open phones

[Tad Eareckson]

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

Meaning anyone I have or would consider having as a friend WILL be voting and will be voting to get that fascist sociopathic piece of shit we currently have in the White House out of the White House and on his way towards a couple thousand years in a maximum security federal prison to cover a few of the atrocities he's perpetrated on the nation, hemisphere, planet.

Mask wearing can bring the virus under control in 4-8 weeks. Anyone thinking we'll be any closer, to being in control, two months from now?

We could've had it under control before it got out of control - with something other than total shit for leadership.

I'm only at risk grocery shopping. The first time I went in the mask era I was scared shitless before entry. I was thinking that I could pull a minor screw-up (or maybe even not) and end up on an irrevocable several week path to death. But after a couple cycles I wasn't any more scared than I would be on a typical landing approach.

After a month or so I asked a Safeway employee how many - if any - of his colleagues had gotten sick. He thought for a second or two and replied nobody. I said, "Wow. With the amount of exposure you guys get that's pretty reassuring." He agreed.

At that point I was pretty optimistic that we'd be able to start ratcheting down in a couple months. But then the Bob side of the equation started kicking into high gear and here we are.

On the one hand I resent the neutralization of the care and efforts I've taken to keep myself and others with whom I've been in close contact safe. But on the other if this does for the gene pool what we'd predict/hope it to...

[Tad Eareckson]

http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=62681
Safer at Home?

Col Rushton - 2020/08/15 02:16:02 UTC

Well, your current "machine" is trying by hook or by crook to help its citizens.

When I think I have seen all of the ugly side of American politics-no-something else will lower the bar- like a scene from a dictatorship of a third world country is discovered!

If your willfully proud ignorant won't see it, I really hope the rest of you guys can at least pick the lesser of two evils in Nov and then bring in preferential voting for your next election and finally change the "machine" to one that is based on people first not greed based..

http://ozreport.com/forum/files/snapshot_postbox_removal_346.jpg

That's EXACTLY what we have going on here.

Brad Gryder - 2020/08/16 02:03:18 UTC

Foreigners who meddle in the affairs of the USA are indeed "safer at home".

Go fuck yourself, Brad. We're all breathing the same air, subject to the same sea level rises and related effects, watching the same mass extinctions.

http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=31052
Poll on weaklinks

Brad Gryder - 2013/02/21 23:25:31 UTC

There's also a way to swing your body way outside the control frame so it stays up there while you reach out with one hand and release. Come on - do some pushups this winter. See if you can advance up to some one-arm pushups.

About what we'd expect.

[Tad Eareckson]

Mike Lake sighted on The Davis Show 2020/08/22 23:15:58 UTC. (Last active on Kite Strings 2017/05/28 21:19:04 UTC.) Good to know that he's / you're still kicking.

[Tad Eareckson]

http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=63136
Bringing in the NTSB

Col Rushton - 2020/07/08 21:06:06 UTC

I reckon we all would agree the politicians of most descriptions or "isms" are more often than not part of the elite. They certainly manage themselves very well while supposedly managing our interests

It's no surprise politicians have the lowest trust in my Australia ever and still dropping.

We have basically a social democratic capitalist system, still some major corruption and other issues, it gives us some more basic human principles than others however still imperfect.

To try to understand the way the USA elects which party/people represent your federal constitutional republic-

Sometimes a comedian can explain things better ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MykMQfmLIro

[Tad Eareckson]

Medical update...

My bug continued migrating all the way down my neck then started creeping out onto my shoulder. I'm pretty sure it was enlarging a bit and was terrified that it would just keep taking over real estate but that didn't happen to any real problematic degree. But it was still making life significant hell.

Then right about 2020/08/03 things rather abruptly started getting not bad. It started looking like it was finally healing. But not quite.

Now I have three little problem spots spanning about an inch and a half traveling back inboard and down a bit along my collarbone. But compared to my situation before this shit's negligible - a bit annoying/irritating versus agonizing/crippling. Still have to do a bit of descabbing and draining. Sometimes seems to be getting a bit worse but it has a long way to go before I start complaining.

I have a white zebra stripe running down the right side of my neck recording the path. Actually have two. The other one's running fore parallel and is narrower and shorter. I can only think it was a leftover from a previous and milder event that I hadn't noticed before.

2020/06/26 late evening. I'd done some yard work that day and the previous. Deer Ticks had been on my mind but I didn't think I'd been in any significant risk situations. Felt something at the top of my left calf, inner side, just above the top edge of my compression stocking / just below the knee. Little dark pinhead size thing. First time I'd seen one.

Much earlier in life I'd had my share of Wood Ticks. Pull them off, no big deal. This one... Area a bit inflamed, pulled it off, started squeezing an astonishing volume of bloody goo out of the puncture. Got on the web and the inflammation pattern was looking a fair bit like Lyme Disease. Next/Saturday morning - more so.

Got on the phone to Kaiser Permanente and they were thinking same. Picked up and swallowed a dose of doxycycline, that seemed to quickly deal with the probable Lyme. But it soon became apparent that I had a local infection very similar to my Staphylococcus aureus neck bug. It's been an often painful mess ever since but not crippling, expanding, migrating. May have started getting a bit better recently.

Just found out that deer are not vectors for Lyme Disease - they're immune. Mice, chipmunks, shrews, birds are listed. (Humans too I'd guess.) Thus we're no longer supposed to be calling them Deer Ticks. Gotta train myself to say "Blacklegged".

Also just found out that Lyme Disease has absolutely nothing to do with SE Connecticut (near to where I did my grade school years). It does the whole Northern Hemisphere. Old Lyme is just where they first figured out in 1975 that it wasn't a flavor of arthritis.

Got a flu shot Friday. Really looking forward to the day when we can all start getting COVID shots. Also to the one when we get a shot at dealing with the lethal corrosive infection fascist assholes like Bob helped install in the White House.

[Tad Eareckson]

Regardless of how this turns out it's horrifying to see the way after four years of being on the biggest stage on the planet that something like that can have the support of nearly half the electorate of the most powerful nation on the planet (conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal).

Guess if I'd been born black I'd have gotten this the better part of six decades ago.

[Tad Eareckson]

You're fired.

[TheFjordflier]

I think most of the free world would give you a thumbs up for that statement

[Tad Eareckson]

Posted that right after I thought of it. And a second after I thought of it I knew that a few million others would've already thought of and posted the same thing but I didn't check before I got mine in.

Had a lot of miserable hours following the election when the unthinkable remained a possibility. And boy am I hoping that this sociopath will be properly dealt with for some percentage of the shit he's been able to get away with for pretty much his entire existence. Ditto for his co-conspirators, enablers, aiders, abettors. Hopefully he'll be behind bars when his next five or six opportunities to regain the White House come around. And I have a feeling that if that happens we won't be hearing much in the way of outcry from the Republican establishment.

And I'm real tired of seeing assholes put in that office after substantial popular vote losses to the other top candidate with lotsa help from voter suppression tactics. Conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal? Not really. And our Civil War didn't do all that much to change that situation. You can see a pretty good pattern of the CSA remaining in the red/blue states map.

One silver lining to this pandemic is that it gave a boost to mail-in balloting and that's a substantial weapon against voter suppression - which includes Election Day being the first Tuesday after the first Monday in the month of November 'cause that's when all the farmers were gonna be in town.

Maryland was a no-brainer Biden and isn't a suppression state. (And we currently have a Republican governor whom nobody seems to hate much.) My vote wasn't gonna matter (like it would've in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania) but I treated it as if it would and wasn't gonna take any unnecessary chances - like getting hit by a truck prior to 2020/11/03 or on my way to my assigned voter location. And the process wasn't all that easy even though the hurdles weren't by design.

Registered and applied online and soon received some snailmail which contained some ambiguous language which indicated that my ballot would become available online shortly. After shortly had long since come and gone I did a more thorough reading and discovered that I needed to go back online and jump through a few more hoops then wait a little longer.

2020/10/13 back online; clicked to blackened all the proper ovals; downloaded the critical PDFs then had to figure out how to get my laptop talking to a printer (although I could've opted for more snailmail).

2020/10/23 signed, dated, folded, sealed; hit a dropbox a little off the path to another errand; checked online to verify that they had it.

What a relief it was to watch the victory rally in Wilmington last evening. Got the same sorta feeling I did from:

08-19
http://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5277/30076449505_1f6ed2f804_o.png


'cept with the scale multiplied by a billion or so.

[Tad Eareckson]

First off... Happy Birthday Kite Strings - a decade since Zack lit it up 2010/11/23 05:23:34 UTC.

Medical update...

Good news... My neck bug issue was pretty much over by early last month, totally resolved not long thereafter.

Not so good news...

- Tick bite site area is something of a mess - two largish lesions affecting a fair bit of real estate.

- I've been having for many years minor but frequent outbreaks of what I now realize was this bug in the crease areas behind both ears. But maybe early this month one behind my left ear decided to get serious and has spread down to the upper area of my jaw.

Still I'm in substantially better shape than I was during most of the eighteen month reign of the neck origin problem but the gap may be closing. Seems to be an arms race dynamic going on between the bug and my immunization system.

And speaking of bugs...

I hope everybody's managing to stay alive through the pandemic. My highest level of exposure is grocery shopping - but everybody's wearing masks, employees aren't getting sick, I figure my personal risk is zilch.

But fuck all the personal freedom lovers who refuse to wear masks and won't get vaccinated when the option becomes available. It would be great if all you were doing was a possible favor for the gene pool but there's no telling where the bugs you spread are gonna end up and what the costs will have been. It wasn't Donnell who ever paid much of a price for his Reliable Release / Infallible Weak Link combo.