I went to sleep at almost 2AM and woke up around 7, went back to bed until a bit after 10. It got down to 38 degrees overnight and when I woke up it at 50, or 10C.
The Dump's latest tirades in which he rants about his aspiration to be a dictator, are all over the radio. His followers are eating it up and asking for more.
I imagine his followers, there in the trailer parks and tarpaper shacks and "project" housing and old school buses parked on a lot, etc., thinking, "Things can't get any worse and this guy is at least spicing things up. None of what he says he's gonna do is gonna affect us, and a real shake-up means we might be able to take that Black guy's landscaping business once he's gone, or oust those Chinese people from their convenience store and run it ourselves."
But they don't realize that things CAN get a lot worse. They'll have to say Goodbye to their welfare, food stamps, "welfare" doctor and dentist, probably even free K-12 schooling and certainly free school lunches. The Black guy's landscaping business is going to get taken over by the "connected" or even more likely, most people will be too poor to keep such a business afloat (when I was a kid, where we were, landscaping services were unknown). Same goes for the convenience store or any other business or asset they think that once its non-Aryan owner is gone, they'll get to move in. The "connected" will move in and the "connected" are certainly not them.
Plus there's DNA technology now. I just re-read the Wikipeda on Huey Long, a something-like-a-parallel to Donald Trump from the 1930s. Except that Long was highly intelligent, came from very modest means, and was endorsed and even much-loved, by at least a couple of Presidents. Long as assassinated by a fellow named Weiss, and the theory I've heard was that Long was behind a whispering campaign that Weiss was actually not pure White, as his name would imply, but had a trace of Black blood. In the US, then as now, we follow the "One Drop Rule".
It's been a hilarious aside that so many White supremacists have been finding that they have some Black ancestry over the past few years, but in a Dump dictatorship it's going to be a lot less funny. The US, in the kind of slump we'd end up in, will have trouble feeding all of its people and thus have a reason to trim some excess population. Those who are "white-passing" but actually Not Pure Aryan may be some of the first "trimmed". I say this because with Blacks and Browns their status is obvious. They can be enslaved and worked and if they run off, they can't blend into the population. But these "Crypto-Blacks" as I'm sure some will call them, will be considered more dangerous.
This is the reason I did that DNA test in 2016. I figured the US government will know what everyone's race is, and if I find out first whether I'm Jewish I've got a jump on them. By the time the rounding-up happens I'd be gone. Since it takes a year and more realistically two years to go through the conversion process, I figured I'd be in about the right position to bug out of here by the 2nd Dump presidency...
It will be a country run under the rules of stupid 19th century "race science". We'll also have stupid 19th century economic rules so it will be the exact opposite of the return-to-the-1950s good times. It will be absolutely awful.
It's unsure whether there will really be anywhere to escape to. With the US withdrawing from NATO and sending support to Putin, not Ukraine, Europe will be set up enter a massive land war. Japan is becoming more Right and more insular. Nations not going Fascist will certainly become more insular and defensive.
I packed 11 things and was out of here at 4. I dropped the things off at the post office, then swung by Christmas In The Park to visit the caricature guys. The two Black guys had become four, as there were two more guys in the group, it turns out. All ISCA members as nearly as I can tell. We talked a bit and one of them wanted to know where I got the "Santa hats" because they wanted to all four wear them. I explained how to find the Walmart I go to, and then they got talking about parking hassles and so on.
I rode down to Walmart myself, and went to the pharmacy and got my first shingles shot. It hurt. "Its hurts, the shingle shot" the guy said, and I told him about a shot we got in the Army that hurt a lot more. And about getting chicken pox at age 30 and what an interesting experience that was. I thought the shingles shots were 2 weeks apart and they're actually 2 months. Plus they're expensive, $200 or a bit more. I said I keep getting notices that I'm losing my present "carrier" on Medi-Cal at the end of the year but I'm pretty sure I'll be assigned another one and it probably won't matter at my level. But if it comes to it, I'll just pay the $200; it beats getting shingles.
It was thinking the shots were 2 weeks apart that made me get down there today, thinking I'd have the 2nd shot before the end of the year. But it's all fine since this is why I save up money.
I got some diet soda and a couple cans of kippers and was in line when I remembered about the Santa hats. I got out of line and checked - just two left in the whole store. So I grabbed those and got back in line.
I put the hats in the Walmart bag and the other things in the bike bag and rode back downtown. Somehow I managed to get a bit lost and saw streets I've never seen before and I've lived in this area a dozen years now. But I got back onto Market Street and over to the caricature stand. I handed over the hats saying "They were the last two in the store so I had to get 'em". One of the new guys was there and was like "Whaaaa?" and I said, "Just like I said the other day, 'Consider it the ISCA dues I never paid'". That got me off the hook. I also complimented them on their clean design of their booth, which had a few examples of their work not tons pinned up everywhere, and easy on the eye.
I went by the Amazon place for bubble mailers and then headed for Nijiya for the final bit of an experiment. On my way out, I'd stopped there for a nice sweet mochi with black bean paste inside, 60 grams of carbs worth, and a can of coffee. I'd eaten that outside before starting off for the post office, thinking I'd see what its effect is on my headache, which has been a pain today. No real effect.
So on this 2nd visit, I got a plate of sushi and some interesting corn-cheese crisp things, ginger and cucumbers, and an Imperial pint bottle of beer. I remembered that time beer had given me some respite from my headache and wanted to see if it would happen again.
I rode home with the usual amount of zombie avoidance, and set up to eat, and drink. Lo and behold, the beer helped. So now I knew I was onto something. It turns out alcohol has a "biphasic" effect on blood pressure in that in the near-term it lowers it due to making the body release something called nitric oxide, but long-term leads to higher blood pressure.
This tells me two things: My headaches are related to my high blood pressure. And one promising way to lower it is to get more of this nitric oxide into my body.
Also, since I've had a beer, I don't feel like doing much.
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