This just in: I think its time for me to express a bit of appreciation for a few things that I don’t want to take for granted.

Let’s start with this – I’m 63 years old with the mind of a teenager. I know that when I look in a mirror, that old guy looking back is me. But then, I turn away and he no longer exists. He tries to make himself known and its a constant struggle to not give in to him; to say, “I’m getting too old to do things that I used to do.”

Part of my battle is to exercise daily. Knowing myself, there are a couple of things I do to help with this. First, the exercise has to be relatively easy to access. I don’t want to have to drive 20 minutes to a gym. Secondly, I need to track what I do. I have a list of 20 things I try to do daily, half of those are exercises. This list has been maintained for years. And finally, I have to not overdo it. I tend to lock onto something I like and then do that to excess. So…Accessible, Trackable and Moderation.

Now for the gratitude; Gratitude for the conditions that make the above possible.

I have a hiking trail about 200 yards from my house. I can ride a stationary bike on my back porch while overlooking a tidal river. A 5 minute drive takes me to a recreational area that has: (1) A skateboard park (2) Hiking trails, (3) Tennis courts (4) Batting cages, (5) Miniature golf, (6) A driving range, (7) Outdoor soccer fields, (8) a golf course, (9) indoor soccer fields and (10) A rock wall climbing gym.

How lucky is that!

The rock wall gym and indoor soccer field is the latest addition. Whomever is responsible for this place needs to be given a lot of credit. The building is huge and yet blends into the surrounding countryside. The roof is covered with solar panels. There is a giant parking lot and at least 25 hookups for electric vehicles. The new road approaching it is well design and attractive.

I have never been rock wall climbing before and at 63, why start now?

Well, I started. I climb every day. Sometimes I stop by for just 15 minutes and climb a couple of walls. Other times I’m there for a couple of hours. The staff feels like a bunch of 25 year old “surfer dudes.” Everything is “cool” and they are super helpful. There have to be about 50 different walls to climb with something for every level of skill. Everything is safe; in fact, I had to take a 2-hour class just to learn how many ways I need to be safe. The place has been open for a month and I’ve been going for a week. I meet someone new every day. It’s much different from a gym where you go and do your own thing. Here, everyone helps and encourages everyone else.

This place is a gift and for that, I am grateful.

Time to save the world.

Up, up and away…

Jim

This just in: For me, quotes are like poetry or art – a lot of meaning in few, if any words. Here are some of my favorites.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair

“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” Alberto Brandolini

“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” Wayne Dyer

“I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” Mark Twain

“Nothing happens until something moves.” Albert Einstein

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Henry Ford

“A ship is safe in harbor but that is not what ships are built for.” William Shedd

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” Arthur Schopenhauer

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” Ernest Benn

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” Anne Frank

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.” Friedrich Nietzsche

“One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is always having surprising discoveries.” AA Milne

“Happiness is a warm puppy.” Charlie Brown

Time to save the world.

Up, up and away…

Jim

This just in: I have a theory. I think that Joe Manchin (senator from WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (senator from AZ) have been bought and paid for.

Manchin and Sinema are the lone 2 senators that are holding up a $3.5 trillion dollar spending bill that will bring the United States up to speed with the rest of the world. Without it, we will continue to lag farther and farther behind until we become insignificant bystanders in the world order.

I understand why Republicans are against it. They only have to platform positions and they stand firmly behind each one. These positions are (1) The election was rigged so we need to change laws that will allow a state’s Republican legislatures to overturn the voting public and put in a Republican instead and (2) They are against anything the Democrats propose no matter how popular it is with their constituents.

By why are Manchin and Sinema opposed to this bill? Could it be that they are representing the will of the people that put them into office? This seems unlikely since their constituents approved the contents of the spending bill by a margin of 2:1.

Could it be that Manchin, who reportedly makes $500,000 a year from coal investments doesn’t like the climate change part of the bill? He refuses to say what he doesn’t like in the bill but my guess is this allows him to pretend this is not about his coal mines.

Could it be that Sinema suddenly thinks we should pay skyrocketing prices for drugs? Or, did the recent massive contribution to her campaign fun by Big Pharma cause her to vote down a bill that would have resulted in lower drug prices?

Manchin, talking to reporters from his yacht tried to explain his position but, all I heard was “let them eat cake” or the modern day equivalent. While he spends a lot of time on his yacht that was paid for by coal, he claims that helping people with food, education and healthcare will lead them to feel “entitled.” This is, of course, complete bullshit.

Sinema seems to not be able to say why she is against the spending bill and had little time for reporters as she runs from one fundraiser to another.

Let’s take a minute to reflect on this bill. 15 Nobel prize winning economists think it would be great for our country. The vast majority of Americans want all or parts of what is in the bill. The bill will be paid for by taxing those making more than $400K in a year. The Democrat Party wants it. The President of the United States wants it. The only ones against it are elected Republicans and Manchin and Sinema.

I flew into LAX international the other day from Amsterdam. The difference between these two airports was striking. While Amsterdam looked as modern and clean as an airport could imaginably be, LAX looked like an unpainted, cement walled relic from some third world country. It’s embarassing.

So, when Biden fails to get his agenda accomplished and Republicans blame this on Democrats, you know that Manchin and Sinema put their own fortunes ahead of the country and paved the way for Trump to return.

Time to save the world.

Up, up and away…

Jim

This just in: I have a certain way that I check on news to see if its real. See if you can pick it out.

Democrats believe that Trump tried to overthrow the election. They base this decision on interviews with people that we in the room and from both parties and they made this information public.

Republicans say the election was stolen from them. As proof they offer “Well, we didn’t win.”

I’m with the Democrats on this.

Another…

Democrats believe that infrastructure spending is not only good for the country but that it will pay for itself by higher taxes on the extremely rich. This perspective is backed by the obvious decay in our infrastructure, the strain on families coping with healthcare, daycare and eldercare. For economic proof they offer a letter signed by 15 Nobel Laurates in Economics that strongly support this idea.

Republicans don’t even want to pay for the $7.8 trillion dollar debt they ran up the last time they were in charge. As evidence, they say, “We are not going to raise the debt limit which allows us to pay for bills we have already created.”

I go with the Democrats again.

For decades…DECADES…the Republican Party has seen government as a grift machine to be used for self enrichment and the enrichment of their donors. They have virtually no interest in governing. They have not passed a single bill that benefits the American public in years. They have lots of meaningless phrases like “Communism” and “Government takeover of healthcare.” None of these have any effort behind them that exceeds what it took to cause air to pass over their windpipes as they spouted this nonsense.

If you vote Republican, and I don’t mean to be harsh, you are either uneducated or you are longing for a White, Christian nation, (aka racist).

On a completely unrelated front: Today’s big headlines are the congressional report detailing how Donald Trump and the Republican Party tried to overthrow a legitimate election AND how the Republican Party is refusing to pay the bills that they ran up during the Trump years hoping that you will believe spending by Trump from 2016 to 2020 was somehow actually done by Biden.

Time to save the world.

Up, up and away…

Jim

This just in: I found out a couple of years ago that I have 2 slipped discs in my lower back. Here is how I deal with this.

I’ll do this using a simple list:

1. Never overdo it. Even on days when you feel great, limit what you to.
2. You will have bad days. I use Advil and Pepcid. I can feel these days coming in advance and I try to stay ahead of the paid. In other words, I don’t wait until its really painful.
3. Bad days don’t last forever.
4. Going up and down stairs may feel okay but your back does not like this.
5. No twisting.
6. Daily yoga for about 20 minutes. No twisting poses.
7. Lots of core exercises every day.
8. Don’t sit for more than 15 minutes in a row.
9. I hang upside down for 1 minute a day (I have a device for this). Don’t hang upside down for too long as you will start to stretch things that are not meant to be stretched.
10. I walk at least 5 miles a day.
11. No heavy lifting.
12. Jacuzzi daily using the jets as needed to relax tight muscles.
13. Lose weight. All exta weight in your upper body is supported by your thin little spine.
14. Pay attention to what you do/did. If you are having a bad back day, ask yourself, “What was I doing yesterday that may have caused this?”
15. Have a routine and keep track. I can tell you what days I missed my morning yoga over the last 3 years.
16. No running!
17. No standing in one place. It’s weird but standing is bad and walking is good.
18. Use a lumbar support when sitting.
19. Have good posture, standing and sitting.
20. Know that pain will pass. A bad day or week does not mean you are done being pain-free. It will pass.

Time to save the world.

Up, up and away…

Jim

This just in: I am a citizen of the United States. I am a citizen of California. Which do you think is more important to me? (Hint, it’s not California)

If you jump into your local Way-Back machine and watch our forefathers constructing our Constitution, you will see a lot of effort went into protecting “states rights”. In my view this was because the smaller, less populous states, wanted to have an equal say in government.

The solution was the senate.

As we know, the Legislative branch of our government has 2 bodies, the House of Representatives and the Senate. The number of people that represent each state in the House is based of population. If you have a state with a lot of people, your state has more representatives. The Senate representation has nothing to do with population and everything to do with land. If your land is a state, it gets 2 representatives. If its not a state, it gets zero.

What this means is that California, with a population of around 40 million has 2 senators, each representing about 20 million people. West Virginia also has 2 senators however, the state is basically empty so each senator represents about 900,000 people. The thing is, the 2 California senators have exactly the same amount of power in the senate as the 2 senators from West Virginia.

Not exactly democratic. So why not change this? Because if you do, the Republican Party will no longer be able to rule from its minority position.

You see, 50% of the Senate is currently representing about 56% of the population that live in Democrat states. The other 50% of the Senate is representing about 44% of the population that live in Red states. The Democrats vastly outnumber the Republicans but the Senate allows them to act like they represent half of the American public.

In short, if you are from a Blue, Democrat state, your voting power in the senate is less than 1 vote per person. If you are from a Red, Republican state, your voting power in the senate is more than 1 vote per person.

The result…we often see minority rule.

Combine this with Gerrymandering and the Electoral College and you will find weird, undemocratic things like only 1 Republican President in the last 30 years received the majority of votes from the American public.

This is why the relatively few Wackos in our country are making policy for the rest of us.

Which is why we can’t have nice things.

Time to save the world.

Up, up and away…

Jim

This just in: The more white, the more Christian and the more uneducated you are, the more likely you are to vote Republican.

The “white” fits in with the racist slant of most Republican positions.

The “Christian” fits in with a personality willing to believe anything so long as you wish it were true.

The “under educated” thing is the most helpful for the Republican Party. The more people understand the facts about a thing, the more they wonder why anyone would ever vote for a Republican. Thus, the GOP targets the white, gullible, uneducated portion of our population.

Let’s take a look at how this plays out. We are approaching a point in a couple of days where we will not be able to pay our debts because of an artifact known as the “debt ceiling.” All that is needed to avoid an economic catastrophe is for Congress to agree to raise the ceiling like they always do.

Here are their positions as stated by their party leaders. I’m putting it in quotes but rest assured, I’m paraphrasing.

Democrats: “We need to raise the debt ceiling so that we are authorized to pay our national debt. This means we can pay social security. This means we can pay our military. This means we can make payments on the $7.8 trillion dollar of overspending that took place under the Trump administration. It has nothing to do with our current budget or the current talks taking place with regards to infrastructure. It just means we are allowed to pay our current bills.”

Republicans: “We can’t support the communist budget of the Democrats while they allow non-whites to flow across our borders. We need to support our troops just as God intended us to do. If we don’t stop them now, they will turn us all into Chinese. And furthermore, budgets are important and we can’t allow for unsafe elections while Democrats are funding abortions with buy-1-get-1-free coupons.”

See? The GOP only has to get in a couple of meaningless phases and their sheep follow. Say something bad about non-whites. Say something about God. Make up other stuff that sounds scary because the illiterate you are pandering to won’t know the difference.

This….this is why we can’t have nice things.

Time to save the world.

Up, up and away…

Jim

This just in: The motive behind the action is what bothers me the most. Not the action itself.

Someone protests racial injustice by kneeling at a football game. Is this patriotic of anti-patriotic? I’m thinking its the former.

Here is my litmus test: What would a spy do?

A spy would never not kneel at the playing of the national anthem because that would draw attention to him. No, he will pretend to be a patriot and put his hand over his heart while the national anthem is playing. Good boy! Only someone that is secure in his or her position as a patriot dare to do something unexpected.

Are we not, after all, allowed to express ourselves? Are we not allowed to protest? That is what kneeling at a football game is. It’s a protest. In this case it’s a person saying, “We are not treating all Americans equally and I want us all to acknowledge that.”

Let’s try another…

I watched once as Donald Trump got up on a stage and stopped to hug an American flag. Patriotic? I think not. He is pandering to his base. BTW, pandering mean “catering to or exploiting another’s weaknesses.” A patriot wouldn’t cast doubt on an election with ZERO evidence to back him up.

I see Senator Munchin going against a bill that is filled with climate change initiatives. This same person make $500,000 a year off of his coal investments. He says, “We can’t afford it.” Well, the bill pays for itself so what is his real motivation?

Trump holds up a bible, upside down, after violently chasing peaceful protesters away that were standing where he wanted to stand. A man of God? Trump? Or is he once again pandering.

Trump once said, “If I ever run for president, I’ll do it as a Republican because they will believe anything.”

At least he got that right.

Mitch McConnell says he will not vote to raise the debt limit. Is it because he is concerned about the budget? Recall that the debt went up by $7.8 trillion during the time Trump was in office and Mitch not only did not oppose it…he help to do it. So, is he being responsible or is he letting Americans suffer for personal political benefit?

Republicans are up in arms about mask mandates saying, “It’s my body. I can do what I want.” They are also passing very restrictive abortion laws controlling the “body choices” of half the people in the country. Women can’t get abortions because old white men in Texas don’t want them to. Pandering to the evangelicals.

“We should stay in endless wars so that terrorists don’t come over here and kill us.” This is a very popular Republican position. And yet, far and away most terrorism is domestically grown. Uneducated white men blaming non-whites and non-Christians for their poor quality of life. They form “boy clubs with guns” and pat each other on the back as they plan their next assault on non-whites and those that oppose racism. If Republicans are against terrorism, shouldn’t they be against all terrorism ans not just against terrorist that won’t vote for them.

I see people do things all the time that I don’t agree with. “He’s using a 7-iron and I think he needs to use a 6-iron.” This never riles me up; even if it affects me directly. Everyone has freedom of choice and they don’t need to act like I wish they would.

It’s the hypocrisy that gets to me. The action that is publicly described one way that is actually motivated by something else. That something else is always hidden or disguised. It is so because it is dark. People don’t lie to hide their motives if they believe they are just. So when they do it, you know that they know they are being malignant.

Time to save the world.

Up, up and away…

Jim

This just in: I have a close friend that is a Republican. He is smart, well education and considers himself a patriot. However, when it comes to defending his party’s actions, his response is always something like “they all do it.”

Now, if this is true. If they are all basically alike, why not just toss a coin every election cycle and vote based on heads or tails. Why always vote the same way if “they all do it?”

I can’t answer this question and neither can he.

When I point out that gun legislation may reduce gun deaths he agrees and then says, “The Constitution does not allow for that.” It’s as if we can’t have seatbelt laws because The Constitution does not allow for that.

When I point out that QANON sent a guy will a gun to a pizza place because he thought Hilary Clinton was running a child porn ring in the basement, he says, “That’s not a Republican thing.” (spoiler, there was no basement)

We’ll maybe not but I’m not reading ANYWHERE about Democrats doing crazy stuff because QANON told them to.

QANON told Republicans to storm the capital and they did. It told women not to get vaccinated because it would make them infertile so they didn’t. It said the election was stolen and today, 72% of Republican still believe this!

Rudy Giuliani, who spewed the most “election was stolen” nonsense, recently, under oath, admitted that he thinks he got this from a post he read on Facebook but isn’t sure. He went on to talk about a reliable witness that he never met or interviewed. This witness and the Facebook post kept him in the news for months as he spewed lies as if they were facts.

Republican ran up a $7.8 trillion dollar debt in 4 years with nothing to show for it.

Republicans lied to get us into war in the Middle East and 20 years later we left and everything collapsed around our little sand castle government.

Republicans pass laws to keep non-white and non-Christians out of the country.

Democrats do non of this and yet I still hear “they all do it.”

Here is my theory: The Republican mind is one that wants American to return to the days of Mayberry RFD. Simple times. No rap music. Everyone goes to a Christian church on Sunday. The military is fresh off a win in WWII. Non-whites are kept in their own separate part of town.

In short, the future scares them so they try to stop it from happening. Thus…Conservatives.

A White, Christian country…run by white old men.

I don’t know about you but I’m not about to sit back and say, “Yep, I gotta get me some of dat.”

“They all do it” is code for “I’m a racist but I can’t admit it even to myself so I rely on this weak retort.”

When I see a Republican, I think, “I wonder if that person knows that their actions promote racism or are they openly racist?”

By the way, when a Republican reads this, they will explode. “How dare he say that. I know a black guy and I treat him like an equal.” Thus….not a racist? Me thinks thou doth protest too much.

Time to save the world.

Up, up and away.

This just in: I was a Republican until I started to follow politics. That’s when I noticed that I had been rooting for the bad guys my entire life.

It’s easy to get sucked in. Phrases like “Democrats want to make us a nation of socialists” or “Obamacare is a government takeover of healthcare” sound legit. The GOP specializes in these type of statements. They work because they sound good. They sound righteous. They sound like Republicans are saving us from something only they can see.

The truth is that the GOP is made up of con artists and has been so for decades.

Let’s take their main historic platform (I use “historic” because they have no platform today). They like to be the Party of Fiscal Responsibility. In other words they don’t waste money and they don’t overspend. If you look at the last 50 years, Republicans have contributed to about 90% of the current national debt. They do this by spending and then cutting taxes. During Trump’s reign, the national debt went up by $7.8 trillion. AND, there is nothing to show for it. No new bridges. No better healthcare. No better education. No new jobs. No surge in world peace. Nothing.

After 4 years of Trump, the bill is due. We are obligated as a country, to pay the debt.

What are the Republicans doing about this? They just voted to not pay the debt. As has been pointed out on nearly every news outlet (except Fox), this is like ordering a giant meal at a restaurant and then running out the door.

15 Nobel Prize winning economists signed a letter in favor of Biden’s huge spending bill. The Republican Party is against it. Why? Well, they have shown they are not afraid of spending but they only spend to enrich themselves or their donors. Biden’s bill is for American, not members of the Republican mafia.

I cannot think of a single time in the last 30 years where the Republican Party has made a sound economic decision.

This is a problem because Congress has 2 basic jobs: (1) make laws and (2) spend money.

As conservatives, they do their best to make time stand still of go backwards, thus, no laws. As for spending money, they are long-term failures. They would all be in jail except that they police themselves and continually find themselves innocent.

Time to save the world.

Up, up and away…

Jim