Perfidy and Malfeasance

In news of the personal, our very expensive Medicare supplement which encompassed Plan F and Plan D with no donut hole has been switched by our former employer to a new plan.  Now we go in the donut hole after total dollars expended by the plan and us exceed $4200-ish dollars.  Do you think they said a word about knowing how much the plan pays for anything?  Do you think they could even get new prescription cards in the mail to arrive on or before January 1 when said plan changes take effect?  Why no.  This has been chewing on me for several days.  Of course they made the changes after open enrollment closed, so we're stuck with them for at least a year with no idea of how bad this will be on the old wallet.

Aaaaaaaaaand, my printer died.  I hate buying stuff like printers or laptops if I can't touch them and see them in person.  We've about decided to buy a new HP since the last one did yeoman service for about 10 years.  Many of the reviews for Canon's say the set up process is beyond difficult.

At this point in the day, there probably isn't a person in the US who doesn't know that the orange ectoplasm called Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger and threatened him if he did not find enough votes to swing the election to the ectoplasm.  The call was made yesterday and lasted about an hour.  This morning the Washington Post had a partial recording up, and now they have the full recording available.  Ectoplasm can be heard whining and pleading and threatening to have his way.  Mark Meadows can be heard asking for some path forward for the administration to get their way without involving the courts.  The degree of perfidy and malfeasance is just astonishing.  At present, I don't think it's known how the recording came to exist.  Both D.C. and Georgia have single consent recording laws, so it's legal to record people and not tell them you're doing it.

The full recording and transcript is on WAPO and can be found here.  Unfortunately, they are keeping it behind the paywall.  I think they should make it free, people need to know.  Mother Jones put up a shorter version of the transcript, and it's not behind a paywall, which you can find here.

As bad as this is, there is worse on the horizon - Josh Hawley.  This man is scary.  He's as crazy as the ectoplasm, but he's smarter.  There is a significant twitter thread on the subject which you can find here.  Click on it, I think it will open even if you are not on twitter.  It's a look at Hawley and how he got to where he is.  He's always been autocratic.  He also wants to bring the Kingdom of Heaven into US politics.  He has no compunction about saying it.  In the thread there is a cut and paste of part of an article he wrote for Patheos, which is an online philosophy journal.  That article is found here.  I screen scraped an excerpt from Patheos

Immanentize:  To make (something which is transcendent) immanent; to render (something abstract) real, actual, or capable of being experienced.

Eschaton:  The final event in the divine plan; the end of the world.

Does this sound like end of days thinking to you? 

Our current government is truly going off the rails.  January 6 should be interesting, with 140 Republican Congress people and 12 or so Senators challenging the election results in the swing states.  I think the Republicans who were elected out of those states should not be seated, since clearly their ballots were fraudulent as well.  Remember when the Republicans were the party of law and order?  Louis Gohmert, the dumbest guy in the House, is calling for armed insurrection in the streets if Congress does not over turn the election. 

But here!  There are pretty pictures of the sun going down.

I really thought I could make it to inauguration day without talking about the orange ectoplasm and his buds, but today just ripped it for me and this is something we should all remember the next time people talk about electing "successful" businessmen to the presidency.

December 27

Greetings Earthlings!  How are things in the waning days of the disastrous year that was 2020?  We wonder how much more damage the orange ectoplasm can do with his 25 or so remaining days.  I guess the government shuts down tomorrow at midnight if he doesn't sign the bill, so there is that.  And there are all of those people losing unemployment benefits, protection from eviction, and food support.  The ectoplasm is doing a pretty good job of ruination.  That appears to be his core competency.

The day of Christmas Eve was cold, and windy.  We went for a cold walk in the afternoon.  I should have worn a scarf to keep the cold air from running down my neck.  We did have some good clouds.

The sun setting on Golden Gate was, golden!

Christmas Day began with clouds and gloom.  Then the clouds departed and it was a gorgeous day.  We got the bikes out to begin the war against excessive calories.  So far I think we're still losing.  What is it about stuffing that makes one eat too much of it?

The Verdin is on the feeder.  The male hummingbird is not happy about this.  Look at his little clenched feet.  As time passes they appear to be reaching detente.  The Verdin gets to eat on one feeder, and the hummer goes to the other feeder.  I don't like it when the Verdin sits on top of the feeder instead of the perch, because he poops on it.  That merits a sock thrown at the blinds to make him leave. 

We're getting a little stir crazy.  December 22 was the last day we went anywhere.  That was the final grocery shopping before Christmas.  Since then we have been in the house or on the bikes.  I am truly grateful for the fact that the weather has been mostly good.  That all comes to an end Tuesday, but really one should not complain.  On the covid map I saw this morning, Arizona is the same deep red as California - so it does give one pause about going anywhere.

In other news of the terrible, migrating birds are dropping out of the sky in droves.  They're starving to death.  They're so hungry that their bodies have cannibalized their flight muscles.  This is not good.  More can be read here.

We have seen a few birds locally.  What we're not seeing are bugs, so we wonder what they are eating.

That's it!  That's all I've got.

Christmas Day

 Merry Christmas!  

It's been an unforgettable year - here's hoping the next one will be better.

 

It's the Winter Solstice

Greetings on the shortest day of the year, which due to remarkably bad planning on our part 35 years ago is our anniversary.  Getting married was sort of an impulse decision, we'd already paid for a ski trip in Utah, so we decided to make that a honeymoon.  A judge friend of Jim's said the words and it was done.  It's too close to Christmas.  Back in the day when Christmas was a thing, we invariably forgot about the anniversary part.  

Who knows the name Katalin Kariko?  Like so many women who were critical to scientific achievements such as Rosalind Franklin (DNA crystallography), or Vera Rubin (discovered evidence of dark matter), or the ladies of Bletchley who broke the German codes, or the ladies who did the computations of orbital mechanics for personned space flight, I feel like Ms Kariko and her contributions to mRNA science are being overlooked.  She worked on it for decades.  Now she works at BioNTech and they do know what she did for the science.  I'd like to see more in the media than the husband and wife team who made the vaccine.  They stood on her shoulders.  You can read more here.

It was another good day, it hit the upper 70's.  While we were riding, it was windy, but as soon as we got home it stopped.  Funny how that works.  This is a cholla, he drops pups in the desert.  Some root and live, many don't and die.  This has been a tough year for the desert.  Monsoon was a bust, and in December we've had one day of rain.  December is generally wet.

Tucson is in a caldera.  Because of all the volcanoes that used to be active, we have a lot of different rock.  I need to hire a geology student to come out and explain what we're seeing.  There is a lot of rock like this that is easy to break.   You see it in ridges in the dirt. 

Here we see one of the ridges.

Bow hunting season for deer has started.  We're seeing hunters in Tucson Mountain Park with their bows.  It's still a mystery to me how they find a deer, sneak up on it, kill it, and then get it out of the park.  Deer are heavy.  We're wearing brightly colored jerseys on the bikes, so we don't look like prey.

The orange ectoplasm continues to insist he won by a landslide.  AG Barr has said no to seizing voting machines, appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the election fraud, and appointing a special prosecutor to torment Hunter Biden.  He's leaving in two days, it's easy to be brave.  The new budget has $2Billion for Space Force while children are going hungry.  There is something seriously wrong with Republicans' priorities.  This week VP Pence announced that members of Space Force would be known as Guardians, which immediately unleashed a torrent of Marvel memes on twitter.

That's it! That's all I've got.

The Pay Off

After enduring the hottest summer ever, we got the pay off today.  No wind, blue skies and 72 degrees.  It was just wonderful.  The summer was so terrible because monsoon failed.  All of the moisture from the gulf went east into New Mexico.  Without monsoon in July and August, to cool things off, it just kept getting hotter.  It was really hot.  Anyway, it was such a comfortable day for a bike ride, we just loved it.  This is from one of the dirt trails we ride.

More sky, gratuitous picture of a palm tree.

The front gate with a Christmas wreath.  It's labelled for indoor use only, so if rain is in the forecast, it has to come in.  I like it, it's shiny and cheerful.

This is the decorative item over the gate.  It mimics a church arch, there should be a bell in there.

Looking out to the west, sitting on the patio.  It was weird, right after I took this clouds rolled in and the temperature dropped.  Not complaining, not after what New York and the rest of the east are dealing with.

I swiped this from the internet.  You have to really want to eat out to do this. 

The orange ectoplasm lost two lawsuits in Georgia today - that was good.  There is some confusion over how many Pfizer doses have been shipped, whether or not there are hold backs, and where they're supposed to go.  I guess it was too much to ask for enough people in the administration to pay attention to vaccine shipments.  Moderna's vaccine was approved, so there will be more coming on line.

I read a lot of blogs, and I frequently read the comments left on said blogs.  I was astonished today to read three comments saying they won't take the vaccine; there's no point since masks will still be necessary, Biden will get the credit instead of the ectoplasm, the virus is a hoax and the vaccine won't prevent it, and etc., and etc.  This is very disheartening.

We're Coming to the End of Things

 It feels like maybe the election will be over soon.  The Electoral College voted, there were no faithless electors.  Today Mitch McConnell asked the Republicans to please not challenge the vote on January 6, because then they would have to vote to support the election of Joe Biden and it would cause them to appear "anti-Trump."  One does wonder how a former reality TV star holds this much sway over a political party.  They should be anti-Trump.

AG Bill Barr is out as of December 23.  He will not be missed.  The Supreme Court declined to hear a case from Indiana which sought to limit same sex marriage.  That was a surprise.  

Mayor Pete of South Bend, Indiana has been named by President-Elect Biden as Secretary of Transportation.  Yea to the Mayor!

We are still in Covid staying at home.  Our esteemed governor will not call for a lockdown, despite the public health officials saying that we are heading off a cliff again in terms of case numbers and staffed ICU bed availability.  We're learning to grocery shop really quickly.

I took this last Friday.  It was a pretty good sunset.

This is my neighbor's lemon tree.  It looks like it's going to be another good year for lemons.  They don't use them (!) so they're all for me.  I juiced and zested a ton of them at the end of March when they were ready to come off the tree.  The fruit cycle is a mystery to me, my tree is just about done producing lemons, and this tree will be ready in the spring.

My lemon tree does not look good.  I think the deer are chewing on it.  I hope it's deer and not illness.

NYT did an interesting article on how the mRNA vaccines work.   It's a lot of words, but it's a good explainer.  Or you could just read this tweet.

There is a hysterical video of the orange ectoplasm being removed from the White House circulating on twitter. You can view it here.  Update to post:  Unfortunately this video has been removed from twitter.  It showed two moving guys picking orange up in his chair and carting him out.

Other than this, I have zippity doo-dah all to report.