals are more dependent on than their urban counterpart
Mauna Loa Observatory captured the reality of climate change. The US plans to shut it down
The greenhouse effect was discovered more than 150 years ago and the first scientific paper linking carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere with climate change was published in 1896.
But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists could definitively detect the effect of human activities on the Earth’s atmosphere.
In 1956, United States scientist Charles Keeling chose Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano for the site of a new atmospheric measuring station. It was ideal, located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and at high altitude away from the confounding influence of population centres.
Data collected by Mauna Loa from 1958 onward let us clearly see the evidence of climate change for the first time. The station samples the air and measures global CO₂ levels. Charles Keeling and his successors used this data to produce the famous Keeling curve – a graph showing carbon dioxide levels increasing year after year.
But this precious record is in peril. US President Donald Trump has decided to defund the observatory recording the data, as well as the widespread US greenhouse gas monitoring network and other climate measuring sites.
| The Dilemma of the Fourth of July |
| As we finish out this holiday weekend, it’s a good moment to reflect on how the Fourth of July is a complicated holiday for many of those living in the United States. At Native News Online, author Mark Charles looks at the contradictions in the experience of July 4th for many Native communities. “The other day I was eating dinner with my wife in a restaurant located in Gallup, New Mexico, a border town to the Navajo reservation. Gallup was recently named “Most Patriotic Small Town” in a nationwide contest. Soon after sitting down I noticed that we were seated at a table directly facing a framed poster of the Declaration of Independence. The irony almost made me laugh. When our server, who was also Native, came to the table, I asked if I could show him something. I then stood up and pointed out that 30 lines below the famous quote “All men are created equal” the Declaration of Independence refers to Natives as “merciless Indian savages.” The irony was that the restaurant was filled with Native Americans customers and employees and there in plain sight, a poster hanging on the wall was literally calling all of us “savages.” |
Satyrda’s Wandering Political Thoughts
I had a FAFO post up about the Texas flash flood disaster and the Trump National Weather Service cuts. But I felt uncomfortable with it and trashed it. First, it seemed too Trumpian to tonelessly crow about others’ bad situation. That’s something that I genuinely detest in Trump and many of his supporters. These are humans suffering, and I feel for them and their pain.
I also don’t believe that pointing out FAFO moments like the National Weather Service changes Trump thoughtlessly executed will help the national political discourse. FAFO incidents must be learning moments for the MAGAs, but they need to do it from their sphere. We’ve already witnessed them coming back with strong denial or whataboutisms when confronted with facts. So, they either learn it on their own, or don’t. Pointing it out isn’t a catalyst to helping them learn. It will just close their minds to people pointing it out to them.
That’s a broad generalization, of course. I don’t know how many MAGAs it applies to. I’ve read interviews where MAGAs have professed to learning from their Trump-supporting ways. I know some have learned; I believe more will learn. I hope more will learn.
But I’m going to try to avoid shoving their face in it when the FAFO shit hits the fan.
Satyrda’s Theme Music
Couple things happening now. This being Satyrda, July 5, 2025, we’re over halfway through 2025. You feelin’ better about your life, our world, and the direction of your nation? Secondly, we’re now ‘closer’ to 2050 than to 2000.
Summer continues here in Ashlandia. We topped out at 80 F at my place yesterday. After an overnight low of 52 F, we’re supposed to traverse the mid 80s today. Blue paints the sky here and sunshine is methodically rising over the trees and mountains, bringing light and heat.
After a bout of interesting and uplifting dreams, I rolled into the day feelin’ pretty good. Then I perused the news and life slapped my face. Heatwave in Europe is unabated, with wildfires in Spain, Greece, Turkey. Flash flooding struck Texas and we’re following that story to see what happened to who and how many. Not helping matters, more rain is expected in the flooded areas. MAGA is gleeful about building a new concentration camp, Alligator Alcatraz, in Florida, using FEMA funds. You know, FEMA: Federal Emergency Management Assistance. Trump has turned that into a tool to imprison others instead of helping Americans. Meanwhile, tropical depressions off the U.S. east coast could develop into a hurricane. And the giant Madre fire still burns in Southern California.
But personal moods sometimes plays by its own sheet music so my mind is up. I gotta take advantage of it because you don’t know when something will strike down the mood.
Today’s song is “Higher Love” by Steve Winwood. It’s a personal favorite from my middle adult years. Released in 1986, when I was 30, the song spoke to me. Today I’m 69, and Der Neurons thought it was a good fit for the morning mental music stream. I really enjoy this flashback video and Letterman’s humor. Hope you find it entertaining. As a bonus, “Gimme Some Lovin'” is also performed.
Here we go, into the day. Let it swallow me and become something. I’m going to try to make it a strong one. Hope yours goes well. Cheer
Frida’s Wandering Thoughts
The parade is over. The fireworks await us tonight. Cloud cover has passed away so viewing shouldn’t be a problem. The arguments over whether they’re entertaining and patriotic or an environmental hazard and an ordeal for animals continues.
2025’s Ashland Independence Day parade was remarkable for its thin festivities and shortness. Didn’t even go an hour this year even though four bands entertained us with march and show music. The are the same four bands heard every year. Indivisible had a “No Kings” display and vocalized that, encouraging us to join. La Clinica was barely there. Climate awareness scuffled past, as did Peace Corps members who knew their legacy was being defunded and dismissed.
Applause was muted; many participants seemed tired, trudging, not marching, forcing dull smiles out as they remembered to toss a feeble smile. Some performers, like the elderly female dancers, were still into it, zinging us with smiles and waving with happiness, but they were the rarity. Mayors from Medford, Phoenix, Talent, and Ashland all drove by, along with other minor local government functionaries. The cars, an Austin Healey 3000, two Jag E types, and a Bugatti GTC, brought comments, along with the vintage and antique cars that gassed us with exhaust fumes out of the 1940s.
The weather stayed cool but the sunshine was hot, a crisply contradictary way of being, which felt perfectly symbolic for this national holiday in 2025.
Thirstda’s Theme Music
Hello. Excuse me. Is this Thirstda, July 3, 2025? It is? Well, I guess this is where I belong, then.
It’s 74 F now. Gonna be 84 F. Dropping down to a chillier temp tomorrow: 80 F. Nice having a not blazing hot summer. So far, knock wood.
The jobs reports of a 147,000 gains surprised everyone, especially after ADP’s report yesterday that the private sector lost 33,000. Experts are now clamoring, gosh, the U.S. economy is more robust than we thought, and the markets hurtled up with glee. Sure, tourism is down and the national parks are a mess, and manufacturing lost 7,000 jobs and teen unmployment and Black unemployment rose and DOGE cut loose a bunch of people, but all is well. Well, we’ll see.
Kudos to Rep. Hakeen Jeffries for putting himself out there and making the effort. He set a new record for speaking on the House floor, 8 hours and 44 minutes, rebuking the GOTP for that ugly bill that they bizarrely call the One Big Beautiful Bill. It passed in the House, so it’s on the way to Trump. We’ll see what happens next. I expect Trump will celebrate with a new product like Trump Beer, a bargain at $60 a six pack. Then maybe he’ll set up a presidential kissing booth. Loyal MAGAs can pay good money to sidle up and kiss Trump staffer ass.
Today’s music is “Children of the Revolution”. I don’t know why The Neurons put the 1972 song into the morning mental music stream. After going in search of a Rex version, I came across a cover by the Violent Femmes and used it, because I used the Rex version back in 2023 and I like the Violent Femmes. So, here we go.
The sun is shining and the coffee is consumed. I’m off to my physical. Have a better one. Cheers
Wenzda’s Theme Music
It’s Wenzda, aka humpday, but also July 2, 2025. Cooled down to a comfortable level last night some and the morning ingredients are calling birds, blue sky, sunshine, and 72F. High will be 83 F, a drop from what I saw yesterday at my casa, 95 F.
I realized this morning that I’m in a metaphorical holding-my-breath state. So many balls in the air. I scan horizons for ‘the next’ in six different directions. Out there is the One Big Beautiful Bill, known in some places as the Big Ripoff, the Great Screwed Up Give to the Rich bill in others. Trump was again idiotically blithering on TV like someone who shouldn’t be allowed out on their own again. Russia and Ukraine’s war continues. Iran and Israel are still out there glaring at one another. Israel bombed some more people in Gaza. Don’t worry: they’re ‘investigating’ how it came to be that they bombed a cafe and killed reporters and workers and such. Yep. Tariffs hang all over everything like toilet paper from trees after Devil’s Night. Supreme Court rulings have been issued and the storms building behind those will come out. It’s Hurricane Season. Europe is suffering record heat and it’s not that cool in ‘Merica, either. Wildfires burn and FEMA is ready to shrug because Trump says states should be doing it for themselves. DOGE has had access to personal data; can that be good? The U.S. measles outbreak has ‘plateaued’ according to the gov’t but has it really? And what will happen with all that new guidance from the science and medicine skewed HHS led by worm brain Kennedy? Killer Noem’s ICE Troops seem more reckless, sanctuary and blue states are being threatened by Trump, he has a new eua-du-shit out, and Musk and Trump have taken their insults to new levels. Then there’s the personal and family stuff.
Hold my breath. Wait to see. What. Is. Next.
Quickening to my mood and thoughts, The Neurons unleashed “I Will Wait” by Mumford and Sons into the morning mental music stream. The song came out in 2012. Led by Marcus Mumford, the band has a different sound but it works for me and enough others that they’ve established a solid career. Hope you find it okay for your Wenzda’s beats.
My follow up dental appointment went well yesterday. All is healing, no problems, no complaints. Biopsy showed nothing of concern from the cyst removed from my gum. Have another appointment, different dentist, for a cleaning.
Coffee-fueled energy is ascending. I’m off to early morning yardwork. Have the best day you can. Cheers
