Fauci can do a gain-of-function but Trump can't do a hush money

Geeez that was kind of quick.  With a Gotham jury what other kind of outcome did you expect?  Trump convicted on all 34 counts in his sex hush money trial in Manhattan.  I view it as a political prosecution but others I'm sure are ecstatic.  A weird thing to be convicted of during an important election season but that's the point to throw Trump and the Republican party off their game.  Many are predicting no prison time even though he is now technically a felon.  Does he pick up trash along the highway with a pokey stick?  The depressing state of American politics.  Was hoping to avoid blogging about Trump for awhile but it's one of them intrusive subjects you can't avoid.

I got 99 problems but my eyebrows ain't one

 In the heart of the mall where I work is a very popular eyebrow threading kiosk.  Day in and day out people of all ages sitting in the chairs.  I don't get it.  You're pressed for time and money it's not on my to do list.  What are some social fads you don't get?  People with the mini phone things in their ears expecting that all important call walking around like they're contractors.  Why not use your cell?  Are they gonna climb a utility pole?  Smart watches.  The point?  Can you watch a movie on one?  Constantly monitoring your BP with arm or wrist band thingamajigs.  Tattoos are more than a fad of course and in some places you're in the minority if you haven't illustrated your body or at least a part.  "I've fallen down and I can't get up" I can see.  All I need is a meter to let me know I'm running low on the Christian Brothers.

I saw this idea posted on a forum once

 The Government already knows how much we owe in taxes or how much they owe back to us.  They have our numbers on file.  How much we paid in state and federal etc.  They pretty much know everything about us already.  Why not just send out letters or notices stating how much we owe or how much they owe us?  If you disagree then fill out a tax form and do the work yourself and send it in.  Why do we even need this behemoth of a tax preparation industry?  Let the government do the work.  They have the computers and the information and now we have ai.  Crunch the numbers and everybody else can get back their lost quality time.

We're living in surreal times

 The Trump Sex Trial.  I know of nobody who's interested in this trial and that includes even the hardcore Dems at work.  Truthfully nobody wants to think about Trump having sex.  The perceived martyring of Trump can only work in reverse.  Uncle Joe - Russell Brand showed clips of Biden on Howard Stern's satellite show.  It was strange.  Biden was sitting there rather silent looking mildly bewildered and nervously holding onto the mike stand like he was on a ship.  Stern who has made a career out of making fun of everyone and everything respectfully extolled the President and his accomplishments (?) thus far.  Now there is serious talk of a great debate between Trump and Biden.  Isn't this past Biden's bedtime?  I thought he goes to bed after Wheel Of Fortune.  I honestly thought he would put in one term to show what an oldster can do and that's all.  Cultivate a hobby.  Take hornworms off tomato plants or something.  Cartoon universe.

Don't book 'em Danno. It's legal now

One late afternoon sitting on my porch having my fine cigar and a funny aroma came wafting over.  Hi neighbor!  In my travels I'm noticing more cannabis shops opening up.  One changed its sign from Cannabis to Leafology.  A sign might say the Legal Cannabis Store and that's right next to the legal sneaker shop.  Many pot hobbyists are fiercely anti-smoking cigarettes.   Lived in my aunt's apartment for a time and my cousin had a meltdown 'cause I smoked a few.  At the same time he's a heavy pothead who keeps cholesterol graphs for his health.  I'm fine with the Christian Brothers/Tito's scene.  No need to take it to the next level.

Cat rescue groups - a review

This may not be a fair analysis as I have not heavily researched the subject but is based on personal experience. Few years back I had two stray female cats temporarily living in the house and one was obviously quite pregnant so I contacted a cat rescue group. The end result was good she took the cats and they went to a foster home. Yes they have them for cats too. The methodology however. She came by late afternoon with two big cages in the back of her SUV and clearly wanted to follow the protocols of official cat rescue techniques which involves putting a bowl of food in the cages and as they say on detective stakeout shows we wait. Order Chinese? I was like how long is this gonna take I wanna watch Wheel of Fortune give me the cages. Somewhat hesitant she gave in and within ten minutes or less I handed her the cages with the cats inside and thank you and have a good night. FF to now and I have another situation with a tomcat that I've been feeding and has battle wounds on his face from territorial cat fights and so I texted the cat lady again who responded to my first text but hasn't replied to my followup texts. I realize these people are incredibly busy and serve large geographic areas but how hard is it to hit an emoji? Then I'm sitting on the porch with my fine cigar and observed a neighbor trying to get what looked like a female cat off the road and then feeding it and trying to get the cat out of harm's way so clearly our neighborhood has a cat problem as do many other neighborhoods so where are the cat people? Calling Jackson Galaxy!

I honestly thought......

I had honestly thought that the plan all along was that once he assumed the office of POTUS Uncle Joe would eventually step down due to health reasons related to age and then Kamala Harris would assume the presidency. Biden would defeat Trump with the ultimate goal of putting her in office. This would make sense from a progressive standpoint. First woman president and hard-core liberal to boot. Liberal nirvana but no welcome to cartoon universe. Apparently we have to endure Biden vs. Trump again. I've often said here it can be perfectly valid not to vote. Do the right thing and sit one out is an option in my book. Thoughts?

Charity begins at home

Unless I find out I had a rich aunt that lived in Chicago and left me a million dollars I have to be careful with my money. I don't want ConEd to flicker my lights. St. Jude, ASPCA, the Vets, Mercy Ships, Catholic Charities, Fellowship of Christians and Jews etc. etc. There's no way I can give to all of these groups on a regular basis. Of course you also need Car Shield, Life Lock from Norton to protect you from the dark web and American Home Shield in case your washing machine explodes. Got a letter from our parish recently if we can increase our weekly donations. I'm sorry what?

Open thread

Talk about what you want.

I don't know if any of you have ever worked with a former nurse's aide but seems to me, it's my impression that they tend to look for health problems in other people.  Chef at work has a small lump, probably a cyst on the back of his shoulder.  He's not working shirtless of course so I probably would never have noticed until she told me about it.  Dishwasher somewhat overweight and she says she walks funny and told her she has the wrong shoes.  One day she said I have dry hands and bought me a small bottle of Jergen's which is fine but maybe you don't have enough to do we can put more on your plate.  My late aunt God rest her soul was a retired RN and once told an Amish woman her socks were too tight and was cutting off her circulation so there's a trend here.  Now nobody's coming to work with a tumor on the side of their face the size of a basketball like you see in those infomercials for Mercy Ships.  We all have something.  An imperfection, health ailment or problem that's not life hreatening that we live with or manage or even totally ignore.  Some may see a doctor some may not.  Most of us are not Rockefellers with endless funds.  I work alongside a young Spanish guy with a deformed ear.  I'm sure he's aware of it I could care less.  To be filed under mildly annoying.

Or we can discuss Kate Middleton:)

The proposed ban against TikTok seems rather strange

It's weirdly authoritarian.  Govern me harder Daddy.  I'm not getting this one.

Random Thoughts On Last Tango In Paris (1972)

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.  Widely seen as a landmark in the history of sexual explicitness in cinema.  So where was the explicit sex I must have missed it?  Even the uncut version is not overly graphic.  Many people if the movie is mentioned automatically think of butter.  That's a childish mind.  Some of the scenes that come to my mind is the character of Paul played of course by Marlon Brando talking to his dead wife alone in the room as she's being prepared for burial.  To my mind this is some of the best acting in the history of cinema.  Also the classic ending where Jeanne played by Maria Schneider shoots him.   The ending is so open-ended it called for a sequel but there never was one.  She's rehearsing her lines for when the police will interview her later (he was a lunatic, I never knew him, he tried to rape me) but so many people had already seen them together at the dance hall but the movie simply ends with the sultry music coming on.  My takeaway - she was okay with having a kind of strange even perverse relationship with him.  She kept going back to him in the apartment even though she was engaged to another man yet when Paul wanted a normal loving relationship with her she basically kept saying it's over and killed him.  A cinematic and much discussed enigma.  Although not by any stretch an exemplary character he's been through the mill after his wife's gruesome suicide and this is his fate.  A movie with many layers to it it's worth a watch or a few.  The actress appeared nude in many of the scenes while Brando kept his clothes on except for one brief scene early on where they didn't show much.  Much vulgar language throughout.  So that's my take the movie is worth diving into.

The geriatric presidency

If I were Kamala Harris I'd be boning up on foreign policy right now just on the off chance.  It's like when your father dies and he knew about the plumbing but you don't.  Natural causes is like a 50/50 right now.  Rudy Giuliani is pretty much a national joke.  It's like the old shrink tests - Giuliani/Running hair dye.   Even Rush Limbaugh is getting impatient.

The transition seems well underway now.  It is what it is.

There's no legal requirement you have to congratulate the other guy

Trump may give his concession speech a year from now or never.  As long as he leaves the building January 20th.

When are the second stimulus checks coming?

How do the dead vote?

If the dead leaned Republican Trump wouldn't be making an issue of this.

There's normal math and then there's weird math.  Most agreed about the normal math.  The President's lead would shrink in several states once the mail-ins started to be counted.  The strange math led to Trump eventually having razor thin leads in those same states with Biden eventually having the sliver in his favor.  What are the odds of so many of these slivers?  The normal math said a majority of the absentee ballots would favor Biden.  Again most including myself accepted this.  The strange math would have it though that a vast majority of absentee voters voted for Biden.  Odds?  Now you could make the case that Democratic voters took the pandemic more seriously and so went this route but there still has to be quite a few elderly Republican shut-ins out there too.  Lastly Georgia a historically red state seemed to flip overnight.  Were Georgian Republican voters so repulsed by the package of Trump's personality they threw political practicality overboard?  Not likely.

For me it's a case of the weird math and the strange algebra says to check it out.

Thank you for practicing unemployment

How are the people who have binge watched "The Munsters" gonna vote?  The media churning out as many anti-Trump articles as possible can work in reverse.  Will Dr. Fauci retire sometime next year and hit the links?  Meanwhile the New York Times somehow thinks they're mainstream.  Are they performing colonoscopies yet?

Race - How does defunding and dismantling police departments work in practice?  If you hear gunshots in your neighborhood do you call your local community activist?

I haven't been going to church lately.  I don't want to go and they say we're at 25 or 50% capacity and get turned away.  I haven't been tithing either.  Take it up with the Lord.

Today in black and white

A few years back I was in a Stew Leonard's food store and proceeded to pay for a few items.  Unbeknownst to me I handed the cashier a phony ten dollar bill and she went to another department and a man came back informing me the sawbuck was counterfeit AND THAT WAS IT.  The police weren't called and I was simply out of a ten.  FF to Minneapolis and another unarmed black man is dead at the hands of the police.  The starting point was when Mr. George Floyd walked into a deli and handed the clerk a counterfeit twenty dollar bill and the clerk then called the cops.  Things somehow escalated until a thuggish cop kept pressing his knee into the man's neck even after he pleaded "I can't breathe" and he later died at a hospital.  Ensuing protests, riots and looting.

What's wrong with this picture?

The strange state of our union

President Trump's 2020 State of the Union Address --  I thought it in very poor taste and low rent for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to make a show of tearing up Trump's speech at the end but also thought it unjustified that Trump bestowed the Congressional Medal of Freedom on conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.  I also find NBC's Chuck Todd to be the most openly biased political journalist/analyst on TV today and don't know why they have him.  Getting back to Nancy Pelosi she looked a little irregular during the entire speech with a pained and disconcerted expression throughout and stood up only a few times for the more obvious consensus points Trump made.  Mr. Limbaugh has cancer and the ribbon around his neck put Dems in an awkward position.  I mean how do you exactly stand and clap for a guy who called liberals evil and a dark force on literally every show of his down through the years?

While there was obviously a lot jam-packed into this approximately an hour and a half long speech, the usual optimistic items elaborated by the president on the state of the union these are the two things that interested me and gave the whole night an unusual quality.

On the pro-forma impeachment acquittal in the Senate your thoughts?  Some say it will become easier to impeach presidents now and that this may become more commonplace in the future.  Then there's the very lonely Republican Senator from Utah Mr. Mitt Romney.

Thoughts on self-driving cars

AAA envisions a self-driving car reality and sees this as pretty much inevitable in the near future. I get their news magazine and they seem completely on board with this. I'm not. The level we're talking about here is not fully autonomous so a driver has to be behind the wheel at all times but then he/she mostly lets the car do its thing at least on open highways although I've seen other videos on YouTube showing folks driving cars with adaptive cruise control with the self-driving feature in slower stop-and-go traffic. I'd rather have a fallible self-aware human being in control of the car at all times instead of relaxing and letting advanced tech take over which can and will go wrong. I can probably come up with a list of other reasons why I'm against. What with ai robots and self-driving cars trucks and buses just around the bend and now flying cars on sale for the bored rich and some people on jetpacks (you can easily search all of these on YouTube) what can go wrong???

The Impeachment Inquiry etc.

Kind of tangentially following the political stuff because I don't care anymore. A lot of other stuff on my plate of late but re this impeachment inquiry for me it's kind of weird that there's some kind of connection between the Ukrainian president and digging up dirt on Joe Biden himself and his son. It'd be like saying there's some kind of Tanzanian connection for that matter but the bottom line is you can't impeach someone for simply being an asshole so you have to have something. Hell Trump might complete two terms with the constant background chatter of impeachment talk. Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings just died at 68 because of poor health. Sen. John McCain died while still in office and of course Alex Trebek with pancreatic cancer is still doing Jeopardy. Seems a trend now work 'til you drop. That ain't gonna be me and I don't see the nobility in it. Soon as I reach the required minimum I'm going online to file my SS. Just saw an interview with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns last night on PBS. He reminds me a lot of Neil deGrasse Tyson for some reason. Their smartness is annoying and do they ever question their own smartness? Burns just did a whole documentary on Country Music which I'm not really into and never could get into not for lack of trying ("...They shot my horse and my wife ran away...") but I did watch parts of it anyway because I like Johnny Cash. Now Burns said he's gonna do one on race which that's another one to slog through God help us. I think we've reached the point where most of us would like to move onto other subjects. Burns said in the interview that Thomas Jefferson had something like a hundred slaves on his estate and we know now that Columbus killed the Indians so you can't really honor anyone these days. I don't know man talk about what you want.

The liberal version of original sin

The House hearings on reparations for slavery.  You can go on down the line.  Should gays get reparations?  Women?  Other historically oppressed groups?  What about the Indians?  Or you can talk about what you want.