Author: ness23456

Things Hard To Understand

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A 90,000 square-foot ball room next to the White House? In these uncertain and unnerving times when the government might be closed and DOGE is slashing budgets? After already paving over the Rose Garden and turning it into a social club for rich people? A reckoning might be coming along the lines of the French Revolution or the Domus Aurea. Ask Ai. Ask about “decadence”, too, while you’re at it.

Income inequality. Period. Aren’t rich people smart enough to know there is only so much “poor” the rest of us can take?

People who don’t want government or taxes. Really, who needs roads, police departments, fire companies, sewer systems. Maybe we can get our cities and towns professional sports teams and stars to fund everything? An outfield “star” for the New York Mets makes more money per year than the entire budget for the upstate NY city I live in. The national “tax” that keeps the NFL and others paying millions to players for a game,…think about it yourself. Don’t make me say it.

Why aren’t firemen, teachers, police men, and even garbage men more respected than Aaron Judge? Or Juan Soto? Should public servants start their own trading cards? Allow betting on how soon a police department might catch a criminal? How much lead is in the water? Vegas will handicap anything, set odds, and offer SGPs galore. Googe it but ignore the first three examples.

Why people don’t know more about history. Because of a long-standing national cognitive crisis, we are doomed to taking one step forward in one generation and then falling two steps backward when the next generation has no idea what the preceding generation did. That is a generic statement that, however, holds true for almost all our current problems. This innate genetic and systemic fragmentation is why we still fight and argue over broken legal systems, immigration, elections, and health care systems, to name a few, after hundreds of years.

Why people don’t realize they are being manipulated? It’s time we all said this about ANY and ALL information suppliers: some of it’s true, some of it isn’t. Letters to the editors and online comments reveal most people think they have the only true source of facts and information, and everyone else is an idiot. This first appeared years ago with the new Fox viewers, but now every political ideology and fringe group has its own information supplier with its own baked-in bias. How long will it take the entire country to realize this and read each different bias and sort out the truth? Hm. That is impossible, so let’s at least admit our favorite sources of news might not be right all the time? And maybe then we can see the ones who purposely try to fool us and lead us by the nose.

The world is an interesting place if you look at it and see it. It’s human nature to let the grind of life wear us down and make us think bad thoughts but remember this is your only shot. Don’t blow it by burying your head in the sand. Look up, look out, and be aware. As the good Doctor Wright once said: “Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm,”

And for good measure: What did the grape say when the elephant sat on it? Nothing. It just let out a little whine. If you get the joke, you’ll be okay.

Things Seen and Heard By Older Eyes and Ears

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I heard—and saw in black and white–The Lone Ranger say this during an original Lone Ranger episode, recorded sometime between 1949 and 1957: “Any public official who abuses the public trust for personal gain is worse than any common criminal.” It was Saturday morning and I had tuned to my free over-the-air channels to get away from constant cable news about current public officials reaping Billions of dollars of benefits in the first 8 months of our new Administration. Ironically, it was the episode where The Lone Ranger and Tonto thwart a bank robbery, save the bank’s money, and return it.  Let’s make America great, again.

Interesting side bar: the Lone Ranger was filmed in color in the years 1956 and 1957 but had to be broadcast in black and white because…wait…very few viewers had a color television. The OG days?

All of the early western heroes had a “Moral Code”. Jim Hardy, the handsome, quick-drawing Wells Fargo Special Agent of “Tales of Wells Fargo” was constantly offered a split of the money he recovered from robbers. He never took a cent. He also had to investigate gun smuggling on the Texas-Mexican border. In 1897. Hope he is still getting royalties from his acting.

It’s becoming clear the differences in our modern political parties. You may not know it but Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. The Democratic Party at the time was split by pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions.

History needs more attention. Think no one trusts government, now? Look into the history of the 18th Amendment, the one banning sales of alcohol. No level of governmental trust could ever be lower than what happened after the 18th was passed. Nearly everyone looked for ways to obtain booze, usually by breaking the laws related to the Amendment. The subsequent years of illegal adventures are credited with elevating Organized Crime to new national and international pandemics. Payoffs, bribery, corruption…we really needed a DOGE back then.

Stop wasting valuable time on social wars, first amendment issues, and trying to debate each other, these days. We should be watching the billions of dollars(cryptos and greenbacks) of activity surrounding our new administration, his family, Tech CEOs, and wannabe richies. It’s become obvious our political system is now the Democrats, and the Richies. Current Republicans are not just okay with The Richies but want to be just like them. The Democrats might be envious, but they are the only hope for the moment, of stemming the high tide of money flowing to the top of our society, and world. Soon, laws, facts, elections none of them will matter. Just money.

In watching the history of the United States and remembering my own exposure to it the turbulent 60’s ands 70’s, one can become complacent with how resilient American Democracy is, and think everything will work out. It still might but the mess the 18th amendment caused led to The Great Depression, and we may have not ever recovered from that if it hadn’t been for World War II. The German and Japanese Empires united Americans, and we all worked together…for about 10 years. Make America Great Again?

We may need an Alien Invasion to fix things.*

Full disclosure: I have A Wells Fargo Credit Card.

*Thanks to “Independence Day”, The Movie, showing us in 1996 the our 2026 future.

An Undeniably Senior Observation

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It isn’t fair, but as we age things get difficult. We know this intrinsically, but I have proof: A Google Watch connected to a Fitbit App on my Samsung Smartphone. Out of curiosity, I stopped the google watch one time after monitoring my calories lifting weights, running, or swimming. Then I restarted it for showering, drying, dressing, and walking to the car. The result? More calories were burned after workouts while getting dressed than when lifting thousands* of pounds or swimming scores* of laps. Odd. But when you consider the “Activities of Daily Living” (ADLs) and “The Instrumental Activities of Daily Living”(IADLs)** the reason getting dressed burns more aclories than the workout becomes obvious: difficult things like lifting weights are still difficult, but easy things—like putting on pants—have become very, very difficult. I’m working out hard, now, to get in good enough shape to put on my pants!

The first thought was The Calamities were responsible. Arthritis, for example, made putting on socks an adventure in stretching, tugging, and twisting leaving me breathless after just one foot, and needing a short break before attacking the other. (No, the “assistive devices” on the internet were not helpful, except for the addictive “Reacher”, as chronicled earlier.) And the drive home is usually with socks twisted and bunched inside my slip-on shoes because there was no longer a desire to see just how fast my heart could beat. Google “orthostatic imbalance”.

Pants. Let’s talk about pants and their*** sadistic cousin, the swimsuit. The Calamities made dressing standing up next to impossible. Think about it, healthy people: putting one leg at a time into pants or a swimsuit while upright. Even putting either on while sitting is an exercise in hope, combined with several side-shifts, strategic tugs, and covering the sitting surface with a towel that has a life of its own. Getting pants off is a breeze until you have to pick them up off the floor. Same with a wet swimsuit, and you always hope the floor is clean. Aren’t they all in fitness centers? To summarize: off go the pants, on goes the swimsuit. Stop for breath, Go swim. Return from workout and off goes the swimsuit and on go the pants. And unless it’s summer, The Socks, too. (Capitalized for effect.)

It doesn’t help to have odd-shaped feet and fast-growing toenails. My feet (and hands) are tapered and are beautiful in their form, slanting down to each side from a higher, central middle digit. Very pleasing to look at, but when trying to slip such a foot into a pant leg or the genital sling of a swimsuit, that taper guides fabric right to the small toe, where no amount of trimming can keep a nail from growing just enough to catch that fabric and require a formally athletic and aerobically fit male to have to bend and tug and hope the fabric will release in time to prevent a stroke. Again: orthostatic imbalance.

Wow. Look at this post. Whine, much? I’m not sure how so much time and typing got wasted on dressing but for some reason I feel better about life, as if letting the world know how hard it is to get pants on makes my life so much easier. Cathartic posting?

The need to whine is over. The Calamities have been pretty much tamed and their return or advancement is not anticipated. Most of the arthritis was surgically removed and replaced with titanium and something akin to Teflon. So…when will life return to normal, with easy on and easy off attire?

Is there any reader out there over 70 years old who knows the answer? There’s no surgery that can help old age. No drugs to stop it in its tracks.

It appears the last 3 years have been a blessing in disguise, then, as my settling into old age “normalcy” is way better than dealing with those dastardly afflictions. I’m ready for anything life can do, now.

Yes, my glass is half-full. What about yours?

And since this venting felt so good, get ready for the next post where you will learn about the effects Image Guided Radiation Therapy (IGRT) can have on your digestive system. IGRT is an Ai guided procedure performed by a linear particle accelerator and you will read a harrowing tale of focused sub-atomic star-wars beams, loose stool, tattoos, unexpected gas, and…cliffhanger!

*Really? Thousands and scores? The mind…

** If you’re wondering about getting older, or are old already old and wondering what’s happening to you, google these two, ADL and IADL

*** Apology for the needless anthropomorphism. It’s a fun word and concept.

Speculation On The Origin Of Man…and Woman

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A fun thing about being old, modestly educated, not being in the early stages of dementia(??), and having enough fingers to type, is one can wonder about things without limits or critics. Language, for example, is so funny. Did I just type we can “wonder about things with no limits”, or “wonder about things, with no limits”? What did you think before the quotes and the comma? It is an example of how imperfect the world is, even with simple phrases.

Imperfection is what makes the world interesting. Couple imperfection with impatience and you’ll write a great novel, or make a great movie, or sing a great song, or kill yourself with mind-altering drugs.

But who wants to make the effort? Who decides if it’s a great anything, anyway? Who? Should that be “whom”? And who/whom ever found out/invented mind-altering drugs? Can you see the first man/woman/person who ate the first mushrooms? If he/she/they had any sense they would have kept it to themselves…for themselves, but word got out.

Picture the primordial planet millions of years ago with ooze, and mud and lightning and storms, and millions of types of crawly, icky little creatures slipping, sliding, and worming about the countryside. One of those ickys was our great, great, great, great, great, great grandparent(s), adding the plural in case the being wasn’t asexual….and hoping there are enough “greats”. Yes, we climbed out of the muck and ooze. Holy Crap, just asked Ai for “the history of living organisms on earth in two paragraphs”.  What a wonderful time to be alive. Ai gave two large paragraphs. Try it yourself, it’s cool.

Ai says life began with an opening line right out of any modern-day, science fiction novel: “Organisms developed on earth through abio-genesis, the process of non-living matter forming life, followed by evolution.” Did you know that? I didn’t but it makes sense, yes? One theory is the lightning shocks “kick-started” life and then evolution, the survival of the fittest, took over. A living bacteria survived longer than a soul-less protozoa? And reproduced better, as well? Gives sex a whole new meaning.

Getting from the very first abio-genesis to Donald Trump as President took over 3.5 billion years. That’s a whole lot of patience and perseverance, and yet, still not enough time to weed out all the imperfections. Survival of the fittest, my ass. Whose fault is it, now?

And who the heck is telling us all this stuff, anyway? Scientists are great, aren’t they? They deal in facts, but facts that can change with new information. Much like a doctor saying you have three months to live….and a new drug comes on the market so you live another 40 years.

It is so confusing. Almost disheartening.

But it’s life.

I’m turning in my science books and only reading romance novels for the rest of my life. Those books make sense out of imperfection and impatience and there are heaving bosoms.

This post got really lost but will not be corrected, amended, or censored. First Amendment!

It’ll be better next time when we explicate the delicate art of cross-stitching.

In a last minute, re-read…what happened to speculation?

OK, speculation: “woman” came from “Whoa, Man”, in cave man times when a pubescent cave man saw a naked cave woman for the fist time.

CORRECTION: Ai says the word “woman” came from the Old English “wifman”. Seriously. Ai it.

RICH PEOPLE ARE RUINING OUR WORLD

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It’s okay to be rich. America is designed to not only allow it but encourages it. A capitalist economy is the perfect system to reward ingenuity, inspiration, hard work, and dedication. In an ideal world. And without that “carrot”, we may not have many of the inventions making life easier and safer.

In a less-than-ideal world, however, it is the perfect place for greed and injustice to run amok, unfettered, destructive, and cruel. Think of a herd* of cute, rabid bunnies who have genetically developed to the size of Elmer Fudd. He used to call them “wascally wabbits” in the old days…when they were cute and small.

Baffling, related, but incomprehensible sidebar: The Board of Directors of Tesla have offered Elon Musk a potential (and complicated) compensation plan worth $1 TRILLION(sic).

In a macro (large) economic system, general rules apply like the relationship between supply and demand: too much demand for goods with too little supply of goods means whoever has that “supply” can raise their prices and make more money. Manufacturers, investors, consumers, the government, me, we all used to rely on this one, basic, fundamental rule. There are many more complicated rules concerning pools of money, interest rates, taxes, the size of several types of debts, and blah blah blah. It’s also enlightening to understand the costs of things, where they come from, and how long they last. At least it used to be.

In 2024 there were 23.8 “million millionaires” in the America, or 460,000 per state. We had 813 Billionaires, a record, in 2024.

In 1960 we had 306 millionaires and fewer than 10 billionaires. When America was Great, originally.

If we ignore the crippling concept of Gross Materialism** and simply focus on the amassing of wealth, what is the problem? In a real, free capitalist system, we tend to pay a price for an object determined by “what the market will bear” as long as it more than the cost of the product. (Again, an economic process simplified for this post.) The “market”, a micro system, is us: you and me. Normal people. Average Joes and Janes with “normal” pools of money. What do you think happens when millionaires’ pools of money becomes part of this micro “market”? Can millionaires “bear” to pay more than Joe or Jane?

Our economic system generates 400,000 new millionaires, or 8,000 new ones per state, yearly. That’s a lot of “money” capable of “flooding” markets with millionaires’ dollars instead of Jane or Joes. No judgement, here, but how many millionaires really care about efficient, cost effective, market-driven pricing? Yes, some do, but most don’t. If Jane and a millionaire wanted the same car, or the same house, whose offer would the seller accept? It’s a question of not only “demand” in the market, but also the available “pool” of money in that market, and the desire of all sides to be treated fairly and economically “equal”. To wit: who is in better position to pay what the seller wants, even if it is too much? Jane or the Millionaire? Imagine if you were the seller…who’s your best bet to pay the highest price?

This scenario has “trickled down” to communities in America where Janes and Joes who research and buy responsibly are being priced out of purchasing, or at last are forced to make purchases at higher prices in a competitive situation. It is evident in housing markets and subtly infecting grocery, gas, and living essentials markets. And try buying a ticket to a professional sports game.

There is nothing legally wrong with this trend. And it is only a problem if you are not one of the existing or new millionaires living in your area. America’s current birth rate is 3.6 million new Janes and Joes per year, so do the math.

It will be a huge problem soon because as the rich “strata” grows larger it sucks all the “value” out of the “poor” first, then the lower middle class, then the real middle class, then the upper middle class until every American will be one of only two classes: very poor or very rich. Eventually, even being a millionaire won’t be rich, enough.

There are many other factors in play: inflation, regulation, wealth transfer, taxes, the end of the world, history…but can we just let this “stratification” happen? Is it already too late? Who cares?

Prediction from an older post: Rich enclaves will return to a feudal society with the Lord and Master ruling over servant’s, vassals, slaves…all of whom will be well-paid but with no place—or time–to spend the money.

Ran out of room, here, but think about how much a professional athlete gets paid, then ask the same of your teacher, fireman, policeman, or doctor.

Anyone miss the days of 10 cent cheeseburgers and 15 cents a gallon gas? Make America Cheap Again. Please.

*Yes, a bunch of rabbits is a “herd”. Conjures up a strange image of cowboy rabbit drives in the old west. Rabbitboys, then, out on the range? Wascals.

**Google it. I dare you.

Labor Day Labors, Senior Version

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This isn’t really about any senior issues, but being a senior amplifies these problems everyone of us faces. Hopefully.

First, a complaint about my cohorts and their relationship to idiocy. Possible relationship. As retired seniors, we can do anything we want, anytime, anywhere, as long as it is within our physical and mental capacities. Experience taught me (firsthand and with observation) young people sleep late. Using genetically-gifted logic, I plan to do what I want, anytime I want, when said young people are still asleep, or recovering from the sudden shock of waking up. This planning allows free run of most fitness centers, grocery stores, and other retail or public places. Get in get out, go back to sleep, all before the motorcycles roar, the muffler-deprived cars cough to life, and general silliness ensues simply because there’s more humans moving about, causing chaos. So here is my latest conversation with an old friend about going to lunch. Me: “Let’s meet at 10am when they open.” Friend: “No. I’m not awake that early. Let’s do lunch time.” Me: “Ok. Applebee’s”? Friend: “No, it’s too busy there.” (Insert rimshot* here.) Note: many late-arising friends scoff at early morning activity. Yes, they actually scoff***, as if it is an insult. It’s okay, even fewer people getting in the way.

So I called the local fitness center Sunday since their website says they are “Open” on Monday, Labor Day, but “subject to holiday hours”. My call was during business hours Sunday and was not answered by a human but a “phone tree” offering an option to find out about “Holiday Hours”. After selecting the alleged option, it instructed me to call “the local branch for more information.” To their credit, the local branch called me back seconds later, apologized and listed the hours. Bless them, for they know not what they do. Actually, they did, so we can save Luke23:34 for the next Labor Day misadventure.

My favorite grocery store’s website also listed Monday Labor Day hours as “Open, Subject to Holiday Hours.” A Sunday call to their phone number informs me “There will be signs in the store about Holiday Hours”.  As an effort, that is a good thing but why say it over the phone? Do we drive there, now, to find the Holiday Hours for tomorrow? (Second rimshot.) Oops, being patient and waiting a little longer the phone tree offers “Press Option 2 to hear Holiday Hours for your store.”. Ever the optimist (sarcasm), I pressed 2 and got this: “Call your local store for Holiday Hours that will be displayed on signs in the store.” Let’s not use one rimshot here but give them an entire drum solo. As a coherent finish to this anecdote, in a visit to the store on Monday I looked for signs about “Holiday Hours”. Go ahead, guess. I won’t insult your intelligence.** For real, this time: Luke23:34.

It’s not clear how much of these last two stories was caused by Artificial Intelligence, but we can be sure “Real Intelligence” was AWOL.

*Drum: “Ba-dum-tss”, phonetically. Also called a sting. Google it for fun.

** Apologies if inferring the obvious is also insulting. It’s a holiday: Happy Labor Day!

*** A very powerful word. Look it up.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect Presidency

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I know. Sorry. But this isn’t really about The President as much as it is his entire government, so this doesn’t count as Trump Derangement Syndrome. More like Derangement, period.

Ai states: “The Dunning-Kruger Effect (DKE) is a cognitive bias where people with low ability in a task overestimate their own competence and ability to do the task…this occurs because the less-skilled a person is, the less they possess the meta-cognitive ability to recognize their own incompetence.”

Pregnant Pause.

DKE was discussed in Trump’s first term, but back then he turned to established experts and administrators to fill the leadership slots in his administration. He fired most of them later, but not our point, here. This term he appointed cronies, sycophants, and Fox personalities to the leadership positions, often nominating someone just to piss off the democratic opposition. What he learned from the first term is he needed to appoint people dumber than him to run the government so he could tell them what to do. All of them. And they’d do it. He don’t need no stinking experts (sic) disagreeing with him. Ask RFK. The net result has been astounding.

DOGE “saved” tons of money. Programs and whole departments were cut, people were fired, and contracts cancelled. The Administration has been, is now, and will be sued until the cows come home*. But since nothing matters to the new administration but the Conservative Supreme Court, courts, judges, and legal actions in courts all across the country are simply the opening salvo of a legal war Trump knows his Supremes will help him win. Money, money, money, for lawyers, lawyers, lawyers.

In the meantime, the down-line ramifications of “The Doge Savings” (TDS??), means farmers, rural citizens, the poor, and anyone NOT rich are seeing services cancelled, important research ended, and entire communities thrown into chaos as properly legislated federal funding is “clawed back” to be used someplace else? Who knew all this would happen? The Heads of The Departments who fawn over Trump at their televised meetings? Ignorance is bliss.

Entire government departments are run, now, by people who have never run organizations so big and complex. Health and Human Services adjusts vaccination schedules for children in the middle of a measles outbreak. FEMA cuts funding and employees as floods and fires devastate red AND blue states. And the TDS appears to be used to send back ANY immigrant, not just the worst of the worst.

We shouldn’t be worried about DEMOCRACY as much as we should be worried about the entire country’s way of life. Farmers and small businesses, rural hospitals, cheap labor, food supplies, all in jeopardy due to this administration and DKE. Search how many times they have quietly backtracked on employee firings, program funding, and department missions. Waste??? You betcha.

Enough. If the US was your business, you’d trim the fat, not throw out the meat and bones. You’d look for savings that don’t threaten services, programs, and lives. You might even study and learn to understand the long-term effects of programs, instead of the immediate, short-term mirage-like savings. But that’s because you are smart enough to know you need help, you don’t know it all.

In another three months fecal matter is going to impact the air-mover and we’d better be ready. Personally. On our own. Our DKE government will not know enough to help. Or care.

  • As an old farm boy, I know what it means “when the cows come home”, which they always did. But Ai says: “it is an idiom meaning for a very long time, often with the implication something will be lengthy, tedious, or even pointless.” Huh. Pertinent?

Peckish or Puckish? The Senior Single Can Be Both

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Living alone? It’s not a bad thing. You come and go whenever you want. Eat whenever you want. Clean (or not) whenever you want. You control the temperature of your home. And imagine the video/music/tv viewing freedom!

So what could go wrong? Old Age.

All those freedoms are fantastic for mobile, alert, supple people, with great vision. Young people. When you’re an older person, these are the pertinent freedoms:

  1. You can dig out your own slivers, wherever they are. If you can reach…or find the tweezers…or see the sliver…
  2. Same with toenail clippings. Woo hoo! Chiropractor, anyone?
  3. You get to answer the door even if you are mid-stream your third morning urination.
  4. You wash the dishes. All of them. Yourself. You can still do them anytime you want, though. And you have the freedom to make as many dirty as you want!
  5. You get to remember the last time you vacuumed. Doing it the same day every week helps if you can remember to write the day down someplace easy to find. Dirt is not as easy to see, these days.
  6. Same with laundry. The less active older person needs laundry less, so it’s a little easier to forget, but if you’re looking for your glasses when they’re on your head…
  7. You can rest on the floor whenever you want. If a senior falls in an empty apartment, does he make a sound? If only we made a special sound. But the lonely senior better have a warning system with younger people in the loop.
  8. You get to quietly fume when the toilet roll runs out and the new rolls are in the front hall closet. Bonus: you get to be the one who put them there.
  9. Lonely? What senior living alone is lonely? Who needs the touch of another human being? Not me, I prefer being able to drink right out of the juice container.

That’s enough. Living at both ends of the spectrum of life and negotiating each stage of existence from one end to the other is challenging, but what else is there? It’s not fair when that understanding only comes with the wisdom of age.

Unfair, but true.

September is not National Be Kind to A Senior Month. There is no such month. There is a Senior Citizens Month, established in May 1963, by John F. Kennedy.* If you’re young and didn’t know, hope it makes you feel better I didn’t know either.

Can’t wait for May 2026!

Hope I make it…

*Please. Google it

PS For no good reason: “What the Puck?”

A Little Big Mistake or A Big Little Mistake?

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I made one of those, yesterday. A huge one or as our leader likes to say a “Yuuugee one.”

To be honest for you, it was an accident of intellectual gravity: I fell into the mistake while looking somewhere else, somewhere mundane.

The internet is a wonderful/crappy place, depending on what you’re looking at or for or…

See? It happened again, And exactly the same way: how can one thing be more than one thing or less than one thing, and not just ONE THING.

Walmart would not accept my credit cards online so I (logically) assumed an answer to the simple question “why?” could be found in the spider web/internet/darkweb world. On the Network. In the ether. Floating in space. Wherever it is answers live. My local Walmart had an object I wanted so I placed it in the cart and proceeded to check out…four different times. Four different credit cards were used, and each time Walmart immediately accepted the order, accepted the payment, gave an order date, listed pick up instructions, and then cancelled the order saying it “exceeded stock limits”***. All within minutes of each other. Maybe Ai was practicing, working out, building up its circular processing muscles? The first three times I went back and confirmed the number “in stock” at the store before repeating the process. As would any intelligent individual, the frustration ended at four tries. (Oh, you would have stopped at two? Right.)

Curiosity not only kills the cat but routinely kills hours of my life as once a mind is opened to the “wonderful/crappy” internet there is no anticipating where said mind will end up.

Mine ended up mired in the swirling, exciting, puzzling, enigmatic world of Quantum Mechanics (QM). This sub-atomic Rubik’s Cube of a land has snared my prying synapsis’ more than once, but this particular trap was set and tripped by the clickiest click bait of all time: “How to understand Quantum Mechanics in 5 Minutes.”

See? Again. Big/Little Mistake. You’re making one, now, by reading further. (PS NOT “farther”. Look it up.) Back to the article: was it click bait just to make me look or was it real, someone really explaining QM in 5 minutes? I was now entangled (remember that word from previous QM posts?) in the perfect QM Schrodinger’s Cat dilemma. Do I look or not? If I did would there be a truth or a scam? Enlightenment or disillusion? Knowing what little I already know about QM, (the “little”: NO ONE understands it), why was the decision a hard one to make? What was pulling me closer and closer to the event horizon of a clicked link?

Sadly, this post is about how we exist in macro and micro worlds (MM Universe? I like it.) I needed help with a macro Walmart Card issue and stumbled into the unsolvable micro world of the small and mysterious. Bet Andy Griffiths or John Wayne or John Wick or Liam Neeson never have this problem, at least the guys still alive, anyway, a clause added to make the preceding verb tense correct. Macro or Micro?

And it brings to mind another duplicitous word that lives dual lives (lives and lives, get it?) in the MM Universe: Faith. Every scientist/physicist worth his salt is aware of QM. But since it is so small, and so hard to observe and quantify, do the men of science have faith in what they see? What they think? What they theorize and postulate? Or do they just believe without proof?

Amazing. All this in one day. Thanks for coming along for the ride, but it’s time for a macro nap. In a few hours neurons will be calmed and all will be right with the MM world, again. Have faith.

Micro world? See ya next time and say hi to the Ai bots.

***I drove to Walmart and purchased the item earlier today and posted a strongly worded Macro letter to Walmart.

Three Sentences…Again

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The Texas redistricting story highlights the idiocy of modern politics since every state and party gerrymanders at a certain, justifiable time. Modern Republicans see the handwriting on the wall and will do anything, now, to change the inevitable future, including tying themselves in knots to justify their actions. Their Prime Directive**, misunderstood by a Texas politician: “We’re doing it now because we can.”

I’ve often postulated America is 30% Conservative, 30% Liberal, and 40% Independent. Trump was (mainly) elected by his motivated Conservative 30%. Wonder if the other 70% of America will be motivated in the 2026 elections…

One More Trump, thing and this sentence doesn’t count. He is building a 90,000 square-foot ballroom addition to the White House, has already gilded most of the White House offices, and paved over the Rose Garden. Joni Mitchell’s “Big, Yellow, Taxi”** comes to mind. Is there anyone other than his 30 per cent that thinks these are good things?

A recent conversation with a friend reminded us both of how prescient Star Trak was and is, even now. My friend recounted*** an episode where Chekhov, the engineer, had trouble communicating with an “older” computer system on an alien planet. “Ancient Aliens”**, anyone?

Another old friend helped me remember an old plan I had for America. The Retirement Years are ages 20 to 25 when we don’t need to work and can do whatever we want. At age 26 we enter the workforce and work until we die.

In trying to understand the recent political scene, it appears conservatives are inspired and motivated to be Republicans even though they don’t fully understand the Party. Democrats become Democrats simply because they don’t want to be Republicans. In a two-party system, what choice is there?

My opinion (as stated years ago) is the Republican Party is the party of GMGA, or “Got mine Go Away” and includes several “ladder pullers” like Clarence Thomas. The Democrats acronym will be “YHTMGSTSE”, or “You Have Too Much Give Some To Someone Else.” Yikes?

A sentence no one pays attention to anymore, should be drilled into all our heads as soon as possible: “No one is perfect.” As noted above, when we segregate (and hate) over party lines instead of human issues, our entire world suffers. It’s past time for good republicans, good democrats, and good independents to put the world back on track.

Nothing will come from the above 3 sentences until females take over the world. Men are too caught up in being men to see we need males to be good citizens, not power brokers and Alphas. If you want to see real male heroes, watch old TV Westerns like “Tales of Wells Fargo” or “The Lone Ranger” and watch characters Like Matt Dillon, Jim Hardy, and even 1960’s Andy Griffith.

Unrelated to anything, there is an Andy Griffith Show episode, “The Manicurist”, (Season 2 episode 16) featuring a young Barbara Eden. The episode highlights the power females have over males. And you don’t have to be old as me to appreciate real beauty.

** google it, google everything. Ai, too…just for fun. Its free, so…

*** It is always amazing to hear how avid fans of Star Trek, Star Wars, and other programs remember their favorites, even after many years. The Human Brain. Wow.

PS Everything is three sentences but this post should be better. Spent too much time on structure and not enough on content. Sue me.