My brain is cloudy, my soul is upside down
Yeah, my brain is cloudy, my soul is upside down
When I get that low down feeling
I know the blues must be some place around
Brain Cloudy Blues by Bob Willis and His Texas Playboys
Forgive my absence. A combination of a couple of weeks through the mountains of Colorado and Utah, paint fumes (we had the whole house repainted and some remodeling done), information overload, and just plain old writer’s block has significantly reduced my output for the past two months. I’ve been writing but it usually devolves into unfocused garbage so I have a ton of future manure (though climate czar John Kerry will have none of it).
I rant every night… at the TV of course. Yes, I still have Fox News on in the background despite their inglorious dumping of their only moneymaker—they’ve suffered a collapse in viewership, if you didn’t know—and if there was anything else I could put on in the background, I would. Sometimes an Astros’ game is on so that’s a good substitute, though MLB is quickly turning my attention elsewhere (their idiotic “boycott” of Atlanta, their constant punishment of their players for expressing wrongthink, and their “inclusiveness” of demonic-like groups to their ballparks has me about to turn it off for good). I am certain that by year’s end, I will no longer watch anything that I used to. The NFL lost me two decades ago and the NBA followed suit ten years later. My second love, college football, is in the process of self-destruction. There is coming the day when my television will be a dust trap. (News and sports: about the only things I watch.)
Back to ranting… It does me good to vent. The combination of needing an escape and my absolute feeling of helplessness, as I witness what I believe to be the destruction of our current civilization, is what pushed me into writing on politics and anything else that grabs my attention. It’s been over a year and a half since I started and as long as you believe I can offer you something to think about, I’ll keep doing it.
But back to the ranting thing…
The debt ceiling charade was something I found to be disingenuous. Why didn’t Republicans say that the only reason they are fighting the debt ceiling, and other associated nonsense, is that this type of behavior was what got us here in the first place? The Democrats don’t care. That’s why. And, frankly, the Republicans don’t care either.
It has now become impossible to pay off the national debt as the interest payments alone have begun to eclipse discretionary spending. And to top it off, Medicare and Social Security will soon be insolvent.
The Social Security and Medicare Trustees just released their annual reports on the financial status of the Social Security and Medicare programs over the next 75 years. The Trustees project that the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund will be insolvent by 2031 and the Social Security trust funds by 2034. Trust fund solutions are needed sooner rather than later to prevent across-the-board benefit cuts or abrupt changes to tax or benefit levels.
As my slow march to decrepitude is at half double-time trot, Social Security and Medicare are starting to become a new concern of mine, and every couple of years there is the gnashing of teeth about the budget, the debt ceiling, and social welfare solvency. Congress, and the particular president at any given time, are accused of always kicking the can down the road. Well, the road is a dead-end alley and the can just smashed into the proverbial brick wall.
Up In Arms
Just one topic to underscore the above: Joe Biden’s foreign/military policy high points since 2021. First (because it’s the most costly), Ukraine. According to the Davos-centric group, the Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. support of Ukraine has topped $77 billion (with a “b”) through February of 2023. That’s more than double the annual NASA budget. The European Union—that would be, in theory, the entity with the most to gain from this adventure—only sends in half that much, and about what we pay for NASA. We could really beef up NASA if it weren’t for those damned Ukraines.
Second, the disastrous pull out in Afghanistan: We spent more than $2 trillion (with a “t”) in our 20-year war in both—as Donald Trump would say—shitholes. So, in a way, what we left behind was a bargain. It had been reported that the amount was over $86 billion but that figure was erroneous since that was the total spent for all military aid to the Afghan army during the entire war; the weapons and other paraphernalia cost closer to $7 billion. Let’s see what $7 billion will buy you these days:
…up to 22,174 Humvee vehicles, nearly 1,000 armored vehicles, 64,363 machine guns, and 42,000 pick-up trucks and SUVs. So, too, the list of allegedly abandoned weaponry includes up to 358,530 assault rifles, 126,295 pistols, and nearly 200 artillery units. Oh, and the Taliban will likely inherit state-of-the-art military helicopters, warplanes, and other aircraft from the US, too…
“The Taliban now has more Black Hawk helicopters than 85% of the countries in the world,” Congressman Jim Banks, a veteran, lamented. “But it's not just weapons. They have night vision goggles, body armor, and unbelievably, the Taliban now has biometric devices which have the fingerprints, eye scans and biographical information of all of the Afghans who helped us and were on our side over the last 20 years. There is no plan by the administration to get those weapons back. There is no plan to account for any of this equipment or these weapons.”
Additionally, a Mexican news outlet, Milenio, showed a video of a Gulf cartel member of a military unit—called the Scorpions—carrying a U.S.-manufactured Javelin rocket launcher along with his AK-47. The report suggests that the rocket system can be purchased on the black market for $20,000 to $60,000 (I think I might buy one of those instead of a new car. It would be easier to get through traffic.). More than likely, this came from one of our recent weapons dump in either Afghanistan or Ukraine.
So, we’re arming a gangster regime in Ukraine, a gangster regime in Afghanistan, and a gangster regime in Mexico. I don’t see a damned thing that could go wrong with this scenario. And we’re paying for it.
And now… On to Climate Change!
As an aside, regardless of whether you believe in the conspiracy theory or not, CO2 cannot be the cause of whatever make-believe warming is reported. Carbon dioxide is a heavy gas, meaning it doesn’t mix in the atmosphere to blanket the earth in its warm embrace. When it is heated—such as during the day, when the sun is out—it rises from the ground and as it cools at night, it falls back to the near-surface. Think of a hot-air balloon. It contains no more or no less heating properties than any other trace gas in our atmosphere.
While oxygen is necessary for most life on Earth, the majority of Earth’s atmosphere is not oxygen. Earth’s atmosphere is composed of about 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, 0.9 percent argon, and 0.1 percent other gases. Trace amounts of carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, and neon are some of the other gases that make up the remaining 0.1 percent. [emphasis added]
Carbon dioxide makes up only 0.03% of our atmosphere. No doubt you’ve heard this before but it is always interesting to keep that in mind when you listen to the fear-mongers mongering fear:
Captain Green and The Red Dirt Cowgirl
This dynamic duo has been a pox on our society for a very long time—almost as long as I’ve been on the planet. I don’t really know how to respond to these two bullshit artists but let’s smell what they have to say anyway.
"And I refuse to call it climate change anymore," Kerry went on. "It's not change; it's a crisis[!] [emphasis mine]. We're beyond the concept of 'just change and we can manage the change.' And without action, millions of lives and livelihoods are going to be at risk.
"There are scientists [that] will tell you today that the probability of a large portion of Africa that is a huge food supplier to the continent [which continent?] could implode in terms of its agricultural capacity, if we don't get control of what we're doing. [Kind of like what you did in Sri Lanka.]
"15 million people are dying every single year around this planet as a consequence of greenhouse gas emissions," Kerry continued. "In the atmosphere in the air, which travels around at [sic] drops in the form of pollution, and is warming the ocean at record rates changing the chemistry of the ocean itself. [Huh?]
"Without action, millions of lives and [the] livelihood of the planet is in parts of the world climate crisis has now got growth in agricultural yields but as much as 40 percent. And at the same time food systems themselves contribute significant amount of emissions just in the way in which we do the things we've been doing," Kerry cautioned. [emphasis mine] [His Ivy League degree didn’t improve his syntax. Should have taken Kamala up on her offer to coach him when he performs a speech.]
Kerry, of course, wants to end private farming because, well, farmers use too much bullshit (i.e. fertilizer) to feed the world. He thinks that Sri Lanka (a nation that bought into Herr Doctor Schwab’s Great Reset and ended up starving and disintegrating into chaos—watch out Netherlands!) is a great example of what can be accomplished in order to save the world by 2030. But where the hell does he come up with these statistics that can’t be proven? Fifteen million die each year because of Climate Change Crisis!? At least he didn't throw in the ubiquitous “existential threat”.
How many politicians, how many scientists, how many people have stood up and said, "This is existential for us on this planet"? Existential. That means life and death. And the question is, are we behaving as if it is? And the answer is no.
Now let’s hear what the Red Dirt Cowgirl has to say:
Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival, Hanoi Jane consulted her Little Red Book and pronounced that white supremacist men and the “patriarchy” are killing us all.
"This is serious," she said… "We’ve got about seven, eight years to cut ourselves in half of what we use of fossil fuels, and unfortunately, the people that have the least responsibility for it are hit the hardest—Global South, people on islands, poor people of color. [But poor people of no color are going to do just fine. And why is that? Because they’re white supremacists. Of course. Need you ask?] It is a tragedy that we have to absolutely stop. We have to arrest and jail those men—they’re all men..."
"It’s good for us all to realize, there would be no climate crisis if there was no racism. There would be no climate crisis if there was no patriarchy. A mindset that sees things in a hierarchical way. White men are the things that matter and then everything else (is) at the bottom." [emphasis mine] [And her syntax isn’t any better that her cohort’s.]
So, after we cut ourselves in half we need to leave the island. Once we’ve left Gilligan behind—he’s a white dude so he stays—we need to go on a hunt for other white dudes and lock ‘em up. Sounds like a sound plan to me.
Of course, has Hanoi Jane thought about the skin color of Herr Doktor Schwab and the other megalomaniacs at the World Economic Forum, that she so adores? If she’s up for it, I’ll join her in her hunt for white men doing irreparable harm to the world. We can start with the good Doktor and move on to Bill Gates, and Larry Fink, and Georgie Soros, and… Lock ‘em all up.
And thanks for letting me rant a bit… We’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming soon.
[Correction: Sir Lanka has been changed to Sri Lanka to reflect the nation’s actual name. There was no knight named Sir Lanka at Camelot.]