According to the old adage, "If you can't think of anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.'' And so I might be done here since I can't think of anything nice to say. Rampant racism, mass shootings, war, global disease, political strife and a literal dummy in the White House make it hard to see a bright side.
Maybe tomorrow when it stops raining I'll feel more optimistic. Oh well, at least the cartoon is funny.
Even though his presidency ended four months ago, some people are still obsessing over Donald Trump. When I say some people, I mean Anderson Cooper and Rachel Maddow, two of the Devil's offspring living among us whose TV ratings have plummeted in recent months. Still, they can't stop trying to resurrect the old glory days when their nightly TV broadcasts were all about, and only about, the many ills of Donald Trump. He was the gift that kept on giving.
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| Kamala's response to not visiting the border. |
We can all agree that's really old news. Maybe the media should consider changing their focus to "Beige Woman Worse," since Kamala Harris, VP and presidentially-appointed "immigration czar," has yet to visit our southern border with Mexico, now overrun with illegal immigrants seeking to gain entry:
According to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, “The Texas Department of Public Safety patrols the border every single day. And they have seen an 800 percent increase in the amount of fentanyl coming across the border. They seized this year enough fentanyl to kill every man, woman and child in the entire state of New York,” said Abbott last Sunday in a televised interview.
How annoying. I guess Trump got some things right despite his bad hair.
If you want to spend a little more, you could get me an apron ($27.95) with the same image on it so while I'm cooking dinner or baking cookies I can still remember the horrible state of affairs that exists today in America.
What fun!
Here in Maine, the law mandated by our Governor, a nice enough middle-aged lady of no special talent, commands face masks be worn until tomorrow, May 24, at which point all the Covid germs will magically cease and desist.
And so the compliant people who wear face masks today, even when it's brutally hot, even when they are spending time outdoors, even when they are hiking alone on a wooded path or driving alone in their cars with the windows rolled up -- those are today's willing executioners. The more annoying among them try to guilt everyone else into doing the same, as if you personally are causing the deaths of hundreds of old people in nursing homes, like you're some kind of Andrew Cuomo.
Oh well, at least they are easy to spot.
As a Jew myself, I don't hate the Palestinians, or any Arabs for that matter. My hatred runs only to members of the media. I would celebrate the total annihilation of those people who profit by fanning the flames of hatred that exist between blacks and whites, citizens and police, Democrats and Republicans, mask-wearers and anti-vaxxers, and all groups of people who differ philosophically, thereby increasing their ratings and thus their incomes. Despite the fact that they hold themselves in high esteem, they are the true Enemies of the State.
—Jordanian Islamic Scholar Ahmad Al-Shahrouri
Yarmouk TV (Jordan), March 8, 2020
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| Kamala Harris t-shirt exploiting her race. |
Americas wackiest state, full of lefty loonies, is now recommending that teachers K-12 use as a teaching guide a document entitled, "A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction." It professes things like telling a student he got the wrong answer is racist. Also racist is insisting that students get the right answer, and that there is only one right answer. Students having to show their work -- racist. Getting graded on their knowledge -- also racist.
Calculus is out of the question for them. So-called "gifted and talented programs'' are hideously racist, since the very fact that some are called gifted implies that others are not. Clearly racist, since most of the kids in those classes are not black. ("Hey, who you callin' not gifted? You better watch your mouth!")
In case you still need it, this is just more proof that lefties consider blacks and other people of color to be helpless dummies who need looking after. And not just the kids but adults too: After all, they can't get a voter I.D. card, are incapable of getting themselves to the polls on Election Day, and if they do manage to get themselves there, they are too clueless to pack water or snacks in case of a long wait.
It's beyond insulting. I am stymied as to how any black person could vote Democratic after Hillary Clinton told a black radio talk show host that she "always carries a bottle of hot sauce in her purse."
Getting vaccinated might protect you from getting Covid. Or it might not.
Wearing a face mask might protect you from getting Covid. Or it might not.
Children don't get the disease. But some do.
Six feet of distance between people is necessary to avoid getting Covid. Or maybe it's three feet. Or maybe it's more than six feet, nobody knows for sure.
Current vaccines available in the US protect will you from the variants from abroad. But not the one from India.
Once you get Covid you can't get it again. Except you might.
One thing for sure that Simon says is, ''Be a good citizen and do as we say without question so we can continue getting our paychecks and lifetime pensions without looking like fools.''
Being a registered Independent, meaning my thoughts are self-generated rather than dictated to me by Anderson Cooper or Rachel Maddow, I am tiring of hearing how Trump "bungled the response'' to the coronavirus. I was there, and it seemed to me he did as much as anyone humanly could to go after an unknown virus that came out of nowhere, or China if you're a realist. By the time Trump left office, one million doses of the vaccine had been administered, and enough doses for the entire nation were on order, bought and paid for. And that was less than a year after the onset of the pandemic, and Anthony Fauci's prediction that it would take four years to develop a vaccine.
Yet just a few days ago a close friend of mine said that "everyone knows Trump did nothing" about the virus. And another friend told me that "all Republicans are anti-vaxxers who don't wear masks." Which is poppycock plain and simple since I know many Republicans who eagerly were vaccinated and do wear masks, my husband among them.
I can certainly handle a little misinformation from my friends, especially if it makes them happy, so I shrug it off, even though part of me thinks that if we lived in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, many of them would be the ones directing me to the showers. (Except Teresa and Jim, who would hide me in their basement.) Anyway, all of this should stop soon since Biden said he would "unite the country.'' I can't wait.
In the very next paragraph, we are told: "The fully vaccinated should continue to wear a mask while traveling by plane, bus or train.'' WTF?
Further muddying of the waters comes from the long-held and greatly repeated canard that most viruses and other germs do not spread easily on flights because of how the air circulates and is filtered on airplanes. You know, what with all the HEPA filters and such.
My advice: Stay at home, preferably in bed under the covers with a mask on, until the next election.
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| Ashley reading yesterday's post |
These days it's hard to get a debate going. Liberals are incapable of seeing any side of an issue but their own. Added to that is their complete lack of a sense of humor and the inability to recognize sarcasm when it hits them in the face.
Last year I wrote a short, humorous essay about how my husband was obsessed with checking his temperature and lung capacity daily at the start of the pandemic. I referred to the thermometer and pulse oximeter he used as his ''pandemic playthings.'' The editor of the website where the article ran used that as the title. Wouldn't you know that some liberal lady on her high horse had a cow over it, writing in that I obviously was not taking the pandemic seriously and thus I must suck. (Suck is my word, she said something else I can't remember now but to that effect.)
Liberals need to take a chill pill every morning with a glass of orange juice. It would greatly help the country.
Why are Uber and Lyft participating with the government by giving free rides to people who need transportation to get shot? How come none of this has ever been done before with any other vaccine?
What does it say that colleges will not admit students who have not been vaccinated? What if airlines refuse to fly people who have not been vaccinated? Then trains, and buses! How about if we need a booster shot every year?
What is really being done to us? Are we being turned into a nation of compliant, brainless sheep?
Have you finally noticed that Dr. Anthony Fauci is a horse's ass and yet we are supposed to follow his advice?
Why do we still need to wear masks after we have been vaccinated? Do masks do anything at all or are they just another way to make us feel controlled by the government?
Wake up people.
It's a crying shame. The famous old saying, ''Youth is wasted on the young,'' pales in comparison to ''Life is wasted on humanity.''
This morning's bleak outlook was fostered by my mistake of logging on to my computer. I could kick myself for doing it since it helps nobody, least of all me. Here at my house things are beautiful, peaceful and serene with nary an explosive in sight. Oh, there was a tick crawling on my bathrobe and that totally freaked me out for awhile but I got over it. (FYI, the bathrobe is currently in the washing machine.)
Still, in Maine spring is finally here, the flowers are blooming, the birds are chirping, and the sun is shining. It's only somewhere else that people are bloodied and dying, bombs are tearing apart bodies and lives and throngs of angry men in flip-flops and tattered clothing are hurling bricks and rocks at a variety of enemies.
I have got to unplug before I go crazier.
Okay, so maybe not. Not wanting to rush to judgement, I stopped to consider whether Bill and Melinda's breakup could impact my life in any way. Or anyone's life in any way besides the members of the Gates family. I decided that no, it could not.
Outside of the pandemic, most of the so-called news has nothing to do with me, or any of us for that matter. Reading about foreign wars, refugee boats sinking with scores of people lost, and police shootings in distant cities serves only to heighten our anxiety and increase the number of antidepressant prescriptions written, further fattening the wallets of doctors and pharmaceutical executives, not to mention fueling more suicides and drug overdoses.
Gardening in your own backyard is a far safer, and healthier, bet. My daffodils are in full chaotic bloom and the clematis and hostas are already showing up!
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| Some of the locals after they have been zombified. |
While admittedly not for everyone, I found Shaun of the Dead to be truly hysterical. And if you're stuck in the middle of a pandemic with all the usual late-night venues for relaxation out of commission, a movie on TV is about the best you can do. Released in 2004 by British director Edgar Wright, and starring British actors (Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield) I never saw before, I was hugely entertained, although their thick British accents obscured much of the dialog and thus may require a second viewing.
The plot is simple: A virus, much worse than the one we are now living through, has infected the world and people are getting horribly sick, then dying, then coming back to life as zombies. They are pretty gross to look at and their behavior is even worse: They tear your heart out, or eat your liver, or bite your neck and chomp on your flesh. The only way to kill them forever is to remove their brains, no easy task for the layman. The gore is hard to take and between laughs I did cover my eyes a lot.
Amidst this chaos is a simple story about Shaun, a 30-something loser who hates his dreary job, his girlfriend breaks up with him, and his best friend is a slacker who's camped out on his couch and who everyone else in his social circle hates. They are all thrust together in an effort to escape the growing number of zombies who seem to be everywhere, shuffling through the streets of London like extras in Michael Jackson's Thriller but without the dance skills. Shaun's mother and stepfather (Bill Nighy) are along for some added pathos.
If you can tolerate all the (fake) blood and guts, it's a riot. And besides, it's worse than Covid, although shorter in duration. After six months the virus is gone and so are all the zombies.
Another such tool to guard against hatred from strangers and friends alike is posting your vaccination card online, or better yet --posting a video of you getting it, or adding a frame to your Facebook profile picture that says you were vaccinated.
You can be a wife-beater, rapist, or drunken, low-life drug addict, but if you do those two things and also say Fox News sucks you are seen as a ''good person'' in the eyes of those misguided and shallow people who seem to have grabbed the wheel of society.
Here are my truths: I am an anti-vaxxer who got vaccinated because I'm not stupid. I watch Fox News (along with all the other TV networks). I don't have a sign on my lawn saying anything, but if I did it would say Jewish Lives Matter. I think transgender people have a mental illness. My pronouns are Oy, Vay and Is mere.
Correction -- I do have a sign on my lawn. It says, ''CAUTION, PESTICIDE APPLICATION, KEEP OFF UNTIL DRY, LUCAS TREE EXPERT CO."
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| Jamie Lee today, unretoched. |
So there I was, awash in the kind of mindless trash that's so prevalent on the internet, when in the middle of an interview with the actress today, she mentioned her two favorite sayings: ''Compare and despair'' and ''Nothing changes unless something changes.''
My head exploded. Both of those phrases hit home for me in a deep way. I decided right then and there to put them both into practice. So far so good.
The definition of "woke" these days is "alert to injustice in society, especially racism." That's a crock. What it really means is, "Scared shitless one will do something wrong and be ostracized from society and mocked on Facebook." To avoid that horror people glom onto anything that is "trending," meaning being followed by the masses. After all, the masses, huddled or not, run things.
Anyone who is awake, which is the proper form of the word woke, knows instinctively that wearing your hair in braids does not rob Native Americans of anything. Or that a white person getting a tan does not demean black people or "appropriate" what is theirs, namely dark skin. Or that being able to run and walk on two legs is preferable to being confined to a wheelchair forever, or that fitting comfortably into an airplane seat beats being so fat that you need to buy two seats. Yet "wokeness" means pretending that all of that -- all physical handicaps, morbid obesity, criminal behavior due to a bad childhood and whatever the heck else you can think of that was once considered "abnormal" is to be applauded. And especially that wearing a face mask even after you have been vaccinated for Covid-19 and even if you are driving alone in your car or out hiking in the woods makes you a better person.
Perfectionism is now deplored. Success means you did something bad to get where you are. Having money means you stole it from a poor person. And if you aren't protesting something, you suck. Ironically, it's the woke people who are asleep.
A good friend (who shall remain nameless so as to protect her from scorn) stopped by for a chat. Since I had just heard that some young women were experiencing a new set of formerly unreported negative reactions to the Covid vaccine, and her daughters are in that age group, I mentioned it and asked if her girls had gotten their shots yet. Rather than thank me for passing along some potentially vital information, she asked, "Where did you hear that? FOX News?"
I responded that I had heard it several places, on the radio, on TV and in print, and could not remember which stations, but why would it matter? She said that it was obviously "a Republican thing, I haven't heard it, and Republicans are anti-vaxxers."
But I am, if pressed, a Republican although I am registered as an Independent, and my husband is also a Republican, and so are my cousins Valerie and Glen and their two grown sons and our friend Doug and several work colleagues of my husband, and they have all gotten the vaccine so what could she mean? She said that Tucker Carlson is anti-vaccine and she knows that I watch Tucker.
See, the thing is I can watch Tucker but that has no bearing on what I think, whereas Democrats get their talking points and base their beliefs on the scripts read by Anderson Cooper, Chris Hayes, Fredo Cuomo and Rachel Maddow. And this is where the problem comes in: brain freeze. As they say about any body part, use it or lose it.
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| The crew of the Challenger. |
Famous for having the first "regular person" on board -- 38-year-old elementary school teacher Christa McAuliffe -- the story of the Shuttle Challenger is engrossing even without the dramatic explosion 87 seconds after takeoff. The film opens back when the Shuttle was just an idea, and follows it to its retirement in 2011. Featuring current interviews with key figures from NASA and the Thiokol Corporation, the manufacturer of the failed O-rings on the spacecraft, it's interesting to see them "then and now' in original footage from the earliest days.
Also interesting, and very alarming, is the revelation that more than a few people in high places suspected the doomed flight would fail and yet said nothing in order to ''stay on schedule'' and procure continued government funding for the space program. Despite its sad tale the film is engrossing and fun to watch, showing the long road that astronauts must travel to qualify for space flight. I watched it twice and a third viewing is not out of the question.
Personally I like masks, although I think they have little bearing on whether or not you will contract the virus. Instead masks allow me to hide my true feelings about people and situations, mutter obscenities under my breath without detection, save on lipstick, and most importantly, pick out the idiots among the general public. The first and most obvious group is solo masked drivers, followed closely by solo walkers on an empty street. These are people with serious problems.
It's ironic that in 1957, at the age of 11, I contracted the Asian Flu, a pandemic also originating in that part of the globe (Hong Kong), that had roughly the same impact on the world regarding deaths. It sickened mainly children and teens. I was incredibly ill for days, and my mother had it at the same time which greatly lessened the care I received. I remember wishing to die so I wouldn't have to throw up again.
Dwight Eisenhower was president and he did not shut down schools or businesses, or require people to stay home in order to save lives. Restaurants were not forced to close. Nobody wore masks. This might be because Anthony Fauci was only 17 at the time and not yet wielding any power. Who knows how things would be today if Anthony had succumbed to the Asian Flu back then.
It's hard to believe that what began in 2004 as an innocent tool intended for Harvard college boys to meet attractive coeds on campus ha...
