Madison Square Garden

Did you watch the klan (also Nazi) meeting held in Madison Square Garden?  I don't think the orange guy helped himself much.  This video of Tony Hinchcliffe particularly seems damaging.  GO HERE, play the video clip.  If you can't play it, this is what he said.

“There’s a lot going on. I don’t know if you know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico”

Tony Hinchcliffe may have just scuttled the orange intestine's campaign. The clip is everywhere, it's on Facebook, Instagram, twitter, everywhere.  Meanwhile, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known as Bad Bunny, shared to his 45.6 million Instagram followers a video from Harris’s official account in which the vice president outlines her vision for Puerto Rico. A source close to Bad Bunny confirmed the post was the artist announcing his support for Harris.  I've never heard of Bad Bunny before, apparently he is a much beloved rapper from Puerto Rico.  You can read more here.

Then there was this.

 

Soon, this will be over.

Project 2025

Project 2025, the plan put forth by the Heritage Foundation, an unelected group of religious lunatics, is 900 and some odd pages.  It's their plan for the US post election, should that man win.  We know it's bad, but really, who has the time to read 900 pages.  Knowing this, a group of cartoonists converted it into a smaller size. Each tile expands to provide more detail if you click on it.  The health care section is particularly chilling.  Here is is:

Stop Project 2025 Comic

Angst and Hotels

Greetings Fellow Humans.  My existential angst knows no bounds.  If that man wins it will be the end of us.  The rat bastard owner of the WAPO, Jeff Bezos, has declined to endorse a candidate.  Apparently he is afraid his company, Blue Origin, will lose government contracts if the orange intestine wins the election.  Meanwhile, it has been revealed that Musk has been having frequent conversations with Putin.  Elon should lose his security clearance, all of his government contracts, and be de-naturalized and returned to South Africa. Rich people are the bane of our existence these days.

There have been many pharmacy closures as of late.  This is particularly true of independent pharmacies.  Here is part of the reason why.

 Pharmacies traditionally earn money in two ways. The first is the obvious one: filling prescriptions. But that model is increasingly under threat. A major culprit? Pharmacy benefit managers, also known as PBMs. These companies originally intended to save patients and insurers money by negotiating discounts from manufacturers on medications. But more recently, they have been snapped up by larger and larger conglomerates. As they consolidated — the three largest PBMs handled almost 80% of all prescriptions issued in the U.S. in 2023 — they steered business toward favored pharmacies (including ones they owned) and mail-order facilities.

Independents are suffering the most because they're being forced to sell drugs below the cost of what they paid for them.  It's not a sustainable business plan.  The head of the FTC is on the case, and is hoping to rein in this industry.  Article is here.

One of the ways Medicare Advantage adds to the cost of health care in this country by doing "home risk assessments" as well as "chart reviews."  They charge for these activities, and then don't follow up if they actually find anything.  Here is a link to the tweet which spells this all out.  In the tweet is a link to statnews which did an article on the subject.  Project 2025 details the pubtards' plan to force everyone to enroll in Medicare Advantage, that is if senior health care still exists, because the private companies who run these plans make millions. It's predatory, and one marvels at the goodness of the lobbyists that perpetuate this horn swoggling of the US public.

Speaking of Project 2025, one of their stated goals is this.

Deep within Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 925-page roadmap for the next Republican president, its authors say they want the service academies scrubbed of anything and anyone deemed insufficiently pure of thought — exactly what they did to Ben-Ghiat.

“Audit the course offerings at military academies to remove Marxist indoctrination,” they wrote in the section on the U.S. military, “eliminate tenure for academic professionals, and apply the same rules to instructors that are applied to other DOD contracting personnel.”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat had been invited by the history department at the Naval Academy to talk about how the military is affected by being part of an authoritarian government.  It was a discussion of things that happened in the past.  The Heritage Foundation got wind of it and got her dis-invited from speaking. Since when does the Heritage Foundation have any say over what is taught at a tax payer supported institution?  This is not getting much attention, the article is here.  Interestingly enough, Elon suspended the Naval Academy twitter account immediately after this became known.

The Fascism is creeping in already, some might say it's already here.

I've been gathering up stuff that needs to go south for the winter.  If I don't go and get it as soon as I think about it, I forget.  So, it's piling up in the room we don't use.  Tomorrow we're making hotel reservations, one of my most hated activities.  I would really like it if we could get one route down there, with hotels we don't hate, and then one route back and just repeat the process instead of having to re-invent the wheel each time.  We had planned to go through Butte this time until we checked the weather and say the predicted lows were in the teens.  Too cold!  We've got the two long days in the middle, so day one and day four are shorted driving days.

Other than my angst, I have not too much to say about things other than I want this to be over.

A Walk by the Lake

I think yesterday was the last decent day.  Today has been rainy, chilly, windy, partly sunny, and now it's dark and gloomy again.  So, yesterday we went for a walk next to the lake.  It was pleasant to be down by the water

Parts of the trail are studded with rocks.  Those parts are unpleasant.

I have zippity doo dah all to post about.  Life, at the moment, appears to be in wait state.  Later, gater.

Rabbits, the Orange Menace and Some Bad Stuff

Ho hum.  I have not much to say.  I can not tell you how happy I will be when this steeenking election is over.  There was an article about how he could conceivably get the results into the courts if it's close and he loses.  We need a landslide something fierce.

Here are some terrible photos.  It's been cloudy and overcast, things look dismal.

Rabbits out grazing.

I think this is a crab apple tree across the street.

These pictures were taken eight years apart.  The first was during or around the inauguration of the orange menace.

This was last night at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner last night.  It looks like some things never change.

DonOLD has not had a good week.  Judge Chutkan ruled that part of Jack Smith's filing about January 6 can be made public.  Oddly enough, NONE of it has appeared on twitter.  Hopefully someone will do an article and tell us what it says.  I hate reading legal stuff.  He continues on the glide slope to full blown dementia.  This was one of his more random statements recently.  It's worth watching.

Now, from the department of bad news you can't do anything about, we have this.  The short version is that the carbon sinks that have been working forever, have stopped taking up carbon.  This makes predictions of the coming climate disaster worse and sooner.  Natural sinks of forests and peat were key to Finland’s ambitious target to be carbon neutral by 2035. But now, the land has started emitting more greenhouse gases than it stores.  This is a Guardian article.  It's not paywalled, but they do ask for money, click the X and move on to the article. 

A  NOAA article has noted that the oceans are also not functioning as carbon sinks as well as they previously did.  This is also bad.  You can read about it here.

It would appear that yearly dental x-rays are not necessary.  There is no data to show they're required, there's no data about much of anything in dentistry.  We quit a dental practice north of here because the dentist was making head CT scans a condition of seeing him.  They were every three years, but they were also $300 a pop and that's a lot of radiation.  So, I guess I'll have a chat with my current dentist and ask if they would like to quit irradiating me so often with X-rays.

Soon it will be time to start putting clothes into space saver bags.  The amount of stuff going south seems to have expanded exponentially.  Not sure how that happened.

WAPO vs. NYT

 This is the headline from WAPO regarding the town hall held last night in Oaks, PA.

If you can get past the paywall, here's the entire article from WAPO.

Meanwhile, back at the NYT, this is how they framed the event.

Since last night, his scheduled appearance on CNBC has been cancelled.  George Conway is encouraging people to sign up for the upcoming Klan Rally in Times Square and then not show, it would be like Tulsa, OK when all the Tiktok kids signed up and then didn't show.

So that's what's happening this morning.

 

More Fall and the Orange Guy

Today was a glorious fall day.  I think it may have been the last ride.  Tomorrow we have the guy out to drain the irrigation system, and the guy who maintanances the furnace, and then we visit the Medicare Plan D sales lady.  We need a different plan, and I want to have this done before we head south.  Then the rain comes and temperatures get out of my comfort zone for riding.

Here is the always lovely lake.  

This is fall across the street.  I like the bushes to turn red in autumn.

Who has been following the lunatics?  Armed people in North Carolina stalked FEMA workers.  They had to be pulled out of two counties due to fear for their safety.  FEMA!  They're stalking FEMA. 

The orange menace has just been off the rails as of late.  Last night he had a rally in Coachella, CA.  For some reason, people had to be bussed in 4 or 6 miles to the venue from where they parked.  After it was over, no busses came to take them back to their cars.  They were out in the middle of nowhere, it was pitch dark.  Apparently the campaign did not pay the bus company, so they didn't return.  I have not heard if they walked the distance back or how they got home.  Many of those people were old, that's a hike for an old, out of shape person.  He can't organize a rally, but he wants to run the country.

Then there was the town hall meeting in Oaks, PA.  This is a thread done by Aaron Rupar, he chronicles much of what the orange guy says.  There's a lot, but you can get the gist of it, just reading what Aaron wrote about the video clips.  Or you can suffer and listen to the orange guy speak, which is fairly concerning.  Apparently he spent 20 minutes on stage swaying to different music clips.  Pretty weird.  The thread opens in the middle, scroll up and start at the top.  I don't know why it does that.  Here is a short clip of him swaying to Sinead O'Conner.

He's back on the Nazi speak, talking about the "enemy within."  If he wins again, it's going to be so bad.  I firmly believe that he'll be removed from office and JD Vance will be installed.  It's going to be a war on contraception, IVF, abortion, freedom of movement over state lines for women and etc.  Yes, I know, I sound like a conspiracy nut, but given his rate of decline, they'll have to get him off the stage.

So, that's my fear and dread for today.

Fall and a PSA

Greetings on this beautiful autumn day, most of which was spent sitting in front of laptops until it was time to leave to get flu shots.  Why, you wonder.  I will address this later on the page.  But first, some fall foliage.

I've posted this picture many times this summer, notice that the familiar yellow streak across this middle of the lake is gone.  The milfoil has quit blooming and is once again sinking to the bottom of the lake.

The lake is really low.  Flow from the Spokane River is down, and not the banks are visible.

Yellow trees on the way home.

This yard gets many leaves.

So, back to the laptops.  Medicare open enrollment starts October 15.  If you are on heritage Medicare, ie not Medicare Advantage, or Medicare C as it's also called, this is the year to pay attention to your plans.  Our monthly premium for Plan D went from $3.37 per month, to $38 per month.  The deductible doubled.  Our Medigap policy premium is going up 15.8%.  Plan D is up due to the cap on insulin prices, the $2,000 limit on drug costs for seniors, and general greed and malfeasance.  So, we will be building a spreadsheet to see who is paying how much for what, and adding in the monthly premium to get the most bang for the buck.  I, personally, am considering a zero monthly premium plan because my two generic drugs are cheap on Cost Plus Drugs.  Jim's generics are not, so that will require some thought.  We went to sleep on it last year, and it was OK, this year is different.

Carry on and keep calm.

Yard Work and a Walk in a Park

Hola!  We've been doing fall stuff.  Saturday was the annual wrapping of the arborvitae in deer netting.  It's a terrible job, the mesh is the perfect size to catch the buttons on the shirt sleeves and it's just a pain.  As much as I hate the arborvitae, I don't want them maimed by the deer this winter.  So they're done now.  You can see the light glinting off the mesh.

Yesterday was the pruning of the hydrangeas.  It's not difficult, but it's pretty boring.  They had a good year this past summer, and were up against the house and surrounding trees.  So, bye bye pretty blossoms.

Then it was on to trimming the boxwood hedge.  I didn't take much off, but there were some wingers that needed to be dealt with.  Over the three years we've been here, we have not been sufficiently brutal with the hedge trimmer.  It's taller than it was when we got here, and it's closer to the walk way.  I'm not sure if it would be a good idea to cut it back a lot.  I guess if we don't let it get any bigger, things will be fine.

Today was chilly, we were just not in the mood to put on all the layers to ride, so we went to Manito Park. It's a delightful park.  It's surrounded by older homes which are well kept and I would imagine updated more than once in their history.  We also saw some new construction done in the style of the neighborhood.  It would be a cool place to live.  I have photos!

The Mirror Pond.  It used to be a natural seasonal lake, but there was a desire for it to always have water, so they paved it.  There are tiny fish and ducks living there.

After wandering for a bit, we found a map next to the Cafe (which was closed) and discovered the location of the conservatory.  They have a lot of foliage plants as well as cactus and succulents.

There is a Japanese garden.  The water features are lovely.  The orange blog is a big koi.

It was fun.  It's kind of a hike for us, but for the people who live near the park, it's a treasure.

Sunset the other night.

That's it, that's all I've got until Milton hits Tampa Bay.  Currently it's a Cat 5 hurricane, so not good.

Human Nature

Greetings Humans.  Today we have had human nature on display.  The dock workers are threatening to strike.  Actually, I think they did go out.  Their union president is a fan of the 45th president.  He was heard to say that he would cripple the economy prior to the election.  The union guys were offered a 50% raise, nope!  They want 61%.  For that, they'll strike while there's  hurricane disaster relief going on, with another storm waiting in the gulf.  Anyway, they've decided to hold off on the strike until January.  This is where the union boss lives.  Pretty nice, eh?

Anyway, back to human nature.  The materiel on the ships that would have been impacted by a strike is stuff from China.  Toilet paper is made in the US.  However, the hoarding has begun.  Today we were at Costco (for toilet paper, just in case) and every single package of TP and paper towels was gone.  They employee we spoke to said there would be more tomorrow, but we'd need to get there right when the doors open. 

We stopped at Target on the way home (and bought toilet paper), they had plenty.  I'm beginning to wonder if mass hoarding is a characteristic of the Costco demographic.  Target was not busy at all.  Costco was packed, and people were panic shopping.  Many people had the big flat trolleys just loaded up with everything.  So, it's good that the dock workers are holding off a few months, it will give toilet paper manufacturers time to increase production.

I saw this in the neighborhood down the street.  This is funny.  The people who live here have a cat that roams at night, and brings them presents.  So, they've put them out in hopes that the owners of the presents will see them and take them home.

Costco has nice plantings.  They've spent some money on landscaping.  This is the view through the wind shield.

In terrible news you can't do anything about, there is this.  Rwanda has had a Marburg outbreak.  It has made its way to Germany.  Marburg is known as the "bleeding from the eyes" virus.  Until this chart, I did not know just how bad it is.  I also did not realize how bad bird flu is.

This was on twitter yesterday.  It, too, is funny.

Other than observing my fellow humans, I have not too much to say.

Hurricane Helene and the Usual

Well, Hurricane Helene was terrible.  The devastation is beyond belief.  How does recovery even start?  Roads are out, power is out, transformers are in short supply to fix the power grid.  In the Asheville, NC area the roads and bridges are wiped out, there's one way in that is long and circuitous.  One of the worst things to have happened is water treatment plants have been submerged in water, debris and mud.  Augusta, GA will not have water for weeks.  Greenville, TN will not have water for awhile, their plant is also underwater due to the Nolichucky River.  There is a global impact, 70 to 90% of the pure grade quartz used in the manufacture of chips is in Spruce Pine, NC which has pretty much been wiped out.  There is no word yet on the state of the mine or the processing facility.  NPR has an article here.  However, none of these things out weigh the loss of life.  

Valdosta, GA took it in the head from Helene.  The orange ectoplasm was there today for a campaign event.  His podium was built from bricks salvaged from a collapsed building behind where he stood.  Since there is no power, there was no microphone available.  He read from a prepared statement about how President Biden had refused to take GA Governor Kemp's phone calls.  This is just an out and out lie. President Biden called and spoke with Governor Kemp  twice in the days after Helene hit Georgia and prior to Trump's photo op in Georgia today. Biden has declared states of emergency for all of the affected states.  

This event makes anything I have to say seem frivolous.  I first wrote that in March, 2022 when Russia was invading Ukraine.  That event, like the hurricane, seemed to over shadow every part of my unexceptional life.  

There has been riding to the lake.  We're going later in the day because it's colder at night.

This photo was supposed to show the amazing amount of pine needles that were down from the wind storm we had.  However, my phone camera does not do well with shadows and bright light, so it's tough to see.  There were many needles everywhere.

This is the local turkey family.  Mom and Dad turkey have been busy.

Other than this, I truly have nothing to report.

The Weather and the Park Model

The forecast was for blowing dust and high winds.  We didn't believe it, but they were right.  About 4:45 big gusts of wind came through, followed by lightning and thunder and a down pour.  And then it was gone.

This is from the Spokesman Review.  That's dust out in the distance.

In personal news, we appear to have sold the park model.  Happy we are about that.  Ground rent was due October 1 for the next year, and now we don't have to pay.   We've chalked that up as a failed experiment.

Apropos of nothing, exactly how many guns are required to order fast food?

That's it, that's all I've got.

Turkeys and Covid Vaccine

Last year we hardly had any turkeys.  We would hear them, but not see them.  This year they've been all over the neighborhood.  There have been many baby turkeys.  Here they are in the side yard.  The pink flags in the background outline yet another unsuccessful attempt to grow grass in that area, so the guys that mow the yard don't cut there.

Today I had to freeze my credit with the three reporting agencies because I was part of the Change Healthcare data breach.  I think this was the breach that made it so that doctors could not get paid, and crippled much of healthcare in the US.  I hate these people.  Anyway, I'm frozen now so even if they get my information off the dark web, they can't open new accounts in my name.

I have also noticed that even though I cancelled the New York Times digital subscription, and lost access to their website, they are still billing me.  So tomorrow that will be another 30 minutes or so of my life that I will never get back.

The main purpose of this post is to document our latest booster for Covid.  This time we got Novovax.  It's not a m-RNA vaccine, it's protein based..  There have been journal articles indicating it covers the variants better and reduces viral loads more than the m-RNA.  Costco finally got it in, we got it this afternoon.  We both have headaches.  My arm does not hurt at all.  So, we'll see.  Since they did away with vaccine cards I have to write it down here.  My vaccine history is an open book.

That's it!

Autumn and Blue Zones

Greetings and Salutations.  How are we all doing in this time of discord?  It's Fall east of the mountains.  The sun is noticeably lower when we're riding through the trees.  It's also chillier, no need to get up early and run out the door.

The laptop situation may be resolved.  We had it at Friendly Computers for two five day stretches.  During this time we were told that he could not replicate the dropping of the internet, the freezing of the cursor, and the over heating.  The second five day stint, allegedly he upgraded the firmware and refreshed the thermal paste.  When we got it home the second time, it died within five minutes.  So, we looked at Yelp and found Pruitt PC.   After we described the problem, his first words were "sounds like the network card is bad."  Yep, it was.  He also upgraded all of the firmware (suggesting it was not done by Friendly), and checked the event recorder which showed there had been issues with the touch pad.  Did you know your laptop has an event recorder?  I did not.  So, we will see if it stays fixed and on the internet.  Now we have a spare HP for the next laptop badness.  Jim is very happy to have his backlit key board back.

We've been doing not much of anything.  The Liverwort continues on its path to world domination.  I love this stuff.

There was a sunset behind a cloud.

Pumpkins up the street.

See the furry thing living on the rock?  There's an arrow pointing at it.  Who knows what this is?  Google Lens has no idea.  Observe the lushness of the moss on the ground.  This area gets a lot of sun, so the moss surprises me.

There are three personal watercraft in this photo.  The one on the right you just sit on, no problem.  The other two drag you through the water until you're able to boost yourself up to stand on the back.  Guy in the middle was good at it, got right up.  Guy on the left had trouble doing it, not helped by the fact that his buddy kept roaring up to him and swamping him.  Eventually they were all able to leave and make noise elsewhere.

The lake, the millfoil is starting to lose its bright yellow color.  It was a truly gorgeous day.

Who is aware of the Blue Zones where people live a long time?  There has been a fair amount written about these special people who live a long time.  The underlying theme behind the reporting is basically why don't all people follow their diets.  It turns out that the Blue Zones are bad record keeping and pension fraud.  There is an article on the recent Ig Nobel (pun on ignoble) award in which Dr. Saul Newman debunks the Blue Zones.  Article is here, and there is no paywall.  Here is an excerpt below.  It's a short read and is entertaining.

Dr Newman received the award for research that revealed fundamental flaws in extreme old-age demographic research, by demonstrating that data patterns are likely to be dominated by errors and finding that supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud (paper pre-print, not yet peer-reviewed).

For example, despite vegetables and sweet potatoes being promoted as key components of the Okinawan ‘Blue Zone’ diets, according to the Japanese government, Okinawans eat the least vegetables and sweet potatoes in Japan and have the highest body mass index.

Other than this, I have nothing much to say.  I was going to discuss the Evangelical Minister and Lt. Gov of North Carolina's sex scandal, but it's just too disgusting to discuss.  It's getting limited reporting because it's too disgusting to put in print.  I will say that he reported in detail his threesomes with his sister-in-law and one of her friends on a porn site.  Can you imagine how his wife must feel?  That poor woman can never go to the grocery store again.  That's it!  That's all I have to say about that.