Heather Digby Parton has some real insights in her column today. Here’s an excerpt and a quotable line:

We see this phenomenon all over our politics and the culture at large. Trump didn’t anticipate that Americans would actually resist his authoritarianism because he promised to bring the bread and circuses. He’s certainly brought the circus but it isn’t a fun one, at least for most people. And the bread is stale and expensive. He just assumed he could use lies, hype and bribes to make yet another of his “deals” with the American people and everyone would end up loving him. It turns out that many people actually care about something more than money and being entertained by hurting vulnerable people. Go figure. 

These people do not understand how other people feel and think because they have no empathy. Our leading tech lord Elon Musk even likes to say “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” so they are actually proud of it. They think it’s a brilliant insight. But he’s wrong too. It’s vitally important to have empathy if you need to understand your adversaries — and your friends. 

This is a big reason why they are so incompetent at governance. They just don’t understand what motivates people besides fear and they assume that always leads to capitulation. They couldn’t be more wrong. 

As Touval writes:

What this war exposes, then, is a failure not only of strategy but of literacy. Literature and history, at their most serious, train precisely the faculties these leaders lack: the capacity to grant that other minds are not transparent to us, and are governed by purposes not our own. A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it.

This is what happens when you elect rich imbeciles who have no empathy and no intellect. You get barbarians.

“You get barbarians” – that’s a perfect summary of the Trump crime family. Barbarians.

After a couple of better nights’ sleep (not great, but better) and 11 holes of golf for a couple of days straight (walking and carrying clubs), life is better. A little exercise really helps.

LOTS and lots of shitty stuff happening around Donny Convict and his minions.

• The Iranian war that was “over on day one” is escalating. We’re sending in troops. Brilliant.
• US air travel is all fucked up, and we’ve got ICE goons at the airports.
• The DoJ is paying treasonous Michael Flynn $1.25M to settle his suit. He commits treason multiple times, and taxpayers have to pay him seven figures. Maddening.
• Inflation is going up quickly, now above 4%.
• Someone close to the White House is making billions with stock and oil trades 15 minutes before Convict Donny’s pronouncements about the Iran War. Insider trading that everyone can see. Corrupt and treasonous, right no brand for MAGA.
• The Pentagon (?) is working hard to remove protections for endangered whales in the Gulf of America Mexico.
• We just paid a French company $1B to NOT build renewable energy in the US. Because fuckwit Trump doesn’t like wind power. What a waste.
• The public has been successfully distracted from Trump’s central role in the Epstein files. But they’re still out there, waiting for a day of reckoning.

Not a lot to be happy about. As usual in politics lately.

Another cool day, but not cold like yesterday. Each day this week the temps go up 5-10 degrees, so golf is practical tomorrow. As usual, I’ve got a new swing trick to try. Same as it ever was.

Spent some time today fine-tuning the setup of my KY vintage stereo lineup. I now have a Pioneer SX-828 (the anchor receiver), A Yamaha CR-840 (also a stellar receiver), a Sansui 201, and a Kenwood KR-2120, all connected to the Wharfdale Super Lintons and the custom-build Scanspeak speakers. The Sansui and the Kenwood are from the 60’s, while the Pioneer and Yamaha are from the early 1970s. Old guys. It’s a bit much for the small listening room I have, but…WTF. It’s a lot of fun.

There’s also a Sansui TU-666 tuner in the stack (lower right, cool green dial), but it’s headed for CA to pair up with the “new” Sansui AU-505 in play there. 55 year old perfection with those two.

The newest addition, the Kenwood on the lower left of my setup, sounded great for a day but now the right channel is out. Not that surprised. This is a 55+ year old device for which I paid $110. I didn’t expect it to be perfect. So it’ll be my first science project – I’ll break it down, figure out what’s wrong (likely, the power transistors in the right channel circuit, though it could be the preamp transistors), and replace the suspect components. I will probably have to replace most of the transistors and capacitors, but that’s my plan for all these old receivers – Make Electronics Great Again, or MEGA. A hobby that’s at least as weird as writing, and just as solo/lonely/geeky. Pretty much my MO.

BTW, there’s actually a big rug in the listening room right in front of the system, but I edited it out because it was a distraction in the photo. The rug helps as a sonic “smoother” – takes out some high frequency echo. But I like the picture better without it. JPG editing is amazing these days.

Watching the news tonight, it’s still an existential shit show. The country we used to have is gone, and the only question is what will we have left once we (sane people) regain control of at least one of the three branches of government. It’s looking like not much – we might have a cold restart ahead, which sounds about right. A LOT has to change to fix what is happening.

Meanwhile, a couple of things that make me happy. Grandson soccer practice and new colts in my syndicate. Sweet.

March 22nd, the end of the 2025-2026 college basketball season. At least for me and the other Big Blue Nation diehards. And we *did* die hard – we played a good first half but then a horrific second half. It was hard to watch. Iowa State got on a roll and just crushed us.

Injuries and lack of a true point guard killed us this year. We had some good athletes, some shooters, but without a point guard everyone was slightly out of place. Pope inexplicably kept trying to play Jasper Johnson, the worst college guard I’ve ever seen.

There are a lot of voices calling for Pope to be fired. He’s hard to defend at the moment, with a weak recruiting crop for next year and some ugly losses this year. Pope miscalculated on Jayden Quintance – that dude was never going to play for UK, and I resent the fact that he sat there and got paid to recover from a prior year’s injury. He and his family punked UK.

Jasper Johnson was another miscalculation, a bad one. He’s just not a D1 guard – he looked like a high school freshman against grown men. Then there was Pope’s substitution method. Game after game, we’d get a few hot players and they would weirdly be pulled out of the game. Just yesterday we were on a roll in the first half, then Pope mass substituted the starters and killed our momentum. WTF? Weird and impossible to defend. I really want Pope to be successful at UK, but right now it doesn’t look good.

This was a tough year to be a UK hoops fan. We get to do it all again in 8-9 months. It’ll take me that long to be ready.

Spring has sprung, and just a couple of days past the Solstice we’re looking at 85 degrees and sunny. The news blathers on about a heat wave in Socal, but it’s warmer here. Go figure.

On the day of the Solstice I attended Man Day at my cousin’s country club, a day in which a bunch of guys get together, donate a couple of hundred dollars each to charity, then proceed to play golf, drink and watch sports all day as a reward. There’s some gambling in there too. It’s a very basic kind of day. The unforeseen down side of Man Day was that I was out on the golf course when Otega Oweh hit the impossible shot that saved Kentucky’s season. I’ve seen all the replays, but it would have been nice to experience it in real time. The abject misery as Santa Clara hit yet another improbable three to sink KY yet again in the first round. Then 2.4 seconds later, as Owen reversed the outcome with an even more improbable shot. After 34 years of whining about Laettner’s shot in 92, we did the same to another team. Oweh will be Santa Clara’s Laettner for a generation.

Yesterday was “Recovery From Man Day” Day, a chill day in which not much got done. Reading, short walks, lots of review/replay of the KY game, and plenty of Gatorade Zero. An opportunity for the circulatory system to replace bourbon with blood. I’m pretty sure Man Day (and the day after) is more fun for 30-somethings than septuagenarians.

Today, on 5-22-26, UK gets to play a tough Iowa State team to attempt to get into the Sweet Sixteen of the tournament. All the pundits are picking Iowa State, as KY has a pattern this year of playing a great game, then following it with a stinker. But I’m optimistic and think that the Cats will find a way. Iowa State’s best player is supposedly hurt, and if that’s true the Fates may lean our way. They don’t call it March Madness for nothing, so anything can happen.

My pre-game plans are to get outside and do some spring yard work. Penance before pleasure. Go Cats!

Thirty degrees in Louisville (as expected), but it feels colder. Just a few days ago I was in 100 degree heat playing holes like this.

But it’ll warm up soon enough here. Not to 100, but 70s are predicted for Friday-Saturday. Well within the comfort zone.

We received some great news last night – our syndicate’s second foal, another colt, was born the past weekend. Here he is with mother Sassy Siena at Hermitage Farm. I’m really looking forward to seeing all the horses this spring.

Lots to do today in Louisville, complicated by the fact that our street is still a major construction zone held hostage by the water company. Parking on the street is…complicated. At this rate they will take the entire year to finish the work. Grrrr.

Haven’t written much anything lately. A few days in the desert playing golf kept me busy, then a couple of days at home/Socal recovering from food poisoning. The last thing I ate in Borrego – a bowl of oatmeal that looked like it had been under a sun lamp too long – turned out to be a bad idea, and boy did I pay for it. Food poisoning is definitely one of life’s worst events.

Tuesday I head east, leaving high 80s sunshine for some 30 degree fun in Louisville. Actually, I should only have 12-24 hours of cold, as it’s supposed to rapidly warm to the 60s by Wednesday.

On the world events front, the war in Iran is progressing as expected. Poorly. I truly, truly don’t understand why Americans aren’t screaming to end a war that (a) had no reason in the first place, (b) has no defined goal or endgame, (c) is rapidly destabilizing the Middle East, a dangerous place to start with, and (d) will crush our economy rather quickly. EVERYTHING will cost more for the next several months after the war ends, whenever it ends. Oil is a fundamental component for almost every part of the modern economy – not just gasoline for cars.

One of my MAGA friends tells me that the war is justified because Iran was going to produce a nuclear weapon soon. He has conveniently forgotten the massive bombing of Iran in June 2025, when Donny Convict and team declared that Iran’s nuclear capability was destroyed, decimated. So which is it? Were you lying then, or now? Because both cannot be true.

The only winners after our idiotic attacks on Venezuela and Iran are the oil giants – Saudi Aramco, Exxon, Chevron, etc. They’re selling oil at double the price it was only a couple of months ago. The rich get richer.

American soldiers killed for no reason. Hundreds of school children killed by a US Tomahawk. The US spending a couple of billion per day. World economies and alliances, destabilized. More countries incented to hate the US for generations.

Nice job, Donny. You dumbfuck.

Good day today. Finished the multi-day cleanup after strong winds 3-4 days ago – pulled limbs out of the pool, chopped up and hauled away big limbs that fell onto the property, and finally, finally got all the crud off the driveway. Limbs, leaves, tree seeds/pods, dust – it was all an inch deep along a hundred yards of driveway. Lotta work. Then I finished replacing a huge, heavy original gate to the backyard. It was a custom size (non-standard today) and weighs about 100 pounds – they built them heavy back in the day. Over the years it just pulled itself off its hinges, so there really wasn’t any way to repair it. I replaced it with a resizable metal frame from Home Depot plus redwood planks and 2x4s. It worked well.

All that work was after I watched UK beat LSU in a tense morning SEC game (morning in Socal). We kicked off the SEC tourney for the first time ever (a dubious honor), and won a good one. LSU played tough. Now we play every day, four more days, as long as we keep winning. Beat Missouri tomorrow and we get the honor of facing Florida again on Friday. Yikes.

Tomorrow I head off to Borrego again, this time to play a couple of days worth of golf at beautiful Rams Hill. Really like that course, and it’s been a while. Bonus for the weekend, my golf buddies and I are staying at La Casa del Zorro, a cool desert resort. Should be a great weekend.

Then back to Louisville on Sunday for an extended stay. It’s starting to feel like spring.

This is obscene:

NBC News reported that Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administration official overseeing the Affordable Care Act, says that many of those enrolled in healthcare under the law should not be there. About 23 million people signed up for ACA coverage this year, down by more than 1.2 million from last year. Oz anticipates cutting another 4 million off the rolls as he targets “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

And yet, as Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling of The New Republic noted last night, according to a report from government watchdog Open the Books, the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blew through $93.4 billion in September 2025 alone, with more than $50 billion going out in the last five days of the month alone.

To spend the entirety of the defense budget, rather than lose it, Pentagon officials bought “a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail. (Lobster tail is apparently a favorite of Hegseth’s Pentagon—the department spent more than $7.4 million total on the luxury item in March, May, June, and October.) In other pricey food purchases, the government decided to drop $15.1 million for ribeye steak (again, just in September), $124,000 for ice cream machines, and $139,224 on 272 orders of doughnuts.”

In October, Houghtaling noted, the administration said it could not fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, because the government had shut down. Millions of Americans lost food benefits.

Quote is from HCR’s Letters From An American. I don’t understand why people aren’t rioting. First the stupidity and corruption of DOGE, then the cruelty and violence of ICE, and now the waste, fraud, and abuse of the Department of Defense War (whatever the fuck it is today). Supposedly we can’t afford to support people in need, but we can afford $24M in one month for ribeyes, lobster, and king crab. $50B spent in five days!

This is what the human pile of dogshit Steve Bannon meant when he said they were going to “flood the zone with shit”. It’s a strategy. When you can’t focus on any single crime/outrage because there are so many, many crimes/outrages – the Epstein files, ICE crimes, the White House ballroom debacle, rollback of EPA gains, tax breaks for billionaires, pardoning 1000s of convicted criminals, wars fought with no Congressional approval, crazy/stupid US health policy – your mind just says “ENOUGH” and your attention span checks out. You’re left with feelings of outrage, despair, and helplessness. Nowhere to focus.

The antidote for this has to be some kind of extreme organization – getting enough people engaged and organized to divide up and conquer each front (each zone of shit) in parallel. The Democratic Party could be such an entity, but they’ve become calcified and feckless. Useless because they’re immersed in meaningless culture wars. Maybe one of these days we’ll have the luxury of debating use of advanced pronouns in our society, but this isn’t the time. Right now there’s a monster in the house, tearing it apart and about to kill everyone inside. Not exactly the time to be polite or politically correct – you’ve gotta kill the monster that Convict Donny’s administration has become.

I keep looking for an effective organization to join so I can be part of the fight, rather than just write about it. Punch back a bit. So far, I haven’t found one. But I’m looking.

Well, Donny Convict’s corrupt and incompetent style of “governance” has finally affected me personally – in the wallet.

• The stock market indexes are down 5-10% in the last month. That correlates directly to retirement savings.
• Southwest airline tickets are suddenly way, way up. One way flights from Socal to Louisville are suddenly $500-700! I’ve been flying this route for years at an average one-way price of about $350. That’s gonna hurt. This is 100% due to Felon Trump’s stupid excursion war into Iran.
• San Diego gasoline prices are now edging into the $6/gallon range. I’m predicting $7/gallon real soon.

Energy prices underpin almost everything in a modern economy. Transportation, food, construction, utilities, travel, and more – all these things get more expensive when energy (oil in particular) get more scarce (and therefore expensive). So this unnecessary, idiot war in Iran is going to drive the cost of living through the roof this spring. It’s already begun.

Maybe, just maybe, this will hurt enough Trump voters to erode his and Republicans’ chances in upcoming elections. I’m not optimistic – Donny Convict has been teflon for a decade or more – but maybe.

630am in Socal and the Santa Ana winds are roaring – maybe 30-40 mph from the east. Tree limbs and debris cover the roads. It’s a little scary – just one small fire east of here and you’ve got a huge disaster. Fingers crossed that the winds die down before that happens.

We did have a disaster yesterday – the Cats lost a tough one to FL at home. That led to UK being the #9 seed in next week’s SEC tournament and playing LSU on Wednesday, a humbling position. This is the first time in history that UK has had to play the tournament in the first round. We used to own the SEC tourney – now it owns us.

The game was maddening, again. Some observations:

• Otega Oweh is a treasure. He came to play on Senior Night, scored 28 points against a hellaciously tough FL defense. Gonna miss him.
• Florida is a beast, probably a repeat NCAA champ. They’ve been beating teams by 30 points, so our loss by 7 was a good result, statistically. Particularly since we got some absolutely shitty calls in the crucial last minute. Even the feckless announcers called it out. Why, fergawdsake, do we get terrible calls at home? Every other SEC team knows they’re gonna get a friendly whistle at home. We get abused.
• UK got outscored 11-0 in the first 3 minutes, then outscored FL the rest of the game 77-73 (!). Once again, our slow start dooms us. There’s no explanation, and it’s been a consistent and fatal flaw all season. Those slow starts are one of the only consistent things about this team.
• Colin Chandler just disappeared this game. Shorthanded as we are, we can’t win with only one scoring threat (Oweh). Chandler has done that a couple of times this year, inexplicably. Actually, that’s a good nickname for this 2025-2026 team – The Inexplicables.
• Not having a true point guard is another Achilles Heel for us. The Lowe injury compounded by the Kam Williams injury really hurt us. I think our season would have been acceptable if not for those injuries.
• Fan calls to replace Mark Pope are very loud right now. He’s hard to defend, given this season. I love the guy’s history and attitude, but we’ve lost 4-5 close games that would seem to be on the coach. And the team has these weird ups and downs. Just like investors, fans don’t like randomness – they like predictability.

So bottom line, another tough game. It’s possible that UK won’t win another game this season, and if that happens Pope probably does get replaced. The LSU game next Wednesday is a 50-50 shot, and even though we’ll likely get into the NCAA, as a 9 or 10 seed we could be playing another tough team. I’m a fan, still bleeding blue, but this has been a hard season to watch and the next steps aren’t gonna be any easier.

Let’s do our own little state of the union summary:

• The unemployment rate is up.
• Inflation is up.
• The stock market is down.
• Energy prices, particularly gasoline, are up. Very soon to be way, way up.
• US farmers are having the worst year in decades.
• Generative AI is about to replace millions of jobs.
• The US budget deficit is at an all-time high, and with Convict Donny’s tax cuts it’s growing fast.
• We’re spending a billion dollars a day in a useless, meaningless war against Iran.
• The US is engaged in military operations (wars, if we’re talking plainly) in eight countries. The DoD can’t spend all the money it has been given.
• US tourism spending is down, way down, because visitors from other countries are learning that the US is a dangerous place for foreigners.
• Measles is making a big comeback in America due to the idiots we have in charge of health policy.
• The idiots in charge of US fiscal policy are trying their best to kill all investments in green energy, striking a blow against the environment and the US economy – two birds with one stone.

Aside from all that, everything’s great. We’re only a year into Trump’s second term and the destruction is mind boggling. At least Kristi Noem got fired – we have to take the small wins when we can.

Today didn’t go as planned. In general, the last 18 hours have been rough.

Last night’s UK game was a mess – the Keystone Cats showed up, and got thumped by TX A&M. During about 10 minutes of the first half and part of the second, UK was outscored 41-10. At that point the game was over. This team is hard to understand – great one game, terrible the next.

But the real fun started when I packed up and left for the airport at 7am. I had a flight at 830am. Got close to the airport in bad morning traffic, dark and rainy, and found that I had left my phone at home. I was puzzled – I was sure I had it. But I turned around and drove home, with maybe still time to make the flight. I got home and it wasn’t there – looked everywhere. Went back out to the street and my car, used my iPad and the FindMy app, and it showed that my phone was with me. I tore the car apart, figuring it must be under a seat or something – but no phone. Then I heard it beeping – it was on the road next to my car, on Galt Ave. I must have dropped it on the road when I left. I typically shove it into my back pants pocket, and must have missed the pocket. Of course, a car – maybe multiple cars – ran over it. It works, but the screen is cracked. Brand new phone. Tried to get to the airport again, but too much 8am traffic. Turned around and went home again. I’m now rebooked on a 5pm flight today. Arrrrgh.

Between then and now I’ve been to the Apple Store, where they are fixing my phone. I was shocked to learn that their policy is to fix it when possible rather than replace it. My phone is/was functional, other than a completely shattered screen. The tech there says the circuitry will be fine, but I have my doubts. But my phone should be ready by 330pm, just barely in time for me to catch my evening flight. Gonna be a long day – it’ll be after midnight Louisville time when I arrive at the Socal house.

I’m sure there are some lessons to be learned here, but I’m not up to thinking about them at the moment. For the next couple of hours, just reading and resting before I restart the so-far-jinxed journey west.

I’m due for a little good luck. Fingers are crossed.

Weird, weird day. Last day in KY for a couple of weeks, so there’s the usual cleaning up before travel. A cool hard rain this morning, then a teasingly nice afternoon. Much warmer, with occasional sunshine. I desperately want to be out on the golf course, but it’s too wet. Hitting balls on muddy turf is no fun, no matter how much you want it to be.

Muddy turf is a problem at the house, too. Louisville Water company is busy tearing our street to bits, and has parked lots of heavy machinery, pipe and gravel on our street, right in front of the house. So I’m parking in the front yard, and now with the heavy rain, I’m ruining the lawn. Tire ruts on a previously pristine yard. Grrrr. That’s one of the big misses on this house – no driveway, no garage.

So on a can’t-do-much-outside day I’m organizing and cleaning shit around here to an OCD-worthy level. This must be a side effect of being truly retired. Before I could do a task half-assed and give myself the excuse that I don’t have the time to really do it right. And I didn’t in those days. Now…I have all the time in the world so, instead of just vacuuming the floors, I vacuum, then mop (Swiffer), then take wet paper towels and go around and look for imperfections. Then clean the tops of the baseboards – where did all that fucking dust come from? I suppose I’m available to hire for housecleaning, but my rates are way too high. Laundry, floors, doing dishes, making beds (well, bed), organizing the random shit sitting around on flat surfaces, storing the last of the Christmas decorations, making sure books are stacked 100% evenly with edges just so…it’s a bit much.

After cleaning I’m trying to relax by listening to random songs on the stereo (whatever the fucking Apple Music algorithm selects for me), reading a book that’s not as good as expected and sipping some 12-year Old Forrester – simultaneously. Multitasking. It’s mostly working, but I’d rather be walking the course and whacking balls. You can’t always get what you want, but it’s hard to know what you (I) need.

Tonight the Cats play Texas A&M and I plan to watch it over at brother Mark’s place – that should help shake me out of the deeply introspective place I’m in. There’s a rumor that JQ will play – that would be cool. No matter, just want them to win so that the FL game Saturday is mostly irrelevant. FL is a beast – you don’t want to need to beat them.

Then off to the Left Coast at O-dark-30 Wednesday. Adios.

We awake to a cold rainy day today, and to the news that the ill-conceived war on Iran – Operation Epstein Fury – is not going well. I’m not sure what i could write that hasn’t already been written/said elsewhere, but here are a few thoughts.

• MAGA and the Trump crime family corrupt everything they touch, including war. Someone made $500K on Polymarket by betting that we would bomb Iran within 24 hours. The bet was made 71 minutes before the news broke. Turns out that the Trump sons and their bros are huge Polymarket fans. Hmmm…I wonder who might have had inside information….?
• Apparently Donny Convict believed that once their religious leader was killed, Iranians would flood the streets and “take over” their country. How naive. He didn’t account for the hundreds of thousands of hard-line Royal Guard, trained to control the population – Iran’s equivalent of ICE. And for the hundreds of hard-core young men willing to become the next Supreme Leader. The Iranian population has been subjugated for years, controlled by violence. They are where WE will be in ten years if we don’t change course.
• The Pentagon’s official position is that we attacked Iran in self defense. There is ZERO evidence of that. It’s simply Dept of War propaganda, designed to deflect criticism. They’re not fooling anyone.
• Because of the chaos and uncertainty now in the Middle East, oil prices are going up fast. That means gasoline prices will follow. Get ready for 30-40% higher gas prices this summer. The anti-war, cost-cutting genius in the White House does it to us again.
• Speaking of chaos, this morning the news broke that three US jets were shot down over Kuwait by friendly fire. I hope the pilots were able to eject successfully. This is what happens when you operate on the strategy of “ready, fire……aim?”.
• Not directly related to the war, but still notable – turns out that Frank Zappa was a very perceptive, prescient man. Here’s a quote from Frank Zappa in 1991 (!!). “Now when you have a democracy, there’s always the possibility that the guy who turns out to be the biggest menace on the planet just gets voted in. And the place where it’s most likely to happen is here, due to media saturation, the illiteracy rate of the population, and the social desperation of the population.” Wow – he absolutely nailed it, 35 years ago. He left out the hate and cruelty endemic to about 30% of the US population, but that surprised us all.

Bottom line, whatever is in the Epstein Files about Trump must be really, really horrible. The incredible efforts to hide the documents, distract the public and deny, deny, deny are mind boggling. Now US service men and women are paying the price of Convict Donny’s guilt and fear.

Managed to fit in a lot of “good for the soul” activities the last two days. That’s the whole reason I travel so much.

• Watching the Cats win an away game
• Taking a grandson to gymnastics and watching him bounce around like a nut
• Walking 9 holes at Crescent Hill on a warm-ish afternoon (and hitting the ball reasonably well)
• Having the grandsons’ new tiny dog fall asleep in my lap, then falling asleep myself
• Taking care of the other grandson while he’s home with the flu
• Teaching myself how to repair/replace damaged capacitors on a vintage stereo receiver
• Having an absolutely perfect slice of NY-style pizza from Frankfort Ave
• Listening to my vintage stereo receiver(s)

Even with crummy sleep, all those good karma activities have elevated my mood quite a bit. Go figure.

Travel day today, made it from SD to SDF. Nine hours door to door, Landed in forty degree weather with a cutting wind and a grandson with a case of the flu. Ugh.

My poor street in Louisville is under attack by the water company. They’re doing *something* that requires the street in front of my house be dug up and attacked by cranes, trucks, and backhoes. It’s a war zone.

After I made it into the house, I watched UK beat South Carolina in an ugly game. It wasn’t pretty, but we walked away with a W. After the last three games, I take the ugly W.

Now I’m watching the SOTU address. I shouldn’t, because it’s basically a long speech full of lies, a staged theatrical play starring political clowns. Trump has stayed on script for the first part, but I predict he’ll soon go off script soon and say some crazy shit.

I didn’t have to wait long. He’s now attacking Minnesota and the Somali community, citing financial corruption. Every accusation is a confession. There is no one more financially corrupt, no person in the world, than Convict Donny.

The R side of the audience is getting a workout. They’re standing up every 30 seconds to applaud Dear Leader. Good for them, they probably need toe exercise.

Donny is hitting the illegal alien crime “problem” hard. Someone has told him that’s a winning issue with MAGA. He also called Venezuela “our new partner” in energy independence. Partner, huh? Partner at the end of a gun.

Last nights UK game was tragic. We played OK – not great, but moments of strong play. But the game was taken away from us by a ridiculous foul call with 14 seconds left. 14 seconds, we’re up by 3, and we lose. Just heartbreaking. This is a very tough team to watch. I’m still taking the grandsons to a game at Rupp next weekend, but games like last night take some of the joy out of it.

In politics, Convict Donny has decided to say FU to SCOTUS and double down on tariffs through a new mechanism. Does anyone even know why we’re still tariffing any country? And BTW, there’s no chance that the $175B already collected in tariffs will ever get refunded to the companies and consumers who paid it.

Homeland Security (an oxymoron if there ever was one) is shutting down TSA Pre starting this weekend, just in time for my air travel on Tuesday. Perfect. Security lines should be massive.

A man was shot and killed at Mar A Lago and it wasn’t…well, you know.

It turns out that ICE has shot and killed 3 US citizens in their lawless rampages, not just the two in Minnesota. They killed an innocent young man in Texas last month and we’re just now hearing about it. Oops.

Tennessee is going full Handmaid’s Tale. A new law proposed there would authorize the death penalty for any woman getting an abortion, for any reason. In perfect Orwellian language, the law authorizing the death penalty is called the Human Life Protection Act. Unreal.

Our tax dollars “at work”: “Trump administration officials have struggled to figure out how to increase U.S. military spending by a whopping $500 billion in their forthcoming budget, slowing the overall White House spending plan, four people familiar with the matter said.” We’re cutting spending on education, health, the EPA, but we’re gonna spend an extra half a trillion dollars on the military. Insanity.

Having noted all this, I’m gonna have to work myself out of the mood last night’s game put me in. Time for a reset.

This is sad, scary, extreme, and irritating as hell. Convict Donny’s ICE goons are making the US a place no foreigner in their right mind would visit.

This doesn’t bode well for the 2026 World Cup events in the US. I sure wouldn’t attend if I were from Europe or S America. If I were held in prison for six weeks, sleeping on a concrete floor, once I recovered I’d spend my life savings on lawyers to strike back at the bastards who took me.

In related news, US National Park attendance is down 11M visits in Convict Donny’s first year. I wonder why?

I made a small technology investment this week – I paid $200 for an annual subscription to Anthropic’s Cowork, which is their Claude Sonnet 4.6 large language model (LLM) with extensions to make it more useful as a personal assistant. I figured it was time to dive into the current state of AI a bit deeper.

So far it has already paid for itself. There’s a tax preparation step I despise, which is going through a year’s worth of multiple credit card statements and allocating expense to the various businesses I still keep running – the Louisville rental property business, the Turo car rental business, and my independent consulting LLC. That takes *hours* and multiple passes through about a hundred pages of small font pages to produce a spreadsheet report of my tax-relevant expenses. It’s really no fun.

So I loaded up all those pages of credit card statements and told Claude to scan through the data and produce a spreadsheet of expenses with categories I defined. That took the AI about 15 minutes. Then I had Claude edit the spreadsheet and allocated those summed expenses across the businesses according to some rules I gave it. Another 15 minutes. I then did a final edit of the spreadsheet by hand, and voila, 8-10 hours of work was reduced to 30 minutes. And during that 30 minutes, I could multitask and read while Claude did the work.

Claude/Cowork was built to be good at computer-centric tasks, and I can confirm that it’s very good. It generated and used Python scripts behind the scenes to accomplish certain tasks that I would have done by hand.

Next, I had Claude create a flyer for me for the N Galt Avenue Spring Fling event, something I volunteered to do as part of the event committee. I have *zero* artistic talent, so using an AI is the only way I’d ever design a flyer with graphics. That was harder for the AI – it’s not as expert at image processing as it is with number crunching. But the result wasn’t bad (shown below). I’m still working with the AI to update the flyer and improve it a bit, but once again I’m able to do something I couldn’t do by myself – hence the name Cowork, I suppose.

The image processing tasks consumed a lot more time and tokens than the financial analysis task. Honestly, I still don’t understand how the LLM platforms define and use tokens, but they’re basically units of work that comprise the basis for pricing and/or metered LLM usage. In this case the LLM had to try different approaches to image editing – some things it tried did not work. It was impressive to see the software get stuck, back up and try something different to achieve a goal. Turns out that jpegs and pdfs are tough for both humans and machines to work with. So hard that I hit the token limit for Claude/Cowork while trying to fine-tune the flyer. The token allocation resets in 5 hours, so I’ll have to wait until then to finish. As a hobbyist, not a big problem. But if this were paid consulting work…nope. I’d have to upgrade to a $100-200 per month subscription.

Breaking news as I’m writing, SCOTUS just made Convict Donny’s dumbass tariffs illegal. That’s a HUGE setback for the administration and a great thing for American consumers. Trump will lose what little mind he has left, so that should be entertaining. For the first time, he’s found a limit to his executive power. Better late than never, right?

<Insert sarcasm font> And I’m sure the government will get busy and quickly refund the hundreds of millions of $125 BILLION dollars incurred by businesses due to the illegal tariffs. That’s damage that will be very hard to undo.

Next up, someone should get the question of Donny’s ability to drop bombs on any country he chooses, for any reason, in front off SCOTUS. We’re about to go to war with Iran for no fucking reason, and Convict Donny has been silent on the whole question of “why are we going to war”. That needs to change.

This particular Trump team atrocity drives me nuts. For years all we heard was that Republicans were fiscally responsible, screaming about deficits and the national debt. And pinning their own excesses on the next Democratic administration.

But this…this is just horrific. Kristi Dogkiller Noem, one of Trump’s all-time-worst appointees (and that’s saying a lot), is fleecing the American taxpayer to the tune of $70M+ so she can fly around the world in luxury, on a private 737. It’s insane. Why should taxpayers foot the bill for this shitty excuse for a human to fly around like a sheik?

The absolute gall of these people. They say this will save taxpayers money because it’s cheaper than a military jet. What a fucking joke…but unfortunately, the joke is on us.

The next time one of your MAGA friends opines on fiscal responsibility and/or the national debt, ask them to justify a corrupt cosplaying Cabinet appointee getting to buy multiple private jets for her personal, royal use, using *our* money. How does that serve the taxpayers?

It’s Fat Tuesday, a Mardi Gras milestone day. The end of Carnival and another excuse for a big party in NOLA. Here in Socal it’s just the calm after and before the storm. Lotsa rain yesterday, and now a cold clear morning before the next round tonight.

It’s also game day for UK v Georgia, yet another must-win game for the Cats. It’s a 9pm EST game, so I’m happy to be on the Left Coast to see it at a decent hour. GO BIG BLUE!

Since returning from Cabo I’ve been *busy*. With K still under the weather, I’ve been shopping, cleaning, doing laundry, being a travel agent, stocking up on firewood, working in the olive grove, and so on. I did manage to get a round of golf in before the storms. I’m surprised at how much I enjoy golf these days – it’s about the only athletic-ish thing I do anymore, so it feels great when I get out and play. I’m real close to playing the best golf of my life – there are a few things I’m changing in the swing and I think they’re gonna work. It would be weird but OK to be a better golfer at 70 than I was at 30 or 40.

I could write pages about this week’s new outrages from Donny Convict’s Crime Family, but it’s depressing and I prefer not to today. The horrors of ICE, the Trump-Epstein files, the financial graft and corruption of everyone in Trump’s orbit, the destruction of the US’s health care system, the constant stream of lies told by the federal government…it’s a lot to take in. The (s)hits just keep on coming.

I get back to KY in a week, and I’m anxious to see family and friends there. It will have been 5 weeks since seeing the grandsons, and that’s a bit too long. Looks like the nasty winter is mostly over there, so that’s another plus.

As if I didn’t have enough to do, I just ordered a dashcam to install in my Socal vehicle. After a run-in with a reckless driver in Louisville, I decided a dashcam is necessary for self-preservation given today’s rude and dangerous drivers. And given ICE, come to think of it. I’ll install one here in CA as a test case, then do the same on the KY vehicle.

Marco Rubio gives Europe the message that the US is no longer a democracy, no longer a beacon to the world. We’re a white Christian nationalist autocracy-in-the-making, full stop. Extended quote from Heather Cox Richardson:

In his speech to the conference yesterday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was less confrontational than Vance was last year, but the message was the same. He attacked all three of the pillars on which the U.S. has previously stood in foreign affairs. Global trade has ruined the U.S. economy, he said, while international institutions have undermined sovereignty, and “a climate cult” has imposed energy policies that are “impoverishing our people.”

He focused, though, on “mass migration,” which he claimed “threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.” He called for Europe to join with the U.S. in rejecting the tenets of the post–World War II vision, claiming that “[w]e are part of one civilization—Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”

His description of that shared heritage reflected the Trump administration’s fantasy past. It was all white and Christian, quite weirdly erasing the Indigenous Americans who were central to the development of a peculiarly “American” identity in the eastern colonies of North America and the reality that the vast majority of the American West was Indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican for hundreds of years before it became part of the United States in 1848.

Rubio’s version of the U.S. did not include Black Americans at all, even though they were among the first inhabitants of the colonies that became the U.S., and even though he called out the Rolling Stones, who built their body of work on that of Black American blues musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, as part of “western civilization.” Rubio even ignored his own family’s arrival in the U.S. from Cuba in 1956, rooting his own heritage not in the modern migration from Latin America to the U.S. that the administration is criminalizing, but in eighteenth-century Spain.

Entirely ignoring the threat of autocratic Russia against Europe, Rubio pushed Europe to abandon the values of democracy in favor of imperialism. He said the U.S. had “no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline” and urged Europe to work with the U.S. for a return to western “dominance.”

I despise everything about Donny Convict’s administration. This is just one more example. We may never recover from the damage done by this gang of thugs – certainly not in my lifetime.

This may be the most depressing, disgusting story I’ve read in years. We’ve definitely failed our children.

Friday the 13th is showing its teeth today. I’ve spent the morning rescheduling our flights and shuttle rides to get us home a day earlier than planned. We now arrive Saturday, and the only question is which Kaiser facility we head for when we hit the OC airport- an ER, an urgent care clinic or the usual med clinic without an appointment. K’s sickness isn’t getting any better, even after a visit to the resort MD here and some antibiotics. Time to get moving toward CA. Being sick while traveling is no bueno, even more so when outside the US.

And with all the down time (not doing much except trying to get her feeling better and making travel changes), I’ve had plenty of time to read the news. Ugh. Convict Donny and his pack of flying monkeys continue to find new things to ruin or destroy. The EPA and air quality regulations. The economy. Upcoming elections. The rule of law. Our international reputation. They’re all taking damage, daily.

It’s really weird watching a country self-destruct. The barbarians aren’t just at the gate, they’re inside the building, burning it down a room at a time.

The only good news that Friday the 13th has brought is this beautiful addition to our horse syndicate, born a day or two ago. No name yet, but he and mom are healthy. Can’t wait to wander out to Hermitage Farm and see them.