Newsbleat

Iran threatens to do this if Israel, the US or the Saudis do that, then attacks one of them, who then threatens to do that if Iran does this. After Iran does this and that a few times, the attacks are responded to with that and this and threats to do even worse to Iran, which responds with that and this.

Eventually one side grows tired of just doing this and that and launches a barrage of this, that and all sorts of other things, which is soon responded to by a similar barrage of all sorts of other things followed by that and this.

Eventually the US gets tired of arguing with Israel on how to attack Iran so Israel abstains but the Saudis don’t listen to them and do what they want, which is mostly letting the US and Israel do their fighting for them.

Several times now the US has maintained a sustained nightly assault on Iran’s offensive infrastructure with no result except to degrade that infrastructure when the primary goal is to make Iran behave, which they refuse to do, no matter what.

A lot of people are making a lot of money blowing up a lot of stuff that working people are paying a lot of taxes to buy it all with that don’t want to pay all those taxes.

In other equally important news, the Queen of England is dead and her effeminate son is now King of England and pissed off at his red-haired bastard son and mixed-race wife, and Australia has banned all free speech.

It hit 100 F. again today, which is pretty hot even with the dry desert air. In summertime, especially, I take a nap about noon to sleep through part of the hottest part of the day and today was no exception. It’s not hard to get to sleep as I’m usually awake at 5 AM, though I don’t always rise right away.

Anyway, that’s my explanation for rising at nearly 2 PM with a craving for cream of celery soup. Because I dreamed about it. Not having a good recipe for it, a Google search quickly provided “The BEST Cream of Celery Soup Recipe”, which of course was my immediate choice. I mean, if it’s the best…

So yes, I printed the recipe and followed it closely and I’ll tell you it’s the best cream of anything soup I’ve ever had, and that’s saying a lot because creamy soups have always been my favorite.

Normally I’d keep a secret like this to myself but since it’s too late and I  already blurted out what I typed into Google to find it, the URL is https://www.daringgourmet.com/homemade-cream-celery-soup/

Seriously. This is amazingly good soup, which takes me to the rest of this tale, about my weight. Most of my many readers will recall that I went on a dieting jag a year, or has it been more now… ago… and dropped 25 pounds down to 145 pounds, from my formerly ponderous self. Being 5ft, 8.5 inches in statuesque stature, all that extra blubber was in my way of doing things, like bending over while sitting down, for example. It took a lot of effort of will over a long time and now when I step on the scale, if my weight tops 146, alarm bells go off and my apatite shuts off on it’s own.

So instead of wolfing down this extraordinary soup, it went into little plastic tubs that were labeled and stashed in the freezer. I’d had about a half cup just from “sampling” it before doing this and knew it was now or never to separate myself from that soup. Within the week one of those tubs will become  a fine lunch, it won’t just sit there and grow ice crystals and the thing is, now that my apatite is in good control, there will be a few more soup lunches in the future after that.

Of course, more can always be made, unless another nap and a new craving for something different should strike when I least expect it. You never know about these things.

5:45 AM, cup of freshly brewed coffee in hand, the cat wants out and so do I because there’s a high overcast of rows of little scudding clouds, banked up one after the other across the sky, all glowing bright golden, and I want to watch as they slowly fade.

Woke from a dream about all the things I remember, like the words and music to a thousand songs, old limericks, and this one that you should try on your friends, see how they do. I was 31 when it was run past me, I got it the first time. The Memory Test

The first line is “One hen”, and they repeat it after you. Then, “One hen, two ducks”, and they repeat it. There’s ten lines and with each one, they repeat the whole thing after you, from the start, after another line is added. One hen, two ducks, three squawking geese, four limerick oysters, five corpulent porpoises, six pairs of Don Alverzo’s tweezers, seven thousand Macedonians in full battle array, eight brass monkeys from the ancient, sacred crypts of Egypt, nine sympathetic, apathetic old men on roller skates with a profound propensity for procrastination and sloth, ten diabolical denizens of the deep who haul and stall and thrall around the quivy of the quo of the quay all at the same time.

Today, the grocery list is a different matter. Four, maybe five things and I might get home with all of them but more than that and I’d better have written it down.

 

The latest crazy attack on Free Speech is the news articles quoting some black person as saying “N*gga”, yes, asterisk and all, because supposedly that’s how blacks say NIGGER now. They don’t. They say nigger, and when they put that in print it looks like this: nigger. No asterisk.

Free speech includes the right to say things that some people find offensive and to use words that are generally socially unacceptable. You can be kicked out of a party for your mouth but you can’t be jailed for saying racist things about your host. You might get the crap kicked out of you for being too offensive and insulting, but that’s a different matter.

If you walk through a neighborhood screaming insults at your neighbors in the middle of the night, you can be arrested for disturbing the peace, but not for the insults, only for the noise and waking people up who have to go to work in the morning. Offending people is not a crime and that includes calling some black asshole a nigger. You can bet he or she has lots of names for you.

Now, for your viewing pleasure, a photo of Barack Obama’s gorgeous manwife.

Choosing the gender of a robot companion may be as important as which brand to buy. At my age, having a beautiful young female with big tits would make me look like the terrible pervert that I am, so that’s out. Medium sized tits might be okay though. A male gender robot might confuse John, the old jerkoff who moved in next door, just down the hill from me, who I suspect is queer. I don’t need any renewed advances of his phony friendship.

Of course, I can’t be too bothered by public opinion, either, and a young lady with, umm, you know, nice tits, modestly dressed and really really human looking hanging on my left arm in public places to totally fuck with everyone’s minds would be pretty cool. That last part, totally fucking with people’s minds, that’s the deciding factor. Yes, I think I’ll go with that.  The thought is titillating, har har har, titillating. You get it?

I look a lot like Donald Sutherland does now if he were still alive but he isn’t because he died 2 years ago so yeah, we don’t look like each other any more but anyway, that’s him below when he looked like I do now at the same age. I mention this so you’ll understand the difference between me and a pretty young lady and why most people would be looking at both of us instead of just her.

His photo will be replaced with a very alluring one of my female ‘bot at first opportunity.

That’s a No on watching Ann Droid, by the way. I need a VPN that puts me in Britain, along with a valid area code and BBC TV license. It just slaughters me that in all the world, only GB charges for an airwaves license to hear a fucking radio. Beatles “Tax Man” has it right.

Lost In Space was a TV show in the 1960’s that featured Robot B9, a companion robot of the Robinson family, that got themselves lost while jetting from planet to planet somewhere out there in space. The robot was always flailing it’s arms and shouting “Danger, danger”. Robot B9 was all flexible tubes with a big, round transparent plastic body with lights and things moving around inside it. Very technical looking for the time.

Things have changed just a little since then.

Only a few weeks ago I asked Google about the progress of companion robots, ones that can read for you, do household chores, things like that, and Google said that the best one, Elon Musk’s Optimus, was a few years away yet. That was a few weeks ago.

Today I asked again and all sorts of Chinese companies are building them like crazy, I can buy one today that will do all those things, for about $20,000 and others are either coming into the market or being sold now for $9000 and less. Their capabilities vary all over the road, but think about what’s down that road.

I’m hoping my one good eye will still be at least marginally functional in two more years, good enough for me to select a companion robot by then. If not, then they better make them sooner, because I’m going to want one that will sit in this chair and type for me, read my email to me, order from Amazon for me, and hopefully be able to drive my car for me.

Right now, different robot makers are developing different abilities and the best of these abilities are well above human capabilities. Over time it’s inevitable that these companies are going to combine to produce superior robots. Marketplace competition will rule and a robot that can carry on a decent conversation, read and type, do chores, be a really good companion and Drive Your Car, that robot will be the top seller.

Google said it would be two years before a robot could do all those things and drive a car too. It’s the car driving that’s the hardest part and requires the best AI, and the sudden rapid advances in both computer chips and AI may make it possible in a year or less. The competition in this field is massive.

The competition in personal robots right now far outpaces the competition in self-driving cars, though that’s also pretty fierce. It’s just that a self-driving new car costs a lot more than a personal robot and isn’t subject to all the regulations, state and federal licensing and safety scrutiny that retards progress, and most people aren’t going blind, they’re just growing old, and there’s a far greater market for companion robots.

Ultimately I may have to buy both a companion robot and a self-driving car, as my uncooperative eyeballs are in control of the time limits here. We will see. Yes, that’s a pun.

Been cooking all morning, it’s nearly 2 PM now and nearly done, just took the stewed tomatoes off the range top to let the pot cool, then I’ll save some in the refrigerator and bag  up the rest in freezer bags and pack them away to freeze, for meals when the tomatoes don’t grow no mo.

Earlier today I cranked out four loaves of zucchini bread, which are now in the freezer. The zucchini plant may be getting about done, it’s beginning to look that way, I started it early because it gets so hot here in the middle of summer and some veggies shut down when it’s too hot. Likewise the big tomatoes, they turn white on top with too much sun, and the tops start cracking. Now is the time to cook and preserve for winter.

One zucchini plant in a 20 gallon planter pot will produce all the zucchini squash that one person is ever likely to want.

You know, effing tomatoes run up to $3 a pound for good ones, the big fat ones, and they don’t have even half the flavor that the ones I grow in my back yard garden do.  There’s not much that grows well here unless you eat acorns and bark, you have to create your own soil, make raised beds and so forth. But what does grow well once you’ve done the work is hard to beat for nutrition and taste.

Elon Musk just quietly bought a $billion mobile energy company. It has ” a large fleet of rapidly deployable gas turbines” that are intended for use as power sources for his AI data centers.

Our government is knowingly engaging in a Middle East war with Iran that is expanding to include surrounding nations.

Headline at barenakedislam.com: “30,000 Trojan Horses (mosques) and 50 million Muslims across Britain and Western Europe”. It may be accurate, or not, Google claims about 20 million, but that’s Google. No bias there… That’s still too many Muslims. Islam is taking over much of the world.

So is Socialism, which is steadily gaining ground here in the USA.

Trump is feuding with everyone that’s going Socialist including our neighbor Canada, and that’s most of Europe now.

A man most of us never heard of until after he died, was killed under very suspicious circumstances, with no one agreeing on how he died, in a circus still going on that’s reminiscent of the shooting of Pres. Kennedy. Charlie Kirk had the flag at the White House flown at half staff over his death, an honor reserved for great heads of state.

Adding it all up: Our government is behaving in very anomalous ways.

Socialism is winning, which means Communism is winning, so basically China is winning, Elon and other billionaires are spending tons of money building AI, humanoid robots and moon rockets, China just did what Elon’s done and landed a rocket back on it’s gantry.

True Communism steals everything including the means of production and makes a mess out of what was once successful. Yet China is Communist and they’re thriving, there’s billionaire Chinese businessmen.

So is this the new model and the reason the billionaires with Elon at the head of the pack are apparently oblivious to what should be an existential threat to their fortunes? Capitalism is encouraged while total control of the people is enforced?

It’s too strange for me to fully grasp. However, this is pretty  much what it looks like. Islam is sort of a religious form of Communism. Islam is the government and it can demand total control of every thought. The Saudis own Mecca, the heart and soul of Islam. Might they be joining hands with this new Socialism-Communism?

They openly came up against Iran’s regime, there are two main factions of Islam that have been at war with each other for centuries, Sunni and Shia. Iran is Shia. Defeat Shia, side with both the East and the West, in a Socialistic way? Unite all Islam? Sort of a Global Caliphate, sort of? Hmm?

A caliphate they’d have to share with China and North America but the way things are going that should be no problem.

When I was born, in Long Beach, California, on Jan. 6, 1939, the population of the United States was precisely 130,879,718 people. Plus me.

Today the population of the United States is uncertain, but demographic sources like Worldometer put the total at about 349,000,000.

That’s how many people are capable of turning every habitable surface of a land area the size of the USA into houses and concrete. This country was really beautiful once.

I feel like Rutger Hauer’s character in Blade Runner. “All those memories will be lost, like tears in rain.” Only it’s not memories that are lost. I remember how it was. How it was, is what’s lost.

I feel sorry for Mars. That planet has no idea what’s coming for it.