It’s amazing how many articles I read on sites like Raw Story, that are clearly critical of Donald Trump and his administration, are targeted by ads in support of Trump. Occasionally I click on one of those ads and provide bogus personal information that includes a real, but throw-away, email address. The first thing to note is that nearly all of the ads are phrased in terms of a survey. Such as “Do you support President Trump?

I woke up today to find that my moderately old 2012 Mac Pro server (that I use to host virtual machines and BOINC scientific computing), was dead. Attempting to boot it resulted in the boot folder with a question mark icon being displayed. Which means the boot disk could not be found. A couple of hours of debugging later I concluded the OWC (Other World Computing) PCI-E SSD disk I installed a few years ago was dead.

I live in Santa Clara. Known to the world as “Silicon Valley”. Just ten miles from the headquarters for Facebook, Google, etc. Home to a lot of well educated, intelligent people. That doesn’t mean we don’t have our share of idiots; though, in this case, “covidiots” is more apt. Walking my dogs yesterday morning I walked by one of the parks near my home and saw a group of approximately 20 young men playing basketball.

This Daily Kos article by Haricot Blue is brilliant. It’s certainly not the first time someone has written about the shortsightedness of oligarchs but the snark that Haricot employs is a joy to read. Here are the opening paragraphs but you really, really, need to read the full article: Oh, rich, white men. You unfathomable idiots. You could have had it all! There you were back in 2008, freshly bailed out after almost totaling the economy with your criminal greed, with not a single one of you headed to prison for it.

I was reading yet another article about excessive police force against a black male and the following hypothetical exchange was posted as a comment to the article: Black lives matter. “All lives matter." All? “All." Syrian refuges? “Well…" LGBTQ lives? “The Bible says…" Unarmed black men? “Should have complied…" Poor people on food stamps or some form of assistance? “I’m not subsidizing laziness…" People of different religious faiths than yours or no religious faith?

TL;DR Citi Bank is indistinguishable from a neighborhood loan shark. They charged me an additional $109 USD in late fees over a period of three months due to an initial debt of $60 USD incurred in the same period. I just received an email from Citi Bank telling me I owed $100.74 on my Costco credit card. Which confused me because I haven’t bought anything from Costco in the past year.

Okay, it was a metaphorical, rather than literal, black swan. I was walking my two dogs yesterday and a couple I’ve never seen before crossed my path. The man was wearing a “Trump/Pence” t-shirt. This is in Santa Clara, CA. Home of “Silicon Valley”. As politically blue (i.e., liberal) as it gets. In the past three years I’ve seen exactly one red MAGA hat. The man, not surprisingly, weighed at least 260 lbs and was having difficulty walking.

In a typical week I used to receive between five and fifteen telemarketing calls each week. In the past three weeks I’ve received exactly two. Apparently even scumbag telemarketers aren’t willing to kill their employees by forcing them to work in close proximity in call centers. A work environment that is probably second only to a nursing home as a petri dish for the spread of COVID-19.

USA Today reports that Rep. Steve King (R-IA) defends rape and incest. I’ve been to Council Bluffs, Iowa, several times on business. You can’t drive a half mile without seeing a church or religious sign (typically a billboard). Steve King is representative of too many of the “salt of the earth” people who live there: hyper religious, willfully ignorant, bigoted, racist, and proud of it. You couldn’t pay me enough to live there.

From a comment in this Joe My God: “How about we treat every young man who wants to buy a gun like every woman who wants to get an abortion - mandatory 48-hr waiting period, parental permission, a note from his doctor proving he understands what he’s about to do, a video he has to watch about the effects of gun violence, an ultrasound wand up the ass (just because).