Lost day, online surveillance, corruption run amok, and lost Canadians

A few scattered items for this afternoon...

• Gravitational forces: The Black Hole of depression is sometimes hard to measure/identify because its effects are often gradual. One's orbit falls just slightly when you start to tire, but just a tad, it's not really noticeable. But a lower orbit means the gravity is stronger, so the next gradual shift comes a little bit faster, putting you under slightly heavier gravity again, but you still haven't really noticed, and on and on until you realize, hey, it's really hard to stand up now.

  Well, yesterday it was really hard to stand up. It was basically a lost day. Then last night/this morning I had grief dreams, my subconscious apparently looking for ways to bum me out by creating a dream-movie wherein my grandpa dies all over again and Pixel goes missing. Sometimes my subconscious is a real asshole.

  In retrospect I can see that over the last week-plus I'd been slipping in my orbit. More easily distracted, unfocused, slower to process. Much more irritable. Whether that realization means that now I can blast myself back into high orbit remains to be seen, but usually it's not so much a blast off as a hard climb. One good thing about my lost day yesterday is that I slept a lot, so maybe banking more rest will help. We'll see.

• You're being watched: There's a website called Since You Arrived that does nothing but inform you of what information is being given by your browser/computer to sites you visit online. It's interesting, might be surprising if you're not into the workings of the interwebs. Check it out, if you dare.

• Worse before better: Even the relatively utopian universe of Star Trek postulated that we as humans would have to go through some nightmares before we achieved the dream. So I'm actually hopeful that Preznitwit Felon47’s latest scheme of blatant corruption, settling a $10 billion "lawsuit" between himself and the IRS that he controls—which should be thrown out and deemed not subject to any settlement for any amount of money or "damages" (he sustained zero injury)—for over a billion dollars to be allegedly-but-not-really used in a "weaponization fund" to aid those prosecuted by the Biden DOJ (e.g. January 6 rioters, among others) and thus amount to a payment scheme for his private militia of MAGA goonsquad will be seen for what it is: the alleged President of the United States backing an armored truck up to the U.S. treasury and stealing for himself, whether he uses it to pay people to do violence for him or not. And with that recognition, tip the scales such that the career of Felon47 starts crashing down in earnest. (I mean, you'd think the illegal war and DHS murdering people would be plenty, but it wasn't enough.)

  Of course, I was also hopeful that people would see the destruction of the East Wing and the blatantly corrupt ballroom project for the scam that it is too, and the Qatari jet bribe for what it is, and the cryptocurrency frauds for what they are, and the myriad other thefts and frauds perpetrated on the American public be recognized as the actions of a criminal. So far, bupkis, so maybe people won't care about having a billion dollars-plus of their money just outright stolen from them in a literally criminal abuse of the legal system. But I think they will, I think most care about all of it, it's only Mike Johnson and his GOP caucus that don't give a damn. The question is, will it get bad enough that even some of them start to see the light or will it take defying the attempts to rig the midterms and retaking control of Congress to see any action?

  I heard some former Republican wonk on a podcast the other day say that if even a few Republican Congresspeople were smart—ha!—they'd join the Democrats to impeach Felon47 now, before the midterms, as any future in politics they want to have after he's gone will be severely damaged by their record of aiding and abetting. I doubt that will happen, though, because they aren't smart or they're so cowed that they just won't defy Dear Leader. They'd need to be inundated with communications from their constituents demanding why they are even tacitly approving of all this blatant corruption for that scenario to have even the slimmest chance of playing out.

  Because Americans en masse only seem to care about politics when their personal finances are affected, maybe the combination of a president personally stealing money from them and $6 gasoline and everything at the grocery store costing $5 or more (I just did some shopping today—bag of chips, $5; jar of mayo, $5; box of Grape Nuts, $5; tub of salsa, $5; brick of cheese, 2-for-$5; bottle of fruit juice, $5....) and the repeated playing of Felon47 saying out loud into microphones that "I don't think about Americans' financial situations, I don't think about anybody" will finally be enough. Maybe.

• Know your lineage: If the decline of the USA is getting to be too much and you want to leave, maybe look into your family tree for Canadians. The Canadian Supreme Court recently ruled that there was a flaw in that nation's citizen-by-parentage laws, so Parliament passed Bill C-3, which says that  any individuals with a documented, traceable direct ancestor who was a Canadian citizen are themselves eligible to be Canadian citizens. So far as I know, I have none in my background, at least on my mom's side—my grandfather was an amateur genealogist of sorts and traced his tree back to Civil War-era USA, and I know my mom's mom's parents came over from the UK. But if you do, and if you can prove it (government birth records should exist going back a ways), you too may be a Canuck-in-waiting.

Off now to watch baseball.