New Food Item, the Lake, Fund Raising and PBMs

Hola!  How are things?  Things are still warm, but are way less hot than they were.  The air conditioning is not running today, which is good.  I can not wait to see the next electric bill, it should be stunning.

I have a new food item to share with you.  As I have previously mentioned, I'm not a great cook because it just does not interest me.  If I could buy a 50 pound bag of people chow, and just add water, I'd be all over it.  I've mentioned the Kevin line of dinners, and their visually unappealing sous vide chicken.  They're good, though.  They've started selling the sauce package separately.  Now we can use our own chicken.

It's Paleo, for those of you who partake.

Also, it's July 24 - why are they hauling out Pumpkin Spice and the Fall Blend.  Why is Lowes bringing out the Halloween stuff.  Could we just get through summer?

We rode today, it was good.  We did not have to get up so dang early.  There were a bunch of people from some sort of social services domain down by the lake.  I was eavesdropping on the conversations, there was a lot of institutional jargon being bandied about.  However, they were out there, unloading a ton of kayaks so they could take a bunch of kids out on the water.  Good on them, it's good to have people who will give the time.  They had a trailer that will hold 40 kayaks.

Congress and the FTC is looking in to the business practices of Pharmacy Benefit Managers and Group Purchasing Operations.  Fundamentally, the GPOs operate as drug rebate aggregators.  Rebates are sent to the GPOs, they then send the money to the PBMs, and the PBMs keep it.  PBMs are generating money for themselves.  Here is an article that explains it better than I can. The PBM business model is part of why we in the US pay more for drugs than anyone else. Updated:  From twitter a recap of testimony given in Congress is here.  Or go here and learn how CVS inflates prices for the consumer. Go here to hear James Comer (yes! Comer!) talk about the terrible effects of PBMs on prices.

VP Harris continues to raise money.  This came out today.  Unfortunately, this is not true.  Bummer.

I am hopeful that this will bring out the young people to vote for VP Harris. 

VP Harris - Day One of the Campaign

Well, I am less depressed than I was.  I'm still bristling at the way the big money people treated President Biden, but that's done now.  Perhaps he's feeling some relief, there are six months to go in his term and the Supreme Court has given him immunity for any official acts he commits.  Perhaps he should test out how much can be done via Executive Orders.  

So this happened today.

That's impressive.  Hopefully the enthusiasm will not wane, people will keep donating money, and knocking on doors.  It's still unfortunate the the big newspapers will not cover what's in Project 2025.

And so, we will stand by to be amazed at the crap that the republicans will start slinging at her.

Chick in the Well, Biden Stepped Down

This is a quail chick in the window well.  It's amazing how fast those little guys can run and how much noise they can make.  I was downstairs and could hear him hollering for help.  The parents were in the area, making anxious noises.  Unmute, if it's muted.  He'll be running right to left, you may have to play it a couple of times to pick up the movement.

As you all know by now, Biden stepped down from the presidential race.  The rat bastard billionaire donors forced him out by withholding money.  Mike Johnson, the evangelical taliban Speaker of the House, is on record as saying they're not going to allow ballot changes, and thus the orange menace will run unopposed.  So, young women, I say to you, stock up on Plan B today.

I am so depressed I can't see straight.

The Day of the Big Outage and Project 2025

Apparently, Crowd Strike, some sort of computing security entity, pushed an update all over the world, to Windows servers and laptops/desktops.  This has resulted in the dreaded BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH.  Airlines have had to institute ground stops, 22,000 flights are cancelled world wide, hospitals are affected, point of sale terminals are not working, people are having to revert to cash.  South West Airlines is still operating because they're slow to update their systems.  As you no doubt recall, in December 2022, South West had a huge work stoppage due to antiquated systems that could not locate pilots and get them where they were needed.  They took a huge amount of criticism for being behind on technology.  Who is laughing now?  

I just read this on twitter: Apparently all the republicans are stuck in Milwaukee and can't get home due to all the cancelled flights due to the CloudStrike issues.  Ha, ha, double hah!

This is from twitter, its satire, but it's funny.

This is why it's so terrible.  The fix is to reboot to safe mode, find one particular file somewhere, and delete it.  Most people at work are not allowed to do this, and don't know how to do it, anyway.

And then there is this.

Apparently the acceptance speech of the orange menace did not go so well.  The first twenty minutes were ok, he stayed on the topic of unity.  Then he went off piste and launched into attacks on Nancy Pelosi, building the wall, he can end wars with a phone call, he defeated ISIS and etc. etc.  Still no information has been made on the shooter, extent of the injuries, nothing; it's like it never happened to him.

Task and Purpose, a military oriented website has done an excellent piece on what the far right wants to do to the military.  They want the Navy to grow from 292 to 355 ships.  They want more F35s. 60 to 80 more per month, actually. One does have to wonder where all the money for this is going to come from given the tax cuts they are pushing. They're going down to the level of Marine infantry squads and specifying who should lead them.  All transgendered people are out day one.  There will be no more paid travel for women to get reproductive health care of any kind. It's an amazing document, ginned up by a bunch of pointy heads in a think tank somewhere.  You can read the article here.

We did ride yesterday.  We were on the bikes at 8:40 am.  Not bad for us.  There is a drive to the trail head to that takes time.  The mill foil is in bloom.  There is a sign up saying they're going to poison the lake, I guess to try to kill it. 

When we got back from the optometrist yesterday, we saw this deer and two babies.  The babies ran off, but she looked at us for a while.  The babies are past the white spot stage.

Other than whining about the heat, I have not too much to say about things.

Hot, Sick Trees and The Ear

Greetings Earthlings!  How are things in your neck of the woods.  They're hot in our neck.  This is what Weather Underground is showing in their forecast.  Our red maple is dropping leaves.  It is not happy with these temperatures.  I can't believe it's going to hit 108F (42.2C) on Sunday.  There will be no riding for us.

We did ride Monday.  It was warm, but not brutal.  First time in almost a month, and we could tell we had been off the bikes for awhile.  It was pleasant by the lake.  There is a new camp host with a large US flag, with its own solar light so he can leave it out at night.  I don't get why people feel compelled to show the flag all the time, especially the guys in the pick up trucks with the flag poles stuck in the stake pockets. 

This guy was heading out to fish.  He had a gallon of water for him, a bucket of water for the fish, fishing gear and a chair.  That's a person powered vehicle.

Winter of 2022-2023 there was a cold snap of epic proportions.  It was zero or less for about a week.  Several of the neighbors lost mature bushes.  Our neighbor the arborist suspects that the Rose of Sharon plants were damaged in that cold period.  They are only marginally hardy in this climate, so it's not surprising.  These are terrible pictures, but if you look closely, you can see some leaves, and then other branches with no leaves.

This is the other one.  It's looking very sad.

There is new growth at the bottom of the plant.  Maybe there is hope for these things.  I'm not going to dig them up just yet.

I've been running a slow hose on them for an hour every day, trying to breathe some life into them.  This is another plant I don't understand why people plant them here.

We had the yearly home owners' meeting recently.  The Firewise guy came to talk about urban fire danger.  One of the things they're stressing is think about what you choose to plant near your house; things like arborvitae, junipers and firs are a bad idea.  They go up like torches.  We put a juniper in the front yard in 2022, never occurred to me that it was a bad idea.  It has since grown like a weed.  We're on the fence about taking it out.  The surviving arborvitae in the back yard would have to be dug up by people we pay, they're old, have giant root balls, and they're too big for the elderly to remove.  It's always something.

The hydrangeas are a bright spot in the yard.

Here is the republican candidate yesterday at the RNC convention.  What do you notice?

Later he came out with a bandage on his boo-boo.  Today Eric Trump said that his father required no stitches what so ever.  Grazed by a bullet my dying ass.  Local police have said that all bullets have been recovered, and that the orange menace was hit by flying glass. 

Apparently the MAGA people have discovered that JD Vance is married to an immigrant from India, and they're fairly shocked and dismayed.  Nick Fuentes is quite upset about this, he feels that white people are currently under attack, and mixed marriages are one of the ways white people are being replaced.  Such lovely people.  Video is here if you want to watch him discuss this.

On the medical front, here is an amazing article.  I did not know this, leukemia can now be treated with immunotherapy.  Glioblastoma, a hard tumor that is invariably fatal, has been treated in three people in a new study.  Basically they remove T cells from your blood, gene edit them to go kill the tumor and inject them into your head.  It's not ready for prime time, and won't be for some time, but it's a technical miracle that any progress has been made on this front.  It's a long read, but it's written in regular English and is very interesting.

That's it, that's all I have to say.

July 13, 2024 Shooting

Well, the print press, TV media and twitter are all going crazy about the attempt on the life of the orange menace.  Current consensus seems to be that his ear was not hit by a bullet, but rather by glass from the teleprompter being shattered.  I have no facts or data, but that makes sense to me.  Seems like a bullet fired from an AR15 would have done more damage.  But what do I know.  Sadly, there was a death by gun fire in the audience.

What is interesting is the response of the secret service.  Since I can't figure out how to imbed video from twitter, you'll have to CLICK THIS LINK to watch the footage of how Secret Service acted after the shooting of Ronald Reagan.  He later said that he thought SS had broken his ribs after they pushed him to the ground.

Compare and contrast that response to this, CLICK THIS LINK to play what happened yesterday.  You can hear him saying "wait wait" so he can position himself with the fist bump, followed by a straight arm salute.  Oddly enough, his shoes were left on the stage.  

From twitter we see the following.

Also weird is that roof tops with a clear line of sight to the stage were uncontrolled.  People in the audience saw the shooter, and told the police and Secret Service that there was a guy on the roof with a gun.  There was no response to that.

Here is the damaged ear in question. 

Predictably, the media puts its own weird spin on the event.

This did not need to be said, especially by a DEI expert.  Really people.

Finally, the New York Times did something right.

Republicans are calling for the prosecution of President Biden for "causing" the shooter to act, others are actually saying Biden ordered the hit.  They never miss an opportunity to be stupid and wrong.