Current Events

I just put stuff in my "things to blog about" file, and noticed that it's quite large.  This may be a very long post.  If you don't make it through all of it, I will certainly understand.

Here is a cactus in the parking lot of our Primary Physician, aka Family Practitioner, aka General Practice.  She is an excellent doctor.  I'm hoping we die before she retires. There are more arms on the other side of him.  He's been busy.

Other than that, it's bike, hike, row, lift weights.  That's pretty much it.  Also, going to the grocery store too often.

So, we all know that the women's and men's hockey teams took gold at the Winter Olympics, by beating Canada.  I was really disappointed in that outcome, I wanted Canada to win.  Kash Patel, director of the FBI, was with the men players in their locker room.  He was drinking.  So if he was drinking, he wasn't working.  Agents can not drink on the job.  However, he took an official FBI plane to Italy.  It's a conundrum.  Then they got the president of the US on the phone who invited them to the White House.  In the process he made a joke about he would have to invite the women or face impeachment.  Everybody laughed.  

From twitter:
So let me get this straight, 8 of the 12 US’s gold medals were won by women. The US women’s hockey teams score across the games was 31 goals made and only 2 made on them While the men’s team scored 24 goals across the games and let in 8… And now a room full of those hockey men are on the phone with a pedophile, laughing at the idea of including their female peers who out performed them in every aspect of the game in the celebration? Remind me again, how these people care about protecting women’s sports and women?
Aria Frey   

The men’s hockey team will be forever remembered for aligning with Kash Patel, while laughing at the demeaning remarks Trump made about the women’s team.  Karma stepped in, however.  Here is the men's team having a delicious dinner of McDonald's burgers and fries at the White House.  On the right we have the women's team having a gourmet lunch in Italy with Stanley Tucci.  Score one for the women.  After their dinner, the men than had to sit for close to three hours listening to 47 bloviate through the State of the Union address.

The men's team is being dragged on social media for being dicks.  The women are on their way to Las Vegas, hosted by Flavor Fave for shows, dining and spa treatments.  

A submariner on the SS Delaware, a Virginia class attack boat, had some sort of dire medical emergency at sea.  They took the sub into Greenland's territorial waters, with permission, and a Danish helicopter picked him up and took him to hospital.  When told of this, 47 confabulated this into Greenland needs our help immediately, we'll send a hospital ship.  Hah!!!  Hah Hah Hah.   

We have two hospital ships, Mercy and Comfort.  They're 50 years old, and are repurposed oil tankers.  They are interesting boats, because they used to haul oil, they now have to have huge amounts of ballast to stay at the proper height in the water.  They're soft sided single hulled boats, and can not be taken into ice, which sort of rules out Greenland.  Mercy just finished up time in dry dock in the Alabama Shipyard, and is now on the way to Portland, OR to the Vigor yard for a midlife maintenance. She is currently southeast of Cuba headed for the Panama Canal. There is a contract that stipulates that she arrive by March 20, other wise there will be significant fines.  So, no, Mercy will not go to Greenland.  Comfort just currently moored in Alabama prior to entering dry dock for extensive maintenance.  So, Comfort is not going to Greenland, either.  Someone needs to put a muzzle on 47, and not let him post stuff that's completely wrong.

Anthropic is a leading developer of an AI, named Claude.  Claude was used in the planning for the kidnapping of President of Venezuela.  It's a good LLM.  

This is receiving virtually no coverage in main stream media.  It should be.  The thought of an uncontrolled AIs killing people should chill your soul.  Palantir, a Thiel company, pretty much has data on all US citizens, combined with facial recognition, the future looks a lot like a gulag in all of those repurposed warehouses.  This is bad.

47 has sent two carrier groups to Iran.  Originally he said help was on the way for the thousands of protesters killed by the Iranian regime.  Now, this has morphed into a demand that Iran give its enriched uranium stockpiles to the US.  The Iranians are saying no.  Iran is being threatened with the mighty US Navy.  There's a hitch in the plan, however.  Senior officials have reportedly warned that current US weapon stockpiles could only sustain strikes for 7 to 10 days before running dry, the consequence of years of supplying both Ukraine and Israel.  Think about it, this information is out there.  Everybody on the planet with an interest in attacking the US knows that our cupboard is bare.  Now would be a great time for China to invade Taiwan.  The US can't do a thing about it.  However, our stalwart negotiating team of Kushner and Witkoff are on it, and I'm certain all will be well.  They've done such a great job of negotiating peace between Ukraine and Russia. 

A draft executive order which is said to be based on a conspiracy theory that China interfered with the 2020 election would allow Trump to unilaterally ban mail-in ballots and voting machines on the basis that they are susceptible to foreign interference. There is a good piece on the subject here.  States control elections, it's in the Constitution.

I don't like how much of my information is out there.  Today I ordered a pair of arm warmers from Primal, which is a stand alone company.  Somehow I was given over to an app called shop.  Shop had my shipping address, mailing address, and credit card number on file.  I do not recall ever using them, and I don't like the fact that they have my info like this.  I know I'm on the dark web from a credit reporting agency breach years ago.  All of this snooping is wearing on my last nerve.  A former health insurance company we were with had a breach, so now we have to go confirm our accounts are still frozen and sign up for more credit monitoring.   It's just one more thing.

If you made it this far, I commend your attention span.