Dental Bill Shock

I think I managed to recover from the shock of bill for the two caps on my teeth, plus fillings, around 3 AM when I awakened and lie there for a while thinking about things.

I do a lot of art forms. The one I sell is making jewelry.

“Oh, I can string a bunch of beads together and make a necklace.” Yes, my cat can probably do that, too but I guarantee, you won't buy the end result. The reason people pause when looking at my work is mostly the colors. I just happened into the proper genetic combination to be able to see more color than you can and because of that, all my blues and browns go together while you are still wondering why yours clash. Your mind can't see what mine can. Your eyes do but your brain can't sort the colors. Your eyes keep sending the information and not getting an answer, so you are repelled by what you put together. The price for that talent is never letting your father out the door until you made certain he didn't look like a clown because he was color blind. My mother carried the gene for color which her uncles had exploited by becoming jewelers. They were excellent at grading gemstones and one of the criteria is color. Wham, of all the kids, I got the genes and I have hundreds of cousins.

That said, I spent 2 hours restringing the fringe on a piece...just seven strands and I used 7 eye pins. So what took so long? Well, it wasn't matching the colors and beads. It was making the wires to hold the glass briolette beads and attaching them with tiny jump rings so they would dangle and sparkle. You see, glass breaks and when it is the very thin top of a tear drop bead with a tiny hole through it, it really breaks. You can't put a jump ring in it because they are too thin. You have to use 28 gauge wire which must be twisted, double if you want any strength, and that will cause it to break if you do it too tight. First twist to create a loop and second twist over that one to strengthen the loop's connection to equal that of the jump ring and one twist too many, snap goes the wire and you cut the whole thing off and start over. But that isn't as time consuming as working with a jump ring so tiny you can barely hold it with tools to connect the eye pin to the briolette. Then using a slightly larger jump ring you attach the other end to the focal piece and they sparkle and fluidly dangle. The last part is all you see.

Which brings me to mixed media often considered the step child of all the arts. Did you ever consider that to do mixed media you have to master each media you are mixing into the piece? I didn't think so.

And now I move to my friends who are doll makers. Thirty years ago I happened into a ceramics studio looking for a way to make unique pots for my African Violets while relaxing from a day of dealing with certified crazy people and stayed. It turns out I love the smell of fresh clay and I am good at ceramics. Little did I dream I was also good at art as that was something strongly discouraged in my family. There was no money in it. Sanding the seams and painting those pieces was labor, both physical and mental, intensive and for an hour, I would not have to think about therapies. Then one day the owner approached me to do some work on several pieces and in return, she would give me supplies to keep. You never use all the glaze on a single piece and glaze is expensive. I also got my hour free, because you pay by the hour to use a studio. YES!!! Suddenly, I moved into a paid artist from amateur and joined the people at the big people table. We were all working on doll pieces for a doll artist. My specialty was being able to sand pieces so they would fit together seamlessly when fired. Each piece shrinks differently in the kiln based on thickness so you really have to have a feel for that clay to do that job. Soon I was also doing the shading on the limbs because of my ability to see color. Another woman did nothing but draw eyes. One lady specialized in hands and fingernails. Somewhere, someone had sculpted the entire doll which was made into mold. And somewhere in a gallery sits the combination of our work, nicely put together with someone else's name on it. A doll sold for at least $500.00 back then so that person could afford each of us to make the pieces and they put the hair and clothes on and assembled the doll.

My friends on Facebook, do all of that. They buy the blank fired pieces, paint them using various mediums, put them together and even make the clothes and shoes for them. You want to buy that doll for under $50.00. I used to get that much money in supplies to sand and paint the limbs. It is 30 years later!

Those cheap painted pieces in the dollar stores are just that. The paint will come off.. You have an assembly line of people painting one doll because few people can do everything. One does eyes, one brows, one lips, and so on down the line until the piece is finished. To find someone who can do the whole piece is unusual and don't forget, those people make pennies an hour.

You aren't paying enough for the art you buy off Etsy, Ebay and Amazon or someone's table in a craft show.

Craft show! Somehow that implies the person isn't a REAL artist. I'd like to see a few real artists make some of the items in craft shows!

Two hours on seven pieces of a fringe not counting choosing the beads and the first mistake and I haven't even strung the necklace or for that matter worked out how to incorporate the large seed beads with the mineral and glass beads. I am still working on how to put the cabs into the setting because the setting is too big for 8x6 and too small for 8x10 so something has to fill in the space or it will (a) fall off the first time the piece is knocked or (b) look like a cab swimming in a setting that is too big. I will have to make something to fill in the setting...do you get it...make. I will have to invent something the perfect size to fill in the space.

I probably have more kinds of beads than a bead store. I have wire in every thickness and most colors. I have tools. I have years invested in watching videos and trial and error. I am not producing a $4.95 necklace. I have to get that through MY head. Once I do the shock of my dental bill will be lessened.

My dentist has to drill the cavity out of the tooth without breaking the tooth and then REBUILD the tooth with the filling material. The lab has to take the two caps that were modeled off the real teeth and rebuild them to cover the area the dentist just rebuilt while making them fit together like two mirror image twins and match the color to the rest of my teeth. Yes, that is worth $3,800.00. I am sure the equipment to do those things is worth more than $50,000.00.

It's not just the making of the piece, it is the creation and everything needed to create it. Each time a bead changes size, if just for one bead, a single strand has to be bought and the left overs stored. Even if it is malachite, the colors can vary so badly they don't go together. All of that is going to cost money and all of that is in the price of making your piece. Every single different bead requires a jewelry maker buy an entire strand of beads. Think about that for a while. Want a black and white necklace that varies in graduation? Black and white bead strands divided into 4 mm, 6 mm and 8mm. That is 6 strands od beads. You'll need a 10-12 mm for focus plus the wire, crimp beads, crimp bead covers, jump rings and fastener. You will need a pair of jeweler's pliers, needle nose pliers, crimp tool, crimp cover tool and cutters. You will need a necklace board to lay the design out on and to measure it. Still think you can make that necklace because I haven't got into months of practice to perfect your technique. I know some people who are still mastering crimping years later. Good luck with that $5.00 necklace because you spent that on the first string of beads.

The Other Side of Rich

After the dentist, we wandered into the poor side of town that the tRump motorcade never passes through. Although a main drag in Palm Beach, its lanes are narrow and harrowing for an old lady driving a commercial van. No SUV's grace these tiny parking lots. If I didn't have my handicap sticker I couldn't have parked the van. Regular sized trucks and compacts that have seen better days snuggle into the tiny parking spaces designed to get the maximum number of little stores into a strip mall bursting at the seams.

We often walk the other strip malls getting between stores. No one ever makes eye contact, smiles or says a word.

What a difference a few dollars makes! Even if talking on the phone, the people took time to smile at us. I even got a compliment on my necklace from a young man who had been removed from the bar for obviously a few too many. He had joined the line of leaning men awaiting the time they could return to the dark cave where no one cares who you are. It was a rainbow of skin tones, all happily getting along and commiserating. No one cares what you are because you are human, just like them. Cheap food, cheap booze and laundromats are the hallmarks of this area hidden in the industrial section of a wealthy county. A Spanish grocery thrives in an area where not a word of Spanish was heard. Harbor Freight caters to tired men covered in honest grease with a very different kind of stock. On my side of the county, which I occupy not due to money but tenacity, the reviews for Harbor Freight are scathing but in this little slice of heaven, they are glowing for price and quality. Things look different when it takes a few weeks to save up to buy them as opposed to swiping an infinite credit card. People actually use turn signals and let people out onto the road over there. Everyone is tired and no one is going anywhere fast. I know the feeling of going home to the place you can afford littered with other people's cast offs in an imitation of decor knowing dinner will be greasy starch not known for its flavor but its ability to fill the stomach.

I think I like that side of town much more than the one I exist within. People smile. People talk to strangers. People even use turn signals!

The Law Trap

When I was a teen, it was mandatory sentencing for a crime. It will make them stop and think before they do this. Nope, the crime rate is higher than it was when I was a kid. The only change is we have a bunch of people, mostly minorities in prison for offenses, like possession of marijuana, that are now legal, for years. Just keep one thing in mind, it costs a state about 300.00 a day to jail someone. YOU are the STATE. You are the one paying the 300.00 a day with your taxes that could be making a better school for your kids, fixing roads, putting more buses on the routes, planting more tree, expanding animal control, providing more arts and sports programs in school, building more free parks and the list goes on.

Extreme mandatory sentences did nothing but provide an easy income for people who don't need it and punish people who don't need punishing. So why isn't it repealed? It is easier to pass a law than get rid of it and that is why you have laws about where to graze your cattle in places that haven't seen a cow in a hundred years.

A law protecting children on the internet seemed like a good idea 3 years ago. Unfortunately, I now see my artist friends leaving the internet for fear of enormous fines they can't possibly pay if their work is reported. Yes, the government, our friend?, made it super easy to prosecute someone for these offenses. They made it so easy, anyone putting up a video can face a $30.000.00 fine in less than one millisecond even if their intended audience isn't under 18 and their subject matter really isn't adult, like DYI. The Government made it real easy to automate the process and in the process created a black and white rule with no shades of gray and no need for a human to review anything before you have pay. The justice machines are real.

The latest great law is on animal cruelty. It is heralded by the very people it is going to punish. Once again the original minimum sentence comes into play. Is there a week that small rescues do not reach the point due to their inability to say no to a suffering animal not violate these laws? PETA uses them all the time to close down small rescues over the condition of ONE out of 200 animals and prosecute the owners. Is there anyone naive enough to think the larger rescues won't use this law to get rid of their competition for donations, the smaller ones? Is there anyone stupid enough to think the government won't use this law to prosecute people that disagree with them politically? Come on folks, the small man gleefully signed this bill and the next day signed one legalizing using cyanide traps to kill animals and the next day another one allowing hunters to kill hibernating mother bears and cubs. This is the same man who populated the agencies charged with saving endangered animals with trophy hunters and YOU think he is protecting animals???? No, he is protecting money and there is big money in animal rescues. The animals see little help from the money you give to the large rescues but the small rescues will love you forever for a bag of cat food and the cats will get that food.

How about your beloved pet, sitting on your lap? Do you know if it has worms? Does it have ear mites well hidden in its ears? Is there a lone flea wandering the plains of its back waiting for the flea killer to kick in? Is your house pet proofed? Do you even know what that is? Well, you are guilty of animal cruelty, get a prison sentence and join the real sickos on a nationally available list. Guess what list you can't access due to a law signed early last month? That would be the list of convicted puppy mill owners and the locations of puppy mills. Guess who can sail through customs with endangered animal parts from their hunts in other countries? That would be the sons of the man who signed all these laws and a ton of others who just figured out a canned hunt is cheaper than the price they can get for a rhino horn or elephant tusk, all of which can now come into the country perfectly legally. In other words, they have now legalized harvesting endangered animals for parts under the guise of canned hunts. The animals don't even stand a chance, starved, abused and drugged so they can't escape their killers, I mean trophy hunters.

The small rescues don't stand a chance either as they lovingly tend animals others have thrown away, scrounge for medications and food and take that over their limit animal into their own bed to hold and reassure as it passes on that it is loved by someone. For that, they may join the person who had less than an ounce of pot on them at $300.00 a day that you are paying every time you buy gas, bread, beer, milk and a myriad of products you didn't even know had a tax built into their prices and of course the sales and property tax bills.

Someone published a statement yesterday that made sense. There is no Deep State. There is a bunch of bureaucrats getting kickbacks from Corporate America to take everyone's money and put it into the pockets of the already rich and overflowing. They are doing this because Corporate America convinced you the same bureaucrats were living the good life with their salaries and pensions just because they are union like many other professions. So now Corporate America pays the bureaucrats to screw you and bust the unions and guess what?? YOU ARE STILL PAYING THE SAME BILL.

Let me make this simple. You now pay in higher prices and jail sentences what you used to pay the bureaucrats in salary and benefits except Corporate America now takes a cut off the top so you are really paying more than before and no one is benefiting but a few rich people who have more money than they and their unborn great x10 grandkids could spend in their combined lifetimes if they starting buying things 24/7 right now. Result: YOU ARE SCREWED. The bureaucrats are screwed. The rich get richer.

Rule: Every time you think the people in charge are helping you screw your favorite group of people to hate, you get screwed right along with that group and the people in charge make a profit and give most of it to the rich people in charge of them. So you had better embrace the immigrant, they probably know where to buy cheap lubricant.

Why Woman Fail

Why Women don't get promoted, elected or succeed?

It has taken me 48 years in the work force to figure this out. Apologies to my beleaguered husband but he is catalyst for my discovery.

After the grocery last night, he announced he had brought the groceries in and put the van back the way it was. This is probably how my cap fell off because for 49 years, this has caused a teeth grinding episode. I know he brought the groceries in because I put them away. If he didn't bring a bag in, I would be out there looking for it. And then I thought, I am grabbing this bull by the horns and flipping the thing. Why is he doing this? Why do men do this?

So I asked him very politely is he would have told me he brought the groceries in if I were another man and his answer was probably.

Then I realized this is a communications problem, big one. Men communicate differently from women about the same things.

As a kid, if I had announced I brought the groceries in, the reply would have been, “Do you want a medal or a Wilkie button?” Both items are useless in the real world. If I had been male, I would have been thanked but women are given jobs to do and taught to do them and shut up no one wants to know about it. The result is we do not talk about what we do. Men, on the other hand, are encouraged to tout not their successes, but anything they do.

So how does this affect women?

For one thing, we spend our lives feeling unappreciated because we never get any thanks for the things we do because no one knows we do them.

Take my professional life for instance. When asked about my week, by my boss, I would say X therapy was proving effective and perhaps add an anecdote about a patient. The male in the position would rattle off he did X hypnosis sessions, X hours of biofeedback, washed so many electrodes and saw X people. Even though I did more, he looks like he did more. So when give out the raises time occurs, the doctor knows what therapy I think is best and something about a few patients but the MAN has done all this work every week. Guess who gets the raise?

Women think is terms of finishing the global job and resting. Men break the job down into tiny work that they did. Women succeed and men do work. The problem is no one sees the success of cleaning the toilet, mopping the floor or spending a hour chopping veggies to make the dish. They just see the Chef prancing out with a huge bowl of veggies he boiled for 15 minutes and slapped some butter on. Guess who makes the most money?

It is the same thing in politics. Women focus of the goals and men focus on everything they did even if they only sat at the table at the meeting. If a woman doesn't directly participate she doesn't list things. For a man, he just has to be in the room, or walking through the room, to claim part of the credit.

What did you do all day? I took care of the kids, did the washing and fixed dinner.

Male version: I got each child out of bed, cooked 3 dishes for breakfast and then washed 3 dishes, put clothes on 2 kids, did three loads of laundry, one white, one cold water and one dark colors while placing detergent in the washer and drier sheets in each load I dried. One load took a full hour to dry. Then took out the pans, chopped the carrots and chopped the celery before putting them in the pot with peas I had defrosted..........getting the picture, yet?

Men are used to getting information this way. I took care of the kids doesn't process in their brain. It is too vague so it goes right out the other ear. You will hand the boss a report. The man will find the paper, write the report, print the report out, find a binder, put it in the binder and hand it to the boss, on time. Now who do you think will get credit for that report, you or him?

I wish I had understood this 50 years ago. I would gotten a lot further in business and life because the person most often handing out the money are male. Rather than having the job done by the end of day, I should have explained that gathering the information would take 3 hours, assembling it another 2 hours, typing it up an hour, printing it out.....and I might have it done by lunch tomorrow. I would be running the country right now.

And one last thing, fellows. We do not find your bowel movements fascinating. Please stop talking.

Mother of all Conspiracy Theories

The Mother of ALL Conspiracy Theories

I am not going to throw words like Deep State, New World Order, etc, around because I prefer John Lopez who lives at 6666 SW 6 Street in Hidden City, New Hole, United Psychopaths and can be reached at 666-666-6666. There is no amorphous organization meeting at midnight to sacrifice a baby before turning on their computers and contacting the Reptilian Overlords for instructions. There are very real, breathing people reading reports written by the best people money can buy making decisions designed to kill us all. The only questions are who and why and there is nothing woo-woo about it.

Fact: Humans occupy less of the world's habitable area than ants, cockroaches, mice, rats, etc. We occupy a tiny portion of the world smaller than the USA when you actually take all us and put us shoulder to shoulder.

Fact: We can feed every human on earth several times over.

Fact: We have enough resources to last ad infinium.

So why are we running in circles screaming the world is ending?

Because it is and the reason is, as Spock the Vulcan would say, fascinating.

We have all this land that no one lives on because we are social creatures that like to clump into groups but, psychologists and sociologists will tell you, not that close. Here is a fascinating fact and it involves no drugs. Our closest social model is a rat. Yes, they organize themselves into communities and families just like we do except they are actually successful at it. So what happens if you give a rat everything it desires which happens to be unlimited food and mates? You would have a happy rat. Now, what happens if you build the rat a city with everything it wants except more space? They go extinct. Now remember, they can't eat all the food, like the water, it is unlimited. Some poor lab tech cleans up after them every day. They get medical care and are healthy little suckers, so why go extinct? The answer was when the population reaches a certain density, the rats lose all interest in everything. They curl up in a ball and stop living. They stop eating and breeding. They actually become infertile for no apparent reason. They go extinct because they never recover from this.

Scientists have known this for at least a century.

So, we build cities, stack people on top of each other and make laws to prevent them from living in the countryside where they would have space and make sure the economy keeps crashing to increase the stress on city dwellers who have no way to actually take care of themselves. All anyone has to do is say, no, this is too dense a population, let's increase the living space. All ANYONE has to do is say no and NO ONE does.

Let's say you are a smart, hardworking businessman. You are making computers. They are a tad slow. Someone comes to your office and says, we can make them 5 milliseconds faster and the battery last fifteen minutes longer using the rare mineral that no one has ever heard of and increasing the price by several hundred dollars. How fast will you toss them out? First off, how did anyone even get a sample of this super rare mineral? It's so rare you don't even know the name or where it is found but it will involve invading several countries that might just fight back and all for what, a few milliseconds? You don't even know how fast a millisecond expires. Who does something that stupid? Well, that would be the current computer and telephone company heads. The men are a geniuses and they make that kind of a business decision?

The oil company executives were told over 60 years ago about global warming. The best minds in the world said there would only be one outcome if we continued to use fossil fuels: extinction. We can assume these captains of industry knew what the word extinction meant. Now, as a businessman with two brain cells functioning do you (a) start pumping as much oil as you can, pollute the environment as fast as you can and build even more inefficient vehicles to use the dwindling supply of fossil fuels OR (b) do you start looking for another industry to go into that does the same thing and doesn't use fossil fuels like, solar, wind and hydro power which is unlimited and FREE! Either the heads of the oil industry are incredibly stupid or brain damaged or there is something we don't know and it all leads to, just like the mega-cities, extinction.

Now how do we feed everyone? Simple, you stop wasting food and water feeding things to kill them to eat them. The only reason man eats meat is man is lazy. Go hunt, kill, eat but eventually you run out of things to hunt because they are all eaten, by you. That was when you started raising animals to eat but, the very people you made fun of, the vegetable growers, now have to grow vegetables to feed the animals you are growing to eat. Now, the fun fact here is that you can eat the vegetables with no problem and have plenty of water, land and food with no animals dying and no wasted resources. Unlike, say the cat, you can process vegetable protein. It actually keeps you alive longer than eating animal protein which is harder to digest and has more toxins in it. So you come up with 101 ways to cook chicken and disguise it as something new. Let's look at facts. You have chicken, beef and pork. That is three main meats and three tastes. You have potatoes, broccoli, tomatoes, beets, squash, lettuce, kale, cabbage, beans …..... shall I go on? The tastes available from plant matter is almost unlimited when you add in flowers and herbs and they cost less to produce, you can grow them in your kitchen and eat for free. So, if you want to feed the world many times over, just switch to vegetables instead of meat. Vegetables don't poop and pollute.

It is simple things, like cooking oil that really get you asking questions. Grape seed oil is a high temperature oil that can be used to cook everything. It can be produced by cold press which uses little energy except for a really heavy rock in primitive times AND here is the clincher, do you have any idea how many grape seeds are in the landfills? Let me explain, take a look at that bottle of wine. Wine is made from grapes and much to your shock, small grapes with BIG seeds. You have to crush the grapes and then filter the seeds out or the wine is awful. That produces pounds of seeds that could then be crushed and the oil extracted and used for cooking and frying and the hulls can probably be used for something but the question is why grapeseed oil is so expensive when it is made from garbage from the wine industry? It is healthy. It can be used at any temperature. It is cheap to produce. But we grow rape seed to make an unhealthy oil to market cheaper than grapeseed oil and we still have the hulls except this time they are toxic. So, all you smart business people out there, do you make a product you have to grow and process and then dispose of toxic waste or make a better product out of garbage and its by products are non-toxic. That is no growing, no harvesting and nothing to get rid of....which one? Why, the rape seed of course because we are stupid.

And the choices just keep multiplying over and over.

Let's keep people from going off the grid to live on their own land because after all it is more expensive and polluting to produce large amounts of power, purify water polluted by producing the power and then try to get rid of all the poop rather than each family passively producing their own power, filtering their own water and composting their poop for fertilizer to grow the veggies they are eating without a farmer spraying the crap out of a monocrop with poisons, harvesting it and trucking it to market all with lovely fossil fuels that are causing more pollution....wait a minute! Stop the insanity! Why are we doing everything the hard way? Are we suicidal?

Are we suicidal or is someone trying to kill us?

Sustainability is a dirty word. It means living a lifestyle that sustains us, society and the planet. It means if you produce it, you use a minimum of resources and you return to the planet an equal amount of equivalent resources. We have stopped doing that and gone to taking from the planet to produce a product at the highest cost and pollution with the end product being something that can't be used again and actually poisons us. Are you going to tell me all these captains of industry are so stupid they don't know that they are killing their own future generations? What kind of world are they leaving their children and grandchildren?

No one in their right minds would do this, except psychopaths who only care about what happens to them and no one else. Fortunately, psychopathy and intelligence go together. You seldom find a stupid psychopath but on the other hand, you don't always find rich psychopaths. I proved in another series of postings that none of the billionaires of today are actually “self-made men”. They ALL come from money, have excellent educations and were given every opportunity. You do not find a rags to riches story among them and every one of them is crazy. Most of them, without rich friends or family, would be serial killers roaming the back roads of the world looking for people to dismember alive.

Harsh? Oh let's look at the infamous twins. They completely dumped their entire family leaving them with little money to produce the most defective oil pipes in the world while abusing their wives and children. I mean, what do you call it when a man who is an expert skier takes his novice wife, the love of his life and mother of his children, on a skiing trip and puts her behind him on an expert slop from which there is no exit and where she can die in a horrible accident at any moment because of her novice status? Would that be a loving husband or a psychopathic potential killer? As the MEME's say, just saying. She thinks it is pushing her potential. So would pushing her off a cliff to teach her to flap her arms and fly. I say it is abuse on many levels. Would they be a billion dollars low producing a quality product that didn't consistently leak and pollute the earth and water? No, they wouldn't. So why does anyone buy their pipes? They are the sole producer of pipes in the world. They eliminated all competition in the field. There is no choice. Why didn't someone, some government stop them? They will stop you from installing your own water piper, for your own good, of course.

Here is what we know or I know. Everyone of these psychopaths got a hand up to become the billionaires they are. Someone whispered in their ear with a deal they couldn't pass up. The only people they care about is themselves. No one else really exists. They are geniuses but like practically all geniuses, they have a single focus and are unable to see either long range effects or the effects on other things from what they do. They all have excellent educations at the best universities where most of them dropped out and followed their “dream” in Daddy's ten car garage with a small, quarter of a mil loan or more, from a relative or friend of the family using their former school mates as slave labor with the promise they might be brought on board when they made it big. The school mates are probably flinging burgers because they are nowhere it be seen. Oddly, any one of the schoolmates would have made a better product and were better people..... I wonder if that is why they are flipping burgers with a Harvard degree. Once you step on that train, there is no exit and you are expendable. You will do what you are told or everything will be removed from you or you will suffer the Epstein fate.

So whose name am I looking for that isn't New World Order or Deep State? I am looking for the person who provided the money the investors gave them to start the companies. I want the name of the person who gave some dupe the rare minerals no one has ever seen in their lives to shave those milliseconds off your download. I want the person who provided the whiskey the afternoon those captains of industry decided to run the energy industry into the ground, start wars over oil and destroy the entire planet. I want to know who the head psychopath is and why they want to kill me. Yes, it is personal and you should want to know why they want to kill you. Why have they made sure we don't have the future we were promised? Why have they made sure we are disease ridden, stressed out, poisoned and overworked? Why have they caused us to waste our lives on a hamster wheel in a rat maze with no cheese at the end? And when we find them, instead of waiting for the answer, let's just throw them to sharks and let nature take its course. Sharks have to eat, after all. It is all every environmentally friendly.

I've done a bit of the legwork for you. So here are a few hints. It's not any head of banking, industry, country or royalty. These people are the expendable public faces of the monster. Remember one thing, the kings were originally chosen in this demented economic system to rule via divine right. Now, who determined what the divine right was? Now you have your starting point so delve into some genealogy and find out who and what the current families are. For all you know, they are living next door.

Pearls of War

Armed with nothing but a pearl necklace.............

I wonder when the reality of who the snowflakes or just plain flakes is going to set in with the screaming Cult of Hate. They have their leader, hiding in Walter Reed with his bone spurs (which curiously enough never go away without surgery and don't seem to appear on a single x-ray, ever), and their cry baby judge, afraid he won't get his bottle of beer, are all petrified of a woman armed only with a pearl necklace. Oh great white supremacist Vikings brought to their knees behind a bunch of old white chicken hawks scrambling for their lives when two women tell them to sit down and shut up armed once again, with that string of pearls.

Damn folks, perhaps we should forget restricting the purchase of AK-14's and take a good look at pearls. Those things are dangerous.

Or perhaps you might want to consider the GOP is nothing more than a bunch of cry babies who suddenly aren't able to bully or buy their way into power because someone finally said, “Enough”, and took away their safe place down at the local watering hole. Perhaps you might want to consider the hatred is fueled by equal amounts of alcohol and fear and like most rodents, will run as soon as the cat steps on stage. The cat wears pearls and they aren't fake.

Nope, unlike the Ho's in the front row of the hate fests, these pearls are the real deal, nicely understated and saying, “I have class, I have power and I have truth”. My pearls come from real wild oysters not subjugated, farmed slave oysters or the great Chinese glass pearl factory. Mine were formed in life's irritations of some poor oyster that just wanted to solve the problem of sand in its meal and now, I am going to solve the problem.

It would seem wrapping yourself in a giant flag made in China while waving a gold painted cross is about to go out of style, since someone just asked for the proof and those wooden swords don't cut well. The magic guy in the sky is nice, but steel always wins and those ladies have steel backbones.

Hold my Mead, things are getting real fast...

Hold my mead.........

One of the now most famous Evangelical “Ministers” is selling prophetic information to help you vanquish your enemies for what I am sure makes the price of a spell kit look weak and unworthy.

Okay, you guys have now publicly crossed the line. Hold my mead, the shit is going to get serious.

Let me explain this going back over 30 years.

Usually I get the call for help from bankruptcy court or the hospital, when the good Christian suddenly needs a “witch” because that “prayer circle” of “prayer warriors” didn't like them dating their daughter, the size of the commission they got or the color of their skin and now they will spend their last penny to stop the curse because now they know this is darkest magic and it is a curse being invoked by these “good Christians”. I have had good friends come within an inch of losing their life after losing everything they own and built. In that case, the why is they took one of them into their business when they got fired because they felt sorry for them. Next thing they saw was the inside of an ICU and after a month of coma. I have heard every excuse to doing this from “I should get a bigger commission than anyone else because I am a Christian” to “I had to get rid of the Catholics working there before my immortal soul was contaminated so I tried to kill the owner”.

No one believed me. Now it is out in the open. There is no vetting to see if this person is legitimately being targeted by someone. No checking to see if there really an enemy or just a rival. No checking to see if the person is insane but if you belong to that sect, the odds are pretty high you are. In short, it is for the right price handing a loaded gun to the bully in the school yard and permission to shoot anyone they think is doing them wrong.

So, let's start with some free information.

Has your child been harmed by the military or any police. Molock is the guy to go to. He rights those wrongs and helps ease the suffering of mothers.

Women, are you being harmed by ex's or others taking advantage of you and hurting your children. Pazuzu is your deity. He is invoked to protect households and children.

I know you have been told a lot of things about these deities but this is what they really do and they are very effective.

Moloch accepts offerings made of cedar. Cedar incense is burned on the altar. The offering can be burned or a cedar tree can be planted in his honor.

Pazuzu doesn't ask for offerings but things in bronze are favored by him. He is a storm god that brings dust storms so some sand is attractive to him on an altar. He will bankrupt the people who harm single mothers with children.

We Need a Specialist

It's time to go back to specialization.

In the olden days, if you needed rain, you went to the rain god's temple with an offering and discussed it with him/her. Thunder and lightning might have required another deity and a larger offering. The fertile crop deities were always popular for a party and wine deities even had their own and frequent holidays.

Then along came this one god I can do everything guy and things have been going down hill. When is the last time he granted anything? I mean it is possible he is overworked but he was supposed to do everything and now we have droughts, famine, Global warming, massive crop failures, unhappy people all over the place (I think the wine deities would have fixed that one), hatred, fear and it just goes on and on.

Multiple Deities made us happy. If they didn't work out, we just borrowed the village next door's deity. I think that is why we have so many wine and fertility deities. Villages started collecting them. They are fun.

I bet all Noah's wife wanted was her garden rained on every Monday and Thursday. Somewhere around week 5, she is asking Noah where the rain is. Noah is, as usual trying to shut her up as he is building a big boat dreaming of all the riches this new one god is going to drop on him. We all know how that turned out, a huge flood and a boat load of whining animals.

We need to go back to the specialist deities. They knew how to get things done.

It's not just a phase

Phases of Life

Oh it's just a phase they are going through!

It's dismissive. It makes you feel like a two year old. It says you'll get back to “normal” shortly.

It's none of those things, not even if you are a two year old and the worst thing anyone can do is just ignore it.

Young children cannot learn by being told. Imagine explaining to a child how to walk while keeping their legs tied together. What do you think the chances are that child is going to learn to walk? The answer is nil, zero, none. That is because the child must experience balance and movement to walk.

However, as the child grows older the parents expect them to learn by being told not to do something. The stove is hot.

Oh admit it, every one of you touched the stove and got burned.

And so it just goes on and on. Not even those brilliant teenagers are that good at learning something by reading about it. Tell me, do you think you can gain confidence by reading about someone who is confident? Am I crazy? No, that is exactly what you think because you just said it was a phase they are going through.

Those phases allow a person to try on and practice a new form of life expression be it being a spy or an assertive person. Women are more likely to be going through phases than men because men are allowed to express themselves and women are locked into the “lady mold”.

Phases do more than that. By experiencing a new life perspective, a person develops empathy with others in different situations. It allows a person to incorporate new expressions of themselves into their overall personality. It is a simple of way of uncovering talents and learning what you really don't want to do.

It is not just a phase. It is how you successfully learn to be human. It is how you learn what works and what is going to get you isolated. It is how you learn what you love. It is how you grow.

Encourage the phases. They will do more to produce a well rounded happy individual than all the money in the world.

The Last Tarot Reading

At the beginning of this administration, I used to do a daily Tarot reading. I really loved doing them and had done them throughout other administrations.

This one was different. Every day the readings were worse until finally, one day when I finished and published, I did a three month reading. The results were worse. Okay, I tried three more months and got a worse reading. I jumped to six months and it was worse. The thing is, even after the 2020 elections, the readings didn't get better. I asked why and the answer was that things would never be undone. I didn't understand. I do now. I stopped doing the readings that day.

Those children in camps will never be reunited with their real parents.

The public lands sold off for strip mining and fraking will never be returned to we the people.

The face of our legal system will be forever one of injustice as these for-life judge appointments continue to play out.

We will never be able to clean up the land and water from four years of heavy pollution. Poison just doesn't go away and the results of this, the malformed children, the sick adults, the brain damaged and the dead elders can't be reversed.

We cannot just turn the clock back because the departments have not just been gutted, they have been destroyed. The very programs that the system ran on, and I mean computer, have been erased and would have to be rewritten from memory.

Our entire government has been destroyed.

But far more, our trust in anything and anyone, including those near and dear to us, has been destroyed.

We would like to lay the blame at the feet of tRump and Moscow Mitch, but they were just the instruments. The people holding the strings to these puppets are FOX News and the Rightwing Shock Jocks. Without their drug induced daily insane rants and conspiracy fantasies, because they didn't qualify as theories....theories require a few facts, these two men wouldn't have managed to consolidate the amount of power they did. The Orange Turnip would never have won without FOX laying the groundwork and lying to gullible people who thought what they saw on TV was truth. Mitch the Moscow Bitch would never have been able to pass a rule he had to approve anything before it could be voted on in the Senate. Old Boner resigned because he had to have been approached to do this and the old drunk actually had enough ethics to refuse but not to hand the position over to someone who would. So, yes, this falls in his lap and he doesn't get to play Kissinger and tell us where we went wrong. He went wrong.

We don't need a State Run Network. We need to prevent foreign interests from ever again buying into American networks. We need to ban foreign interests from having any part in American news organizations. If Reagan hadn't fast-tracked Murdoch's citizenship application, he could never have created FOX. So, yes, let's blame the real culprit in this saga, St. Ronnie because the framework for everything that has happened, economically, socially and religiously starts in his administration with a group of 5 economists and one sleaze who managed to get Nixon elected by costing the lives of thousands of young men in a jungle in SE Asia. If Nixon hadn't been caught, this would have happened then.

So no, there is no happy ending. You can't fix the trauma of the Trumpcamp children. You can't bring back the dead from canceled insurance. You can't fix the Veterans returning to a thank you and a homeless camp. You can't make up for 4 years of a gutted educational system. You can't bring the veterans back you deported. You can't bring the Kurdish women and children back to life that we abandoned. You can't fix this. But you can make sure the people who aided and betted this in their little red hats never get to forget what they did because we will NEVER FORGET.

Great Deal? Think Again

Oh, so you got a good deal........

Heinlein wrote the most profound theory of economics for the rest of us, the 97%, when he wrote: “There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch,” or “TANSHAAFL”. You, dearies, are the free lunch for the upper 3%. The rich get richer off the backs of the poorer. So, tell me about the great deal you got and I'll LMAO.

I got a letter in the mail today from an insurance company. It is the annual Medicare round up of gullible sheep for the shearing. They are going to give me, not just medical, but vision, dental and hearing, PLUS medications AND MONEY BACK in my Social Security Check not to mention, and they won't, a 23 Million Dollar Bonus for their CEO this year. REALLY?????? Are they printing money in the back room? Who is really paying for this windfall? Well, it's not the CEO, he's getting bonus. It's not the doctors and pharmacies because they always make money. That sort of leaves you and I. Anyone starting to think maybe there is something they aren't telling me. Sorry MAGA hat wearers but someone always pays and it is always you and I, either through denial of service, postponement of service until it is no longer medically necessary, i.e. you are dead or too far gone to save, over charging you for cheap things you really have to have, and have to get from them, or some equally nefarious trick like charging the government (which is you) for things you (which is you) never got like our dear Senator and ex-governor did Medicare when he was CEO of a hospital.

What about those great deals on brand names that aren't from the manufacturer or authorized dealers? Get ready to not like what you got.

Let's take shoes and clothes. The machine cuts a six foot tall by 54 inch by 6 foot stack of pressed leather or fabric. That's it folks, it has to cut that much. For each pattern, the computer laser must be calibrated which means they have to check to see if the finished product actually fits together and the person. So they make one, just one. Then the computer is calibrated to the mm to correct any mistakes. Another pallet of material the same size is placed in the machine and another cut and test is done. Usually, like 99% of the time, this one is correct and all the material goes to the people assembling the product BUT are you wondering what happens to the first pallet of material? Reputable companies destroy it, good companies send it to be recycled and really bad companies sell it out the back door. So when you get that great deal, the material was either sold out the back door or bought off the recycle truck and then assembled, without correction in a sweat shop somewhere to be sold to a not-so honest seller and that person is in your local flea market or online with the big auction or cheap resale companies like but not only, Ebay and Amazon. Do they know this? Of course they do and they even encourage it. That is why you can go and examine the product at a real retailer, try it on, nibble on it and then go save money on line and get something that is off, won't fit or falls apart. You got the real test parts, that's all. You may even get the real label.

When I first started out, after two experiences I learned quickly as a retailer, you get what you pay for. Want an awful smelling shampoo, that doesn't lather or clean but has the manufacturer's label on it at 2/3's the price....shop at the great W. You may never know what was added to or missing from that bottle until your hair falls out in 10 years and then, oh my, you can't sue the manufacturer because you bought nice clean product that was sent to the dump and never made it.

A man offered to sell me glass enclosed candles out of his trunk for half the wholesale price. I knew the manufacturer and bought from them. The color was off, was why he got a great deal on them and then the stores that bought them started getting the complaints. They burned forever or down in a couple of days and some of them exploded. You see, the manufacturer had to produce 6 dozen candles at a time. Then they test burn time, too hot the glass blows up, too cool they burn forever. They adjust the oil to wax ratio. This guy's great buy was out of their dumpster or rather beside it because the forklift driver was getting a couple of dollars not to drop them in the dumpster and break the glass bottles.

The one I fell for was at a very legitimate trade show when I bought a load of discounted books from a dealer carrying books by printers not at the show. Two months later I finally got my books. They weren't even returns to the publisher that didn't sell in bookstores. They were returns to the book stores and purchases from secondhand bookstores, filthy, marked up and unsalable. Then I say my copy of the invoice was marked no returns, sale merchandise. His wasn't and the invoice I saw. Mine was the carbon not exact copy under it.

There is no such thing as a free lunch and if you think there is, you are about to be fleeced.

Reflections on War

Memories of War

Remember the Veterans. No, remember the cost of war and that the Veterans are one. Of course, by the time the Man in the White House finishes privatizing the VA, there will be no cost because you'll probably have to pay for everything.

My first experience with this day and its cost, came young. I guess you could say my family's experience with wars in this bright and shiny new country that was going to do fantastic things so very differently from the Kings and Queens of Europe was the Civil War or as I was taught in the South, the War of Attrition. I don't know which is more amazing, that the powers that be actually convinced the people and future generation it was a war of two noble sides, one fighting to free the slaves (notice they never say PEOPLE from slavery) and the other fighting to preserve a noble way of life full of happy workers (that just happened to be property) and cotillions or that a 4 year old child knew the meaning of Attrition.

Just so you fully understand the brain washing that comes with this heritage allow me to show you the two sides or rather what each is taught. Every Sunday after dinner the dining room table, which is the size of a small car, is cleared and the toy soldiers come out. These are not some plastic replicas advertised on a cereal box for a dollar, these are hand carved images of the real men who fought with special care given to the uniforms, medals and appearance of your family's veterans. Oddly, all the Northern soldiers look like faceless blobs. Then for the next few hours of increasingly drunken strategy the prominent battles are refought by little pieces of wood, strategy analyzed and revised by a group of men that will never see a battle field and probably faint at the sight of blood. It is called the War of Attrition for a reason. Wikipedia defines War by Attrition as “Attrition warfare is a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and materiel. The war will usually be won by the side with greater such resources.” The South considered themselves to be the superior military force that lost only because the North had greater numbers and resources. It was a miracle that our brave and intelligent men won a single battle but they managed to hold out for four glorious years dreaming of those Southern Belles and home and the glory of the Southern way of life, a way of life marked by manners, everyone knowing their place and of course, those fantastic ball gowns stitched and beaded by hand by slaves and those glorious dinners grown and cooked by slaves because those Southern Belles never touched raw food, cleaned anything or did anything. It was a heritage stolen by my wife of a carpetbagger grandmother from her lesbian lover who actually owned the small plantation they lived on as soon as they murdered both husbands in unfortunate farming accidents a week apart. Are you beginning to see the cracks in that story of the Southern Belle, yet? I guess those men did just before one them cracked their skulls.

The story of my mother's side was a different one. No it wasn't a noble group of people fighting to free the slaves (remember, those slaves wouldn't really be considered people until modern times), it was one of a family torn apart and never patched back together as one son went off to join the North and the other the South. Most people do not realize this is why there is Virginia and west Virginia or even Tennessee and Kentucky. Kentucky was part of Virginia, all of which were part of a territory. Kentucky declared its neutrality in the Civil War whereas Tennessee joined the Confederacy. An attack on Kentucky by the Confederacy caused them to join the North. Tennessee was part of North Carolina. Why all the splits? Someone wanted all the states to be equal in size which is why Pennsylvania and Ohio are two states now. Seems I just heard that same illogic in a meeting to annex all property into cities in Broward County. Things never change. People do not realize this is the story of the Northern Veterans, families torn apart by those evil Southerners stating this unnecessary war.

Yes, the Civil War was as much a farce as the shame of my father descended from a Carpetbagger being derided for marrying a Yankee who actually had an uncle who fought for the South. This is when I yell, “Lies, all lies” and the Man in the White House counters with “Alternative Facts”.

So now that we know the Civil War was all about slavery, let's have a few facts.

a. .1% of the men in the south owned more than 100 slaves. Yes there is a decimal point before the 1.

b. 6.6% of the men owned 10-99 slaves.

c. 17.2% owned 1-9 slaves.  

d. 76.1% owned no slaves.

And boom went the myth. The South was a land dominated by mega-factory farms producing cotton with 6.7% of the population having all the wealth and .1% at the very top running things. From Lumen Learning's course on American History: “The South prospered, but its wealth was very unequally distributed. Upward social mobility did not exist for the millions of slaves who produced a good portion of the nation’s wealth, while poor southern whites envisioned a day when they might rise enough in the world to own slaves of their own. Because of the cotton boom, there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River Valley by 1860 than anywhere else in the United States. However, in that same year, only 3 percent of whites owned more than fifty slaves, and two-thirds of white households in the South did not own any slaves at all. Distribution of wealth in the South became less democratic over time; fewer whites owned slaves in 1860 than in 1840.”

Gee, where have I heard that, “poor southern whites envisioned a day when they might rise enough in the world to own slaves.” Oh, right LBJ's explanation of why the poor vote for the wealthy.

“Although a small white elite owned the vast majority of slaves in the South, and most other whites could only aspire to slaveholders’ wealth and status, slavery shaped the social life of all white southerners in profound ways. Southern culture valued a behavioral code in which men’s honor, based on the domination of others and the protection of southern white womanhood, stood as the highest good. Slavery also decreased class tensions, binding whites together on the basis of race despite their inequalities of wealth. Several defenses of slavery were prevalent in the antebellum era, including Calhoun’s argument that the South’s “concurrent majority” could overrule federal legislation deemed hostile to southern interests; the notion that slaveholders’ care of their chattel made slaves better off than wage workers in the North; and the profoundly racist ideas underlying polygenism. “

You might want to read that summary from Lumen several times to let it sink in because it is integral to creation of veterans.

The Northern landscape was dotted with Factory Towns and the reason why the North was actually more prosperous than the South. The south had converted their food producing farms to cotton producing to make Mo' Money with food production being just what they needed to feed the slaves and themselves. The Northern factory towns had a better idea creating a more balanced economy. The factory worker, a “free” man worked for a salary that he then used to buy his food, clothing, medical care and housing from the factory owner. It is most convenient to convince your slave he is free and then charge him to be your slave because he is inferior to you but allow him to think, he might one day own a factory full of workers. But, you had better do it before you became old or disabled and couldn't work because then you were escorted off the factory property to fend for yourself. Whoa, wasn't that the same thing as what the Southern upper class was doing to the lower class white men?

Believe me, the similarities are just coincidence but not lost on the .1% of the Southerners that owns practically all the slaves and land because the factory town was a financially more profitable system than the direct loss from feeding, housing, clothing and providing some medical care for a slave without the bonus of being able to kick him out the door when he became disabled or old and couldn't work any more.

So what was the real fight? Tariffs, and that is a word you will find over and over before every single war after that one. The Northern factories processed cotton into fabric. The South could ship the cotton to England and France, have it processed into fabric and shipped back cheaper than sending it to a Northern factory and all these new millionaires were all about Mo' Money. So the North imposed tariffs that made making it in the USA a better deal than sending it overseas and cut into the Southern profit and the South argued through Calhoun, “ a leading political theorist defending slavery and the rights of the South, which he saw as containing an increasingly embattled minority. He advanced the idea of a concurrent majority, a majority of a separate region (that would otherwise be in the minority of the nation) with the power to veto or disallow legislation put forward by a hostile majority. “

And he based his argument on the Founding Father establishing the Electoral College and the US as a Republic and not a true Democracy. Does THAT sound familiar?

The next big Veteran maker was WWI, started by a lie called the “Em's Telegram”. According the great god Google, “A French diplomat asked William and Bismarck to support his country's wish that a Hohenzollern would never become a Spanish king. William rejected this request and Bismarck, after editing the French diplomat's statement, made it public in the Telegram. France declared war on Prussia on Jult 19, 1870. “

That sounds a lot like today, but it makes more sense once you know the Arms Merchants part in fanning the flames and creating a World War out of this molehill. My relatives came home from WWI with the thousand yard stare as in that war every dirty form of warfare created was seen and we cannot imagine the horrors they saw but the reason the US entered WWI was “The United States entered the war because of the Germans' decision to resume the policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, and the so-called "Zimmerman telegram," intercepted by the British, in which Germany floated the idea of an alliance with Mexico. “

Germany was sinking merchant and passenger ships alike whether they were from a country involved in the war or not. Of course, my relatives actually died for the right of the 1% to enjoy cruises in Europe and buy expensive items from France and Spain to decorate their houses because no one in my family could afford either one.

The next big Veteran creator was WWII. Interestingly enough, the word tariff once again arises from the ashes. The US, England and Europe decided to punish Germany for WWI by placing huge tariffs on anything German, bankrupting them. This allowed a paperhanger to incite the upper class of Germany into electing him and returning their former glory to their society. Didn't I just write that about the Civil War? Now the upper class in the US was not for spanking Hitler for his transgressions because they and the upper class of Germany were good friends and relatives. It wasn't until he attacked England and France, those bastions of royalty, I mean society that all poor white men aspire to rejoin, that something had to be done and so a lot of veterans were created in Hawaii to get us into a war by our illustrious leaders and a Emperor in Japan fighting to maintain the way of life and society of his very civilized and socially structured society with a rich and ruling 1% that everyone else worshiped as gods. Didn't I just write that????

Lather, rinse and repeat and no one ever stops creating veterans, over and over and over again, Johnny goes marching off to war to protect something he isn't a part of and never will be. Johnny needs to wake up and refuse to fight the 1%'s wars. Perhaps when the 1% get finished kicking Johnny in the teeth and he figures out he is never getting any of that wealth or respect, he will but will he be too damaged to do anything about the little Johnnies growing up believing the same old tale?

You tell me.

My father tried to enlist in one of the many wars. He was a pilot and a mechanic. That got him in, but they discovered he had asthma so to get rid of him, they shipped him to Tampa Florida. Between the humidity and the mold, he could not breathe, so he was given a choice by the US government. He could resign and claim no benefits or he could die in Tampa. He had a young wife, I wasn't born yet, and he had a short life expectancy with asthma, anyway. When he lost consciousness, the other men in the ward pooled their money and called my mother in Pennsylvania where she was staying with her sister. The only reason they had a phone was my uncle was a union man and had a good job in the steel mill. Scared to death, having never left the small area of West Virginia and Pennsylvania where her family was, she borrowed money from my uncle, boarded a train and road all the way to Florida to the VA hospital which was a converted hotel that had been abandoned for years. The men half carried my father to the train station claiming he was drunk to get him on the train because they wouldn't transport the sick. The conductor took pity on my mother because she was young and pretty and didn't throw them off the train in Georgia when he discovered my father wasn't drunk. They spent the next years in poverty although they both made a good living, her a secretary and him a mechanic, paying for his medical bills. Through a strange miracle, he was cured and they moved to North Carolina to escape the federal records that prevented him from getting a pilot's license. He steadfastly stood by his country and refused to sue them to get his earned benefits until he became a mercenary in the Latin American theater and discovered just who and what his government was, a government for and by the wealthy and he was nothing more than cannon fodder. That was when he sued the US and won. He spent the end of his life in the VA hospital being treated for ailments mostly caused by that little side trip to Tampa. Tampa no longer is the Hellhole he was in. It is drained, air conditioned and a lovely place. The ex-VA hospital is a gorgeous hotel. I've stayed there. It's haunted by mostly the ghosts of all the Veterans who died there. The basement houses gift shops and is really haunted because that is where they piled the hopeless ones and let them die. That is where my mother found my father, in a bed that hadn't been changed in week, with no food or water, gasping for breath and dying in his uniform. They didn't even bother giving them a hospital gown, so the guys had no trouble faking the guards out and carrying him to the train station.

Oh yes, honor our veterans but never forget who makes them and how they treat them before you vote or sign into the military.

I found my father in a bed in the VA having had his leg amputated against his wishes in a room with 5 other veterans, 2 were psychiatric cases, one violent, and the other two were heart patients trying to stay calm and not have another heart attack. It was bedlam with screaming and throwing things, one trying to strangle the other one for throwing feces at him, while my father begged me to kill him.

Yes, let's never forget our veterans and how the rich, who buy their kids out of military service, treat them the 364 and a half days that aren't spent in the stands at an 11/11 parade.

NEVER FORGET.

Old Cats and Old Humans

Old cats and old people have one thing in common, we are both grouchy. I think they must feel the years in their bones, too. I had fed the cats and went into the kitchen to get my food. My blood sugar was dropping like a rock. I turned the light on and went for a bowl. One thing I have learned with diabetes is if I don't have prepared food in the morning, I will declare it too much trouble to put the cereal and coconut milk in a bowl and go back to bed. That is the road to the ER. So I was lifting the bowl out of the drainer when I looked down and there in her box was the Matriarch of the Cathood. I don't know exactly how old she is but Napoleon is 16 and she was a matron when he was a bottle sucking kitten. She looked up at me, one eye closed, the other squinting and showed one fang. I clearly heard, “Turn off the f'n light hoooman. I am trying to sleep.” I grabbed my bowl, hastily dumped the blueberry yogurt I made last night and turned off the light. She was already back to sleep.  

Still Locked Out of Social Media.

I guess I should be flattered the Religious Right considers me such a threat that they have to keep me locked out of social media but they seriously underestimate me and the platform.
Here is what happens.
I go to both parties, games and media, and they instigate an investigation. I am found to be in violation of no one's rules and my account is opened. From  an hour to a couple of days, until the next complaint is filed and I am locked out of posting and we repeat the  cycle.
The lockouts are automated and the  people doing this know that but they are underestimating the platforms. If you really think they don't track who complains and how many complaints are made and against whom, you are really, really stupid. You are wasting their man hours and they don't like  that because they have revenue to earn rather than babysitting  you. You become a problem and you lose access both platforms. The games will get you first because they can't afford to lose money or reputation. If you think they don't work together, well, you are hopeless.
Now here is what you have achieved.
1. Aggravating me.
2. I am unable to post lost and found pets. These posts are picked up and relayed by a number of other services. Pets stay lost.
3. I am unable to post to TNR pages which means I can't help people find vets and neuter spay clinics. I can't post pets for adoption from small rescues.
Now  here is what you didn't achieve.
1. Silencing me. I am on several  platforms and they actually post my posts back to the one you have me blocked on.
2. Losing followers for me. They follow me on several  platforms so no one missed a thing.
3. Costing me money. Actually you are making me money because people now  have to pay to get information on the paranormal from me that I was giving away free.
4. Being the great caped hero of your God. Nope, you just proved you are stupid and nothing else.
Oh, and you are doing this to a lot of people including someone who specializes in tracing the owners of lost pets. You knocked him off the main rescue he was working with so, all those chipped found animals are dead in animal control because he was the guy who traced the owners down.
Actions have consequences and a lot of people are hunting you guys down. Soon, you won't even be able to get on the Internet. People are sick of your crap. People and animals are hurting because of what you are doing to the helpers. You never know what a person does off the internet but we know what you do for others: absolutely nothing. You sit in a chair behind a computer harming people and organizations that are trying to make the world better and complain and  file complaints and think your God is going to reward you once you are dead.
LMAO. It doesn't work that way. No God asks who you harmed. They ask who you helped.

Global Warming Made Simple

Global Warming, the simple explanation

Ever get in an argument with someone who says, “We can't have global warming because we had the coldest winter on record”?

My answer is, in the winter, “It is summer in Argentina.”

It shuts them up as they are now convinced I am crazy. Unfortunately, I probably am not. However, here is a simple explanation, not into the cause, but how it works.

You have built a pendulum which is nicely swinging over a piece of paper with marks from 0 to 10 on both sides. 0 would be the position of the pendulum at rest. It is swinging between -2 and 2. It will keep swinging there forever because you added a motor to keep it swinging there.

Along comes your friend and hits the table knocking it to 8. It overrides the motor and swings back to -7 and ¾ as it tries to return to the -2/2 position it is programmed to swing to for eternity. It is going to take a while for that motor to get it back to -2/2.

This is what happened to the earth. We, or something, knocked the table. Now the summers are hotter than normal and no shock, the winters are colder as the earth tries to get back to normal.

But, this is not Global Warming. This has happened many times in the past with mini-ice ages and sudden warmings. The historical evidence is overwhelming.

When our friend knocked the table this time, something new happened. The stand the pendulum was attached to moved from 0 to 1. So now even when the motor takes the pendulum to a -2/2 swing eventually, it will now be a -1/3 swing. This is Global Warming. The earth can never return to the previous range of temperatures because we moved the default setting.

Now let's build a model of some place on earth. There are mountains, plateaus, rivers, flat areas, hilly areas, and even a few crevices. Along comes our clumsy friend and spills his super sized coffee on our model. Coffee is everywhere but the top of the mountains and plateaus. It is heading for the rivers and crevices but they were already full so it covers the flat areas. Our model is forever changed.

This is weather. There are all sorts of things that cause the weather here to be different from the weather a mile away. It flows and swirls. This is why the models for Global Warming are averages but within the area of the average, the effect may not be seen. Whereas Florida, in the Atlantic Ocean, is still the same size, whole islands in the Philippines, in the Pacific Ocean, are sinking fast and a couple are gone. Although the Atlantic Ocean is higher than the Pacific, and pundits would point out Florida should be one sinking fast, they fail to note the north oceans are higher than the south oceans, so the effects are felt in the southern hemispheres first and Florida is in the Northern Hemisphere.

This is how our friend in the first paragraph was easily mislead. There is simply more to the world than the city he lives in. Weather is a complex system that ebbs and flows over and around, as are the oceans. This is why we do averages. It doesn't matter what the cause of Global Warming is, the zero point has moved and it isn't going back. That is what they call the point of no return.

So what IS the big deal about a few degrees.

All life on earth is basically teetering on the lives of a few tiny creatures and plants that feed larger ones and so forth. It is one huge game of Jinga. Pull the bottom plank out and eventually the whole thing falls down. These tiny creatures and plants survive in a very narrow range of environment deep within the oceans and earth. When you move the zero point, you start killing them and then gradually or fast at this point, the creatures that eat them die and all the way up the food chain until finally, we die.

And it is not just food. Diseases that exist only in tropical areas, suddenly find it nice and comfy in what were less tropical areas. Take Montezuma's Revenge for example. It lives happily in Mexico. The Mexicans are immune to it having been born there to immune parents but any tourist will tell you that evil bug is waiting for you to touch the water. Now, what if it finds a comfy spot in Texas and Florida because they are now hotter, sort of like Mexico. That could cause a lot of the elderly and young to die from it because it is a nasty bug. Do you see how this works now? Without immunity to European bugs, the Spanish almost wiped out the Mayans and Aztecs without even trying. Now they may almost wipe us out. Some would call it Karma but I call it Global Warming. I know what awaits you in those hot steaming places. I have lived there. I am immune.

Know your friendly mosquito? They really love you. Most of those bloodsuckers die or hibernate somewhat successfully all winter. Without winter, they breed and multiple all year and now the more tropical, vicious ones have moved into the south from the Caribbean and Central America. They also carry diseases.

So it's not just a matter turning the AC down cooler or buying one, you now have new neighbors and they really aren't human but they love the new food: YOU.

Yes, Global Warming is as serious as leaving your kids and grandkids an uninhabitable planet, so wake up. The people you follow claiming it doesn't exist, know it does. Actions speak louder than words. Who do you find among their ranks? You find trophy hunters killing endangered species. How do you think they justify that? Oh, they are just thinning the herd because Global Warming is going to kill them anyway. You find the cruelest people harming the weakest of us, the handicapped, elderly and poor. How do they sleep at night? Oh, very well because a fast death is better than a slow death from the effects of Global Warming. You find the proponents of fossil fuels trying to pump them out as fast and dirty as they can because why not, the whole planet is dying so make those billions while you can. Live it up fellows, there really is no tomorrow. Why research diseases when we are going extinct? Why support the arts when there will no one here to see them? Why not endless war when people are just going to die anyway? We can play with people's lives because they are dying, they just don't know it. We will be living with our kids in underground bunkers, growing our own food with super filters for water and air and climate controlled temperatures because we have the money and you don't.

Yes, if they can just keep pulling the wool over a large chunk of the people in the world's eyes, they can reduce the population so much they don't have to worry about anyone storming the old bunker when the surface is uninhabitable, medicines are used up, food is gone and people can't breathe.

You might want to think about that before your next political rally. No one is going to tell you the real truth except a few high school students who have figured out what this Boomer has because that next rally might turn into something closer to a riot complete with a French solution and the people arriving in the impressive jet as God's chosen, know it. They don't care about you because they are in save my ASSets mode. They know exactly what is coming and if they can just get enough billions, they can survive.

Hoarding, dear ones, is a reaction to scarcity, real or perceived. These guys have never know a moment in their lives when they couldn't have or buy anything they wanted, so the scarcity must be perceived as coming and where would they get that idea in a world in which they have so much money they and several generations down the road couldn't spend it all if they started right now? Think about that for a moment when you start to deny Global Warming.

If you had a product and someone told you there was no scenario in which anyone would buy your product in ten years, would you sell it all off right now for a profit and invest in a new product that would sell or would you start making all of it you possibly could? Now why would the fossil fuel companies ramp up their production to unimaginable levels when they knew this? Why wouldn't they invest in solar, wind and water power? It's almost like they expected the world to end...........  

The First and Only Pagan Prosperity Ministry

As I scroll Facebook all I seem to see is this  and that minister, most of which seem to be wearing ill fitting human skin suits, declaring the God said to kill, maim, vote for or sent money to them. Oddly, I never see a pagan saying this, You see, once upon a time, a Viking got the great idea that he would tell the tribe his God told him to get extra mead at the next meal.
He stepped into the center the of the village and proclaimed, "Last night Thor told me...."
There was loud clap of thunder, a blinding flash of lightning and all that remained in the center of the  village was a small pile of ashes.
A thundering voice proclaimed, "If I want you to know something, I'll tell you. Now leave me alone."
And that was the first and last Pagan Prosperity Ministry.
Now, have you ever wondered why your God seems to speak through crazy old men and women with dreams of jello cities? Perhaps it's just psychosis and your gullibility.
As for me, I can figure things out for myself without any God's help. I am a smart, responsible human being and I am designed to solve problems. So are you, by the way.

Old Goals

It's that time of year that Druids look back over their life and see if they have met their goals. At 68, I have quite a distance to look. Let's see memory, what were my goals?

I wanted about 10-15 acres with a dozen avocado and mango trees each plus a large garden capable of feeding us. A house big enough to house my and George's work would have been nice. Perhaps a smaller house for retreats and classes would have supported the taxes and spread the word a lot farther. I wanted to continue publishing Witch Way?/Which Way? I wanted us to be independent enough to pursue our studies. I wanted to have my cats.

What did I get?

I can say I met none of those goals except having the cats. Life got in the way and we got stuck here because of family loyalty. That is something I will not have in any future lives if condemned to return. There was just too damned much work staying afloat to do anything but swim madly.

So if I were to give you any advice, it would be to chuck everything and follow your dreams. Your main loyalty in this life has to be to yourself because I will guarantee, no one is going to be loyal to you.

Everyone always asks why they are here. I think you know the answer but you hide it under family obligations, making money, surviving, being social responsible. From childhood you are taught to do what is best for the family but do they ever do what is best for you? Every aspect of society is designed so if you aren't the rich ruling class, you have to take care of family. Have as many little slaves as you can pop out to help with the work load which increases with each child. You don't see the ruling class with 8 kids. You get work as soon as you can to help out with the family. The other class helps their children with their dreams and ideas. The deck is not only stacked against you, but you aren't playing a game, you are following orders. There isn't even a deck, just rules.

Some day, maybe, the rest of us will realize we don't own our children. We can't live through them because we were forced to do what we didn't want to for the family. We are just producing the same lock stepping robots to continue to underestimate their value and talents to be exploited by someone living their dream because they inherited the money.

When the revolution comes, perhaps we will learn to value people for themselves rather than pieces of gold. You may think you are so much better than everyone else, until the garbage isn't picked up, your clothes don't get cleaned and the farmer goes on holiday. Suddenly, those laborers have value, perhaps more than you.

My new goal: trying to get out of bed in the morning.