Heart and Mental Status Update

 

Since I somehow found time to expose my growing fears several days back, I guess I might as well give an update on my ongoing heart problems.

All things considered, compared to others also on the transplant list waiting for a heart, I’m doing pretty good within a certain point of view. Namely that I’m “healthy” enough to still be working at my job. My cardiac arrhythmias are still under control by the medicine the doctors put me on back in October. Great news, you might say and while yes it’s true the devil is in the details.

Namely that I’m living in a box. I get up and go to work. Come home, eat dinner, go to bed just to do it all again. While that sounds like a pretty typical routine even for healthy people, I feel like my existence is confined inside a small box. For the first few months this routine was tolerable but as time has passed it is becoming difficult. While the wife can travel, I can’t leave the country. Not because of any physical limitations but if my arrhythmias should hit me out of the country I’m screwed. Long story short, we’re talking massive problems with possible healthcare costs outside the range of my insurance and even larger costs in getting my stupid ass back to Charleston.

Throw in that all but one of my off days since leaving the hospital in October have been me driving down to Charleston to get poked and prodded by my doctors. The icing on this cake is that my employer, who will remain anonymous has saw fit to pick this moment to increase the workload by everyone in the department. Without seeing fit to hire extra help. Part of the reason when I get home I just collapse on the couch and zone out. Finding the energy to even concentrate on a book after getting ready for bed is tough.

Let me add that I am seeing a psychiatrist to help me with the mental gymnastics brought on by having to deal with everything associated with waiting for and having a heart transplant.

Then there is the growing fascist nightmare that is Trump and the Republicans. Not in the mood to delve deeper in my fears on this one right now.

So to anyone who might read this I hope you’re doing okay. I’ll try to post more but it all depends on my energy levels. And give how badly I hear the locals complain about liberals I might have been rounded up and thrown into one of the interment camps that the MAGAs are promising to build for illegals. News flash, once the illegals are “dealt with” they’ll be coming for the next scapegoat.

Toodles and Good Luck!

Cold Fear Brought Me Back This Time

 

Let me begin by saying fear brought me back. The greasy and putrid fear that this country is inching ever closer to a fascist regime with strong Handmaid’s Tale leanings. I’m not being flippant in the least, all it takes to find evidence of this is a little internet searching. No, I’m not including Left-wing websites in these searches, which for me have long since become almost as obnoxious as their right-wing counterparts.

I’m speaking about hard centrist sites like the Washington Post, NPR, AP, and Reuters to name a few. What is the source of the fear that pulled me off my comfortable couch this Sunday morning?

 My terror comes from the Heritage Foundation’s wet dream called “Project 2025.” 

Boiling down the nightmare to its basic parts, the people pushing the 920 page document called Project 2025 want to restructure the federal government towards a Christian Nationalist vision. 

Starting off on day one of Trump returning to the White House his Administration would purge the federal government of as many as 50,000 apolitical civil servants. They would be replaced by a cadre of personnel specifically picked to be Trump/Conservative loyalists. 

How do you explain to the average brain dead American that the majority of civil servants are totally outside the whims and fancies of the politicians. That they perform vital jobs that keep the Federal government running. But Zaius, you say, they’re just parasitical bureaucrats sucking the life out of hard working Americans using tax dollars for lazy welfare folks or stupid projects that go nowhere and do nothing. 

Totally cool I respond, because there is waste in government, just like in business and any other human endeavor. But just to keep things simple, these government expenditures also include vital entitlements like Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare. 

Shout out to all those socialism hating patriots, the Social Security and Medicare your grandparents probably depend on are the very definition of socialism. Oh yeah, numerous Republicans in the House and Senate have pushed for both of those entitlements to be drastically cut. They say we can’t afford such entitlements while constantly pushing for more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. 

But the Project 2025 restructuring that should icy chills every American is its goal to slash the Department of Justice and dismantle the FBI, ending their traditional independence and tying them to the whims of whatever Administration is in power.

Project 2025 also calls for the shutting down of things like the weather service, civil right monitoring and a whole host of agencies that are at times inconvenient to a conservative agenda. 

Then there is their plan to end all reproductive freedoms, which means no abortions even if the life of the mother is endangered. Several states with highly restrictive abortion laws have already had women who have had to flee their home state to receive the medical care to save their lives. The fact that several states are pushing to make it illegal for a woman to receive an abortion in another state is nothing less than totalitarian. The icing on that cake is legislative action allowing a third party to sue anyone who helps a woman reach a destination where she can get an abortion is something you would only expect in a dystopian book a few years ago.

Spelling it out as simply as possible, for numerous conservatives who have convinced themselves that God is on their side, after a woman becomes pregnant she is even less of a human being and more a vessel for breeding. 

Conservatives have been pulling at the strings of the modern United States at least since the Reagan Administration. They freely admit of their desire to return to the status quo to something more along the America of the Founding Fathers.

Anyone with an inkling of knowledge of history and the actual conditions that many had lived under in the 18th and 19th and the better part of the 20th century should be sickened.

Yeah, I’m voting for Biden in November. “But he’s old and losing his mind,” someone might say to me.

I’d vote for President Biden if all that was left of him were cremated remains. I don’t vote for a man but the ideas he represents. 

  Here's a link further explaining Project 2025 with other links to the full threat. 

Come the Nightmare

 Truthfully, this country has been on this nightmarish political path for decades. Personally in my head I can trace back the events leading to the Orange Deranged Mutant to the Reagan Administration. I believe it was Rosalynn Carter that said Ronny Reagan made Americans comfortable with their prejudices. Don't cuss me out but I'll give the Devil some backhanded credit because he did shake the foundations of the Soviet Empire. 

But that being said, Reagan was a horrible president when it came actually leading this country. He kept the Republicans mostly civil during this time but he set the stage for the likes of Newt Gingrich, Clearance Thomas, and the worst boil ever to appear on the American scene, Rush Fucking Limbaugh. Reagan also played with a few Trump terms like "Making America Great Again" and the old favorite of the states rights.

But Trump is a whole new level of openly dangerous nutjob. He has played on the fears and rage of white middle and working class folks like a master violinist. Yeah, in my mind his movement has moved into literal cult territory. Just when I thought the MAGA cultists couldn't get any lower, more than a few of its members have openly put Trump on the same level as God and Jesus. 

No matter what the dingbat Nikki Haley might say in public, she has no chance of taking the nomination away from Trump. The Orange Mutant will win the Republican nomination, shit he's essentially won it already. The only question left how bad will he damage the country. The answer of course is that piece of shit can literally destroy American Democracy whether he wins or loses the election.

Shit, I've been worried the last couple of days of a new civil war starting with the the bullshit happening on the Texas border. That bastard Governor Abbot is just hoping President Biden tries to federalize the Texas National Guard, which would force the National Guard soldiers in Texas to chose between their state and presidential authority. Making things more dangerous, other right-wing Trump loving governors have promised to send National Guard forces to Texas to support Abbot's policies on the border. 

So if Trump wins the election, he goes in implementing the Heritage Foundation's "Project 2025" which will rework the federal government in Trump's corrupt image. I picture something similar to what happen to Germany in 1933 as the Nazis took over. Trump's henchmen and henchwomen all have the personality and character of your average Nazi bureaucrat. 

And if Trump loses, well I highly suspect at best we'll have another January 6th-like insurrection. At worst, I've heard enough talk of "Second Amendment remedies" over the years to believe it could happen. I'm not thinking the old fashion type of USA/CSA type civil war but low-level insurgents and anonymous political violence. 

While the left has their own versions of nutjobs, the militant right-wing vastly outnumbers them. The left's biggest problem are the idiots who mouth the brain dead idea that picking the lesser of two evils is still evil. Must be nice to live in a world where things are so starkly black and white. 

Yes, it should be obvious that Trump could win and return to the White House. It should also be as obvious that even if he loses he most likely will be just as huge a danger.