Dr. Martin Luther King Day

 

Not enough has changed since 1967.

Random Photos and No Stockpile

Every morning for the past four years I have awakened and thought to myself, surely it can't get any worse.  Every damn time, I have been wrong - it does get worse.  Before I launch into today's screed I have some attractive photos.  

I took this one in January 2019.  Is it not lovely?  The way the clouds are layered is particularly attractive.  It was in a Facebook memory, so I fetched it up to the blog.

A day or two ago there was a dove on the wall, it's a  Mourning Dove, also known as a turtle dove.  It was chilly, it's puffed up to trap body heat.

Their eyelid skin is blue.  They're pretty birds, and they have a striking note to their wing beats.

This was today.  Hardly any wind, clear skies, and warm enough for shorts and jerseys.  Before leaving, we stood and talked to a neighbor who was pruning a Texas Ranger, and another neighbor who was watching him do work.  It was so unbelievably pleasant.  Remember, all you people living where it's cold, we had weeks of 110 degrees last summer.

 

Some of the nights have been cold - we're low budget so all we do is put a styrofoam cup on our baby cactus.  These people made hats.  Totally cute.

We went to  Costco yesterday.  I spied a five pack of Clorox wipes in someone's basket; feeling like a hound on the scent I ran to the cleaning supply area, but did not find them.  Spotted another five pack in a man's cart, stopped him and asked where he got them.  They were up in the front of the store, we'd walked right by them.  So, now we have a five pack of Covid killing Clorox wipes.  Due to all of our other pandemic shopping, there's no where to put them, but I will not complain about that.  Note the giant rolls of aluminum foil in the background.  Notice that I have not showed the giant pile of toilet paper I've accumulated over time.

This was on twitter today, I find it astonishingly amusing.  American Thinker is a right wing magazine.  They, and many others, have received letters from the lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems.  Apologies have been demanded and tendered for the lies they have been telling.

As you no doubt recall, President Elect Biden announced last week that he would be releasing all of the stockpiled vaccines for immediate deployment.  This was met with resistance from the administration medical talking heads as being short sided and potentially dangerous.  Guess what?  There are no stockpiles - they were released in December.  Azar had to walk back his previous statements about Biden's plans.  From the WAPO we learn:

When Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced this week that the federal government would begin releasing coronavirus vaccine doses held in reserve for second shots, no such reserve existed, according to state and federal officials briefed on distribution plans. The Trump administration had already begun shipping out what was available beginning at the end of December, taking second doses directly off the manufacturing line.

Now, health officials across the country who had anticipated their extremely limited vaccine supply as much as doubling beginning next week are confronting the reality that their allocations will remain largely flat, dashing hopes of dramatically expanding access for millions of elderly people and those with high-risk medical conditions. Health officials in some cities and states were informed in recent days about the reality of the situation, while others are still in the dark.

This is very disheartening, I had dared believe Jim and I would be vaccinated 1Q21, but now I doubt it. 

Secretary of State Pompeo has spent his last week or so burying foreign policy landmines to hurt the Biden administration, so I guess this is another landmine for Mr. Biden courtesy of the orange ectoplasm.  

So, yes, it actually can get worse.

Schadenfreude 2.0 - Impeached Again

 

With that, the orange ectoplasm becomes the first president in history to be impeached twice.  It's unlikely the spineless worms in the Senate will vote to convict, but he's still impeached.

In news from the department of schadenfreude, the real estate firm who handles the renting out of floor space and collecting of rent payments for the ectoplasms' properties has said they will no longer work with him.  All of the banks he's done business with will no longer work with him.  He'll have to take him money somewhere else.  The city of New York is cancelling their contracts with the ectoplasm.  Apparently someone called Eric this morning for his reaction, and Eric had a complete and total melt down and hung up on the caller.  Ivanka has said she will not be attending the inauguration after all; and the swanky country club near their recently purchased $30M lot on Indian River Island has declined their request for membership - so no club sandwiches for them at lunch.  Hah!

It appears that members of Congress have colluded with the insurrectionists.  Ali Alexander, a key organizer of the terrorists is on record saying he organized the "Stop the Steal" event alongside three GOP lawmakers: Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Mo Brooks (Ala.) and Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.), all hard-line Trump supporters.  Biggs and Gosar are flaming right wingers, Brooks is certifiably bat shit crazy.  So the fact that these three have been named is not surprising.

What is surprising is that 30 House Democrats want information about suspicious groups of people being given tours of the Capitol on January 5.  The Capitol has been closed for tours due to Covid.  However, there were many groups being shown around the Capitol on the 5th.  Mikie Sherrill first raised alarms Tuesday that some members of Congress may have provided "reconnaissance" tours to would-be insurrectionists.  This is bad, the people who did this need to be removed.  More can be read here.

This is the Capitol.  Soldiers sleeping on the floor is something that has not been seen since the Civil War.  How did it come to this?

 A few birds have returned to the yard.  Up the street this afternoon we heard a raven, which we have not done all year.  

That's it!  That's all I've got.

Schadenfreude

 The PGA has permanently banned any ectoplasm owned golf course from participating in PGA events, including the one that was scheduled for 2022.

Amazon stopped offering its web hosting services to Parler on Saturday.

A non-US hacker has archived all of the Parler posts and videos from January 6 to the demise of Parler.  She has 56 terabytes of data, and some of it is location data.  This could be useful to researchers and law enforcement.  You can read about it here.

Stripe will no longer process payments for orange ectoplasm merchandise.

From Vice we learn: "To send its emails, the Trump campaign uses infrastructure from a company called ExactTarget, an email marketing firm now owned by Salesforce, according to a Motherboard analysis of the emails. The emails are sent in conjunction with the Republican National Committee, according to the emails themselves. In response to a question about whether the company had taken action to prevent Trump from using the "contact@victory.donaldtrump.com" email infrastructure, Salesforce said it had "taken action" against the RNC to "prevent its use of our services in any way that could lead to violence." 

He's not a happy camper.

Weather and Hot Water Tank Maintenance

This is another picture of last night's sunset.  It was pretty good.  There is less zoom (more crop) so you can see the size of our neighbor's trees. The one on the left is a eucalyptus.  They're beautiful trees, but they drop leaves by the thousands.  Someone must rake them up.  Our neighbor is a pretty cool guy.  Although he's up in years, he remains very active.  He had a pronounced tremor in one hand.  They did the deep brain stimulation on him, and now he is tremor free.  I'm certain that it has made walking, biking, and golf easier to do.  I like knowing that the technology exists and can be effective.

Yesterday was outstanding.  Originally Jim thought he had an appointment with the dermatologist, but as it turned out he did not.  So we were able to ride in temperatures that allowed us to wear shorts and a jersey.  I love that, pulling on the layers is just so annoying.  After we returned, Jim encouraged us to flush the dang water heater.  If you hear your tank making a popping sound while there is heavy demand for hot water (like the dishwasher) you have sediment.  The sediment lays on the bottom of the tank with water under it, that water boils and then bursts through the sediment layer.  You're wasting money boiling that water.  After awhile, it kills the tank and you must replace it.  Given the amount of minerals in our water, this is a twice a year exercise.  The last time we had it done, we paid attention to what the tech was doing and wrote it down.  It's not actually difficult.  Below is what sediment looks like.  That's out on the street where the hose dumped it.

View from the front yard.

@Sabian404 posted this picture of a new 777X preparing to leave the factory in Everett, WA.  It's the next iteration of the 777, it has composite wings and folding wingtips.  Look at the size of the engines - big.  If you're on twitter, he's worth following, he's a plane spotter and shows us interesting stuff.

I was determined to keep today's post apolitical, but I find I can't resist posting this picture.  It's a screen shot someone did of Fox.  Note the number of platforms that have banned the ectoplasm.  Pinterest got rid of him!  This morning Jim read that his email provider had shut him down, so there are no more fund raising avenues available to him.

Today is colder than yesterday, with a really cold breeze.  We've done laundry, perhaps we shall dust.

January 8

This is a comment left on one of the blogs I read.  It was left yesterday. People talk about unity and healing and all of that stuff, but how does that happen when people don't even agree on basic facts?

Oh my. This requires a little more research. It was not Trump supporters but ANTIFA carrying Trump flags. You can't believe everything you see on the news any more. That lady was a veteran standing outside on the lawn and was shot by the police by mistake. Where is the outrage about that? What about all the killings, looting and burning in Portland and Seattle? Where was the outrage then? News stations used to tell the truth. Now they tell you what they want you to believe. Sadly, people do believe it without further investigation.

Several law enforcement agencies have quite clearly stated there was no involvement on the part of Antifa.  The people who did the destruction were supporters of the orange ectoplasm.  Jake Angeli is also on record as saying that there was no Antifa - it was them!

This is funny.

Awhile back I posted about the Bellingcat organization.  They're the ones that proved that Russians shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 over Ukraine.  Bellingcat has done a bang up job of tracing Ashli Babbit's steps to radicalization and then through the Capitol.   Ashli morphed from an Obama supporter to a rabid follower of QAnon.  Using cell phone records and many videos they have the route she took to her death.  She was killed in the Capitol by a plain clothes police officer as she was trying to get through a window to the Speaker's Lobby where congress people were hiding.  It's sad that she died, but there was no way the mob could be allowed to breach that window.  The article is here and is worth reading.  Update to post:  WAPO has done an article about Bellingcat.

The are discrepancies in the stories of why the security breach happened in the first place. From WAPO we have this account from Larry Hogan, governor of Maryland.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) offered new details Thursday about the delayed response to assist law enforcement at the Capitol, saying the Maryland National Guard was ready to help but was “repeatedly” told they did not have the authorization needed to join the effort. Hogan received a panicked call from House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md)., who pleaded with him to send in troops from Maryland, the governor said. Hoyer told him that he was calling from a secure location with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).

“I was actually on the phone with Leader Hoyer who was pleading with us to send the guard,” Hogan said. “He was yelling across the room to Schumer and they were back and forth saying we do have the authorization and I’m saying, ‘I’m telling you we do not have the authorization.' ”

Hogan said Maj. Gen. Timothy Gowen, the adjutant general of the Maryland National Guard, was repeatedly rebuffed by the head of the National Guard at the federal level.

Gowen “kept running it up the flagpole, and we don’t have authorization,” Hogan said. “We don’t have authorization.”

Ninety minutes later, Hogan said, he received a call “out of the blue, not from the secretary of defense, not through what would be normal channels,” but from Ryan McCarthy, the secretary of the Army. McCarthy asked if the Maryland guardsmen could “come as soon as possible,” Hogan recounted.

“It was like, yeah, we’re waiting, we’re ready,” Hogan said.

We've also been told that Capitol police turned down offers of backup, three days before the riots. Apparently they believed it would be a peaceful first amendment covered protest, despite the fact that on Parler, chat rooms and Facebook the planning had been going on for months.  AP has a particularly scathing article about the lack of readiness, which you can find here.  This is a complete and total failure on the part of the national security infrastructure.  This was knowable, and they either chose to be idiots or to be complicit.  The Pentagon has countered with they don't do domestic surveillance, so how were they to know?

In news of the very good, twitter has permanently suspended the orange ectoplasm's account.  It's about time.  You can read their reasoning here.  The most chilling words are:

• Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021. 

As such, our determination is that the two Tweets above are likely to inspire others to replicate the violent acts that took place on January 6, 2021, and that there are multiple indicators that they are being received and understood as encouragement to do so.

I think Fiona Hill has made one of the most cogent statements about the whole shameful episode.

 Meanwhile, Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has said she's not sure she can remain a member of the Republican party if the orange ectoplasm does not resign.  This was placed on Twitter in response to her statement.

 

So, that was today.  All we have to do is get through to the inauguration and hopefully they don't hurt the president and vice-president.  I wish they would do the swearing in inside.

Finally!  This day is over.