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.