A Dangerous Seed

It is now almost a month since Joe Biden won the election as president of the United States. Unsurprisingly, the current president refuses to accept he lost. I say unsurprisingly because the man lives in a self-made delusional world where he is not only the smartest guy in the room in every situation but also the most popular president who ever sat in the White House. He has never had greater than a 45% approval rating since his election yet he still insists that he is the most popular president ever. 

I'm long since past being irritated by this idiot. He simply can't help himself. The man is totally without scruples or basic understanding of almost any concept and is a classically proven narcissist. None of this is new. He's been delusional and self inflated since he began to ingratiate himself in the media many years ago. There is a long string of broken relationships, broken promises, bankruptcies, refusals to pay people he owes money to, and totally false statements from him that go back for decades if anyone cares to actually look at the record. The fact that he could lose an election by a large margin and yet still insist he won is by no means remarkable. It is simply how he operates and it will never change. 

What is irritating to me is the number of people who continue to feed into his fantasies. Obviously, many of them are doing it to maintain their power or influence with his voter base but the really scary part of this is that a lot of people truly believe the things this man says. This has been a puzzlement to me for many years but it plainly exists. Otherwise, a large portion of the population would not have voted for him. 

I think we could break it down even further and find that many people don't approve of him or his methods but they like his policies. I can accept that. I find it disgusting that these same people have for years put themselves forward as the moral leaders of our society and now turn a blind eye to a base criminal and habitual liar in the most powerful office in the world, but I can accept it. I will no longer remain quiet the next time they want to morally legislate for the rest of us but I  can accept it. 

The supporters who really scare me are the ones who believe the drivel he is putting out about the election being stolen. These are basically the same people who believe the rest of his lies but they are sadly disconnected from reality. I'm not quite sure how to react to these people. I am a strong believer in logic and communication as without it, no one ever gets past believing what they want to believe. In other words, choosing what we want to believe in the face of all evidence to the contrary is the kind of thing that brings on chaos and violence and it always has been. It is a dangerous seed to plant and it bears bitter and violent fruit when it ripens. 

We have allowed that seed to be firmly planted in our midst. Social media which feeds us what we want to hear and "news" networks that do the same are dangerously close to wiping out the very idea of truth in this country today. At one time, we understood the power of the media and regulated it accordingly. The airwaves belonged to the American people and we zealously guarded them to make sure that powerful voices weren't allowed to drown out dissent. At that time, you couldn't own more than one media outlet in one area. Even the ones that people did own had to answer to the FCC and tell both sides of the story or face losing their license to broadcast. 

People say the internet changed all that. That's partially true, but we began to change things long before the internet. Reagan defanged the FCC by putting people in charge of it who ridiculed the idea that broadcasts should be regulated any more than people who make toasters should be regulated. Shortly thereafter, news networks, radio stations, and newspapers began being gobbled up by people who had no interest in unbiased reporting. Instead, they wanted to simply maximize profits. What we have now for news reporting is the inevitable result of that. Affirmation and not information rules the newsroom driven by ratings with no concern for the truth. 

Trump is the end result of that type of thinking. Unfortunately, he is not the worst result. The worst result is a large portion of the population on both sides of the spectrum who simply refuse to hear anything that disagrees with what they already think. They don't have to. Just get your news from someone who agrees with you and believe what you read on social media and you never have to question your own ideas. Never mind these ideas are carefully packaged and fed to you by people willing to sell your votes to the highest bidder. You just don't have to think for yourself anymore and you are always right. What could be better than that?

Timing,,,,

I sold my motorcycle last night. It was on old Harley Davidson made the year I graduated high school. A friend of mine had it out in his barn when I bought it. He had used it as his backup bike. It was kind of rough looking but ran really well. Squat, beefy, and loud with lots of power and a very low centre of gravity. The first time I rode it I gunned it too hard going down the gravel road he lived on and it jumped hard to the left, perilously close to a barbed wire fence running parallel to the road. The barbs were whizzing by close to the crash bars and a slightly surprised cow just inside the fence gave me a startled look before jumping and kicking like a calf on her way away from the fence and the hard guttural growl of the old shovelhead engine. I had a huge smile on my face at the instant at the insane response of the throttle and the massive vibrato roar that a shovelhead infuses in your whole body while you are riding one. 

Harleys have a following for a reason and it's not all hype and posturing. The distinctive sound from the V shaped single pin design is unique and mystifyingly similar to the beat of a human heart. The timing of the two pistons firing in one distinct part of the cycle and then resting for a longer cycle is quite unique in combustion engines. It's not mechanically efficient but it is unique. Because Harley's fire on such an odd cycle they also tend to vibrate and shake violently when you rev them up. It's almost irresistible when you are riding one. The surge of power is uneven and the bike feels like it squats down and grabs the road before jumping forward like a large lioness grabbing the savannah with each churning lunge of her body. 

Over the years Harley has mitigated this vibration with an assortment of rubber mounts, belt drives, and counterbalance weights imbedded in the engine. The new Evo's sound similar, although there is a difference, but run smoother. The world's largest vibrator now has a softer shake. The old Shovelheads and Panheads were hard mounted to the frame and unmitigated in their stroke. My bike vibrated so much that I had to have a loose grip on the handlebars to get my eyes to focus. It had been bored twice before I got it. It was tuned to turn over slow at idle so it sounded like it was going to go dead between strokes but when I turned the throttle it would literally jump forward after that initial squat to grab the road. The chain drive rattled and added to the cacophony and it had been lowered to the point that the pipe mounts dug into the pavement if you leaned too far right on a turn. Everything came loose on that bike. It laughed at loctite and every short ride was followed by tightening of bolts and screws or reinstallation of accessories that were about to fall off. I actually had the crankcase vibrate open one ride and begin dumping sixty weight oil out directly in front of the rear tire. 

Try that sometime if you want to experience instant panic and see your life flash in front of your eyes. I tore the bike down to the frame and rebuilt it at one point. (Yes.... part of it was in my kitchen for a while so I was that guy). I remember the night I got it put back together and cranked it back up in my shed without the baffles in it to blue the pipes. It was a small metal shed more suited for lawnmowers than bikes but I literally rattled the metal itself so that it added to the symphony of growling horsepower and mistimed energy so much that I could feel it vibrating through my whole body every time I revved it up a little. I remember watching some roofing tacks in a wooden crate move around like an ant bed coming alive as I let it sit at idle and warm up. 

I put it up for sale a week ago as my daughter needs the room in her shed and I haven't ridden it in at least ten years. I lost the urge to constantly work on it. It was the kind of bike that required oil in the saddle bags and and an extensive tool kit to go far as it would just shed parts if you rode it too far or too hard like a big dog shaking water out its fur after coming out of a creek. Putting an old Harley in a sale paper is a little like setting a field of catnip on fire. People come out of the woodwork to bargain with you. Last night a guy pulled up in a large enclosed moving van truck with a lift gate on the back. He was wearing a porkpie hat, a long ponytail, and an long grey goatee that reached halfway down to his belt. He looked straight out of every biker movie ever made. He shook my hand and started talking about where he could back his truck up to load the bike. He immediately told me he was buying it sight unseen because he knew what it was and had to have it. He handed me a wad of folded hundred dollar bills that was exact to the amount I had agreed to over the phone. He was tickled to take all the spare parts I had hanging all over the shed. My homemade tilt jack, the Clymer's manual covered in oil and grease, and every other homemade tool I had come up with in years of working on the bike. He loved the custom paint job and was ecstatic to find the jack plate I had made out of 5/8 steel plate for the clutch assembly. We talked about bikers we knew in common and marvelled the hadn't run into each other before. Somehow.... he and that bike were meant for each other, two relics of a different time reunited. A part of me hated to see that old bike go but I was happy to see it go to someone who understood and loved it like I did.

The New World

When the Spanish Conquistadors landed in the New World they were so alien to many of the natives that they weren't capable of processing the images they were seeing. Having never seen such technologies or blatant materialism they were simply incapable of making judgments as to the dangers they presented so they welcomed them as gods of a new age. Clarke's third law says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. We don't like to think of ourselves as being the natives sufficiently unadvanced but the evidence seems to suggest we are at the moment.

The world is changing pretty dramatically. I know that every generation says that and it true for each generation as well but I'm not sure we have ever seen changes like those that have come about in the last 20 years or so.

In the last century we saw the power of states with authoritarian rulers bent on controlling nations lead to destructive wars of massive scale. Words like Freedom, and Liberty seemed at risk from these powers that be within these states. The human race has always had a disturbing tendency towards self destruction but that period seemed especially dangerous for some of our leadership's efforts to control and dominate.

Now, we face a different kind of danger to our freedom, liberty, and self determination. This threat doesn't invade or destroy from the outside, it does it from within. It isn't a state or a government, it is a business model. We willingly let it into our homes and our minds but make no mistake, it's goal is to take over and control us and it is well on the way to doing that.

It ignores privacy laws and constitutional protections across the globe because these were largely put in place to protect us from overweening governments, not private business interest. No one imagined in the past that such private interests could gain enough power, influence, and control to actively control our actions; much less our thoughts.

Like most human disasters it has been a confluence of events and actions that led to this change. 9-11 and other terrorist actions across the globe woke us up to the idea that we were in danger from people we hardly knew. Organised terrorist attacks made it seem reasonable to give up some of our freedoms and rights in order for our governments to protect us. The timing of these events happened to coincide with our gradual awakening that our privacy rights were being usurped and ignored by this industry but we looked the other way and our governments became encouraged by the tools of unlimited surveillance these companies were already utilising to sell us products and herd us towards a complete lack of privacy rights.

Now, they blatantly gather, sell, and gradually successfully control our thoughts and actions in thousands of different ways each day. Cell phone apps tell them where we are each moment. Cell phone and smart house apps and devices tell them when we move, how we move, and what we say in ways that allow them to predict what we might buy next. Facebook clicks and likes allow them to categorise our thoughts, beliefs, values, and habits in algorithms designed and perfected to influence what we do next.

None of this is legal in this country or most of the rest of the world, yet the profits from this information sold to the highest bidders in competitive auctions is so massive that it's worth the risk of collecting and selling it. Governments turn a blind eye for the tradeoff in security in knowing who might be plotting the next terrorist act and most people see it only as a matter of convenience and improved technology.

Meanwhile, our children spend hundreds of hours a month being shaped, pushed, pulled, and controlled by these same algorithms latched on to their very real need to be accepted by their peers. We have long known that the adolescent years produce psyches especially prone to suggestion and peer pressure but Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have made it into an exacting science of gathering huge logs of data available to the highest bidder.

If what they know isn't bad enough, what they intend to do with the information is even worse. These companies believe with some certainty that by gathering and stealing this information, the information that tells them what we think and when we think it, that they can control what we do next. If that sounds scary it's only because it is. They believe this because they test, retest, and perfect their algorithms daily. They are able to sell this information because it is accurate and it works.

We have never in history faced such a threat. No small group of people have ever owned the information that would allow them to control our actions. Orwellian horrors of big brother or big other are here. They didn't come from government, they came from private entities who stealthily managed to make us believe we were getting something for free while they steadily and illegally mined our thoughts and actions like so many strip miners swarming around a gold mine we believed we owned, the thought processes in our own mind.

The Mental Derangement of Religious Fanaticism

I just read an article describing the self professed views of Ralph Drollinger, head of Capitol Ministries. It was the semi delusional drivel that often comes out of the mouths of religious fanatics. Mr. Drollinger is neither unique or even out of the ordinary for that brand of evangelicals that see the wrath of God in any number of natural events. His basic ignorance of science and biology is not out of the norm for an evangelical preacher but what makes him dangerous is the people he is influencing and partnered with in his ministries.

Drollinger released an article last Saturday in which he spewed the following misinformation: "Whenever an individual or corporate group of individuals violate the inviolate precepts of God's word, he, she, they or the institution will suffer the respective consequences. Most assuredly America is facing this form of God's judgement."

Drollinger then went on to denigrate the LGBT community and bemoan the fact that he believes people are somehow worshipping the "religion of environmentalism." I can see why a charlatan who preys on the fear of mentally weak and ignorant to get them to send him money might be upset that other groups attempt to raise money by using the same methodology but he obviously doesn't understand the basic difference between a belief that we need to take better care of the environment and the fantasy conversations he has with the god of his own particular lunacy. Just because his own livelihood is based on basic deception and fear doesn't mean other people trying to accomplish something they see as valuable for everyone are similarly taking advantage of people.

While Drollinger's self serving brand of fear and loathing of things he doesn't understand is not unique in religious circles, his influence on people with real power is. Capitol Ministries was specifically created to increase the amount of "Christians" in places of political power. Some of his flock that support him are Mike Pence (current Vice President), Mike Pompeo (current Secretary of State), and Betsy Devos (current Secretary of Education). All of these people regularly attend his services whenever they have time. Drollinger brags that Trump himself reads his articles and gives them rave reviews. Unfortunately for Drollinger, Trump worships only himself and it is common knowledge that the man doesn't read anything over a page long. He doesn't have that much interest in anything that isn't abject praise of himself.

We've heard all this kind of rhetoric before. The AIDS virus was widely seen as God's wrath on a world of people who had turned their back on this angry, infantile being no longer being worshipped properly. The god of the Old Testament regularly punished, destroyed, mangled, tortured, burned and banished to slavery his own worshippers when they didn't properly perform animal sacrifices to his exact specifications. Generations of his children were banished to slavery and all manner of inhuman torture and killing whenever he felt he wasn't being properly worshipped. We really shouldn't be surprised that people of Drollinger's ilk can read the Bible and come to such conclusions because the god of the Bible is undoubtedly a narcissistic sadistic monster with the blood of millions on his hands if we believe what is written in that group of books.

The fact that thousands of years later in a representative republic we are electing people with such beliefs is disconcerting to say the least. Drollinger, or anyone else for that matter, is perfectly welcome to believe in an angry, jealous god of destruction and mayhem if they want. However, I would much prefer that we don't elect people with such beliefs to positions of public power, just as I would much prefer we don't elect schizophrenics, child molesters, and murderous sociopaths. I am especially tired of hearing the truly ignorant who believe in such things use it to denigrate people who are of different sexual persuasions. In my opinion, it is a dangerous form of mental derangement to believe there is a mysterious, mystical, invisible all knowing individual of infinite hate and sadistic tendencies angrily striking people down with a virus because we love people for who and what they are. We should be vigilant in protecting our government from the influence of such groups as Capitol Ministries who are actively trying to gain more power by insisting that having this mental derangement should be a qualifier for electing our representatives in government.

Sixty to Zero

Two years ago I started a small business doing electrical work with my daughter. Word of mouth and low rates led to us soon being covered up with work. We both work full time outside of this business so it was supposed to be a part time thing. One thing led to another and we wound up with so much work that we can't do it all, no matter how many days a week I work. Around December I decided we needed to scale back and started turning down work for everyone except friends and people we had done work for previously. I determined that I needed to work 7 days a week for at least a month to catch up. That month turned into six weeks soon enough but I was within a weekend of catching up when the Coronavirus hit.

Like most everyone else, I was not prepared for this. I work for NASA as a contractor in my full time job. We were already working four ten hour days as a way of saving utility costs so I had started working Friday, Saturday, and Sunday on my electrical work some time ago. Then, someone at the center tested positive for the virus and we went on a telework system for most all of our projects. This is of course temporary as we do hands on testing but there are procedures that needed changing and a lot of similar type issues that will keep us busy for a little while.

Unfortunately, last Wednesday I started having a dry cough and feeling like my lungs were feeling irritated. Neither symptom is bad and neither is something I would really be concerned with normally as I had been crawling around under a hundred year old house for two weekends when that occurred. However, since we had the scare at work and since whatever this is no one else wants to get it I have self quarantined since last Friday. I talked to my doctor but his best advice was to stay home and call him if I start running a fever. There have been no available tests where I live to check who might actually be carrying the Coronavirus so that's pretty much out of the question.

So.... before the centre shut down I had already self quarantined but now everyone is working from home unless it is a drastic emergency. My side work has also shut down as the last thing I want to do is be a carrier for the virus. Odds are that is NOT what is going on with me but I have no way of knowing so I am going to just wait it out in the interest of protecting everyone else.

Working seven days a week for so long had kind of worn me down anyway. I have spent more time at home in the last five days than the previous 3 months. It strange going from such frantic activity to spending every day at home. I am doing telework some 8-9 hours a day but it still seems like I have slammed to a halt on most everything. It's not the worst thing in the world and I am certainly not complaining but it is an odd feeling to go from sixty to zero with no in between.

My off hours have been spent reading, watching Netflix, accelerating my workout routines, and doing things around the house that have been put off for a while. Not that there is any shortage of them but it's quite a change from my schedule I had been living on for a while. A lot of people are seeing pretty drastic changes from the effects of this virus. I suspect we are really just getting started with them. All in all, going from sixty to zero has been kind of pleasant.

Facts Matter

Testing is important. It is the first and most important building block of planning when presented with an unknown variable. Without testing as soon as you have an unknown variable you must choose an action based upon assumptions instead of facts. This is the blueprint for disaster in any field. Faulty assumptions invariably lead to more faulty assumptions so that progress is impeded and whatever one is trying to accomplish soon fails when enough bad decisions are piled one on top of the other.

At the moment the critical lack of testing availability for the Coronavirus is crippling the country. This lack of testing is doing two things that are extremely harmful for people in the United States. IT is causing responsible people who probably have a common cold or respiratory infection to stay at home for up to two weeks because they don't want to spread what could be a deadly contagion for older people. It is also causing irresponsible people who don't understand the problem to continue in their daily routines so that if they have the virus they are spreading it to a lot of other people. This is effectively the formula for turning a contagion into a pandemic such as what we have right now in most of the rest of the world. We don't really know if we have one here because we don't have the availability of tests to answer the basic question of whether people should stay home or not.

It is the one most critical tool to reacting to a contagion of any kind and we are missing that tool no matter how many times our President lies to us by saying we have it available. The fact of the matter is that the test kits the federal government had as late as the end of February were inconclusive when administered. Think about the massive incompetence that implies. The one tool we had to determine who had the virus was inconclusive. Add in the fact that the number of tests we had were laughably low. My state was issued a little over one thousand tests. Up until last week, the only place that thad these tests was in Montgomery. In a state of almost 5 million people we have 1000 tests. This means we could test 2 people out of every thousand that live here.

It's hard to accurately state how unprepared this country was for this event. I'm sure in the weeks and months ahead we will find out a lot more about how unprepared we are in many other ways but the lack of effective testing has made it impossible for us to make good decisions and that alone has caused this to spin so far out of control. Add the initial responses from the right wing conspiracy mongers who currently have power in this country and the assumptions that were allowed to rule because we didn't have facts and you have the real reason we are now in the state of disaster we find ourselves mired in.

Unfortunately, we have a President who doesn't deal in facts at all. As Kelly Anne Conway pointed out to a stunned media at the start of his presidency they have "alternate facts". This is a euphemism for hopeful lies. Lies that suit the narrative Trump lives by. People who constantly lie make bad leaders. Leaders who make critical decisions based upon their own lies and ignore facts are indescribably dangerous. The lack of availability of testing has led to the disaster were are in at the moment. As bad as it is, it pales in comparison to the basic lack of understanding of the necessity for FACTS in making decisions that exists in the mind of Donald Trump as President of the United States.

Coronavirus

There were 3 reasons to vote for Donald Trump for President of the United States.

1) You hated Hillary Clinton and couldn't stand the thought of four years of her as President. I actually struggled with this one myself but as the saying goes I held my breath and voted for the lesser of two evils.

2) You were ignorant of what Trump is now and always has been about. Trump is for Trump. Any means of boosting his ego and his bank account are eagerly sought after, whether they have anything to do with truth, honesty, or integrity or not. Trump is a habitual liar and always has been. Not only that, but he is devoid of integrity, basic honesty, or any other values that might interfere with his first and only love, promoting Trump. I can actually understand those who voted for Trump because they hated Clinton. I don't understand anyone who didn't take the time to do even a modicum of research to realize how debased and stupid Trump is and always has been. The number of people he has cheated, stolen from, and abused in every way in his long climb to notoriety is mind boggling. If you didn't or haven't taken the time to figure this out it is only because you are incredibly lazy or don't want to. I have as little respect for one as the other.

3) You are among the owner class that cares for nothing as much as how much money you can make. This applies to those who ignore Trump's basic dishonesty and trampling of ethics because they are personally enriched by his schemes AND those who think they might be in the future. In either case, it doesn't say much for who you are as a person if you fall into this category.

Regardless of who we are to blame for Trump being in the position he is in, we are now stuck with it for at least another year. Even though everyone knows he has continually broken laws, defied the Constitution and personally enriched his family and business partners while in office. Despite all this Republicans united to maintain their power base instead of protecting the Constitution and voted not to throw him out of office despite the fact that most or all of them realized he was guilty as charged; both in the case of trying to bribe an ally into investigating a political adversary and in the 2016 election investigation when he repeatedly and blatantly interfered in a justice department investigation into him and his cronies. Despite the fact that many of his closest confidantes are now in prison, Republican's still insist that Trump himself is innocent of doing anything but aggravating Democrats.

We have made our bed and now we must lie in it. We have slept with dogs and woken up with fleas. Now it's time to pay the piper, and pay the piper we will. The long term effects of what he has done to the economy will no doubt come home to roost soon but that is not what I am talking about at the moment. The Corona Virus that will no doubt soon infect large portions of the population will be Trump's hopefully final parting gift before leaving the stage. I am not going to claim that Trump somehow is responsible for the virus OR even try to claim that he could have stopped it. What I will say is that his incompetent approach to handling any and every crisis is critically at odds with what is needed now and we will pay for that with thousands of deaths in this country that didn't have to occur if we had a real leader in the White House who understood what is going on. All Trump can see is that it is hurting his chances for re-election and worse yet, hitting him where he can't stand to be hit; squarely in his massive and overblown ego.

Deny, deny, deny and deny louder are his first and automatic responses to any suggestion that his judgment might be faulty. We are in stage three of that at the moment. I am sure we would see several more stages if he had his way and was able to cover up what is actually going on but this one is beyond his control. In other words, he can't bully, intimidate, lie, and bullshit his way out of this one even though he is trying. Eventually, the numbers themselves will tend to show how ineffective blustering is when faced with a real problem. I sincerely hope all the experts are wrong. I do not want to see a pandemic that kills and sickens thousands and thousands of people decimate the population and wipe out large numbers of older Americans but it may be too late already. In any case, his continuing denials and refusal to put even basic pandemic safeguards in place are making it worse than it should be.

Republicans and Conservative Republican's specifically have been saying for years that the government should be responsible for protecting it's citizens to the exclusion of every other responsibility. This mentality has seen the cutting of public health initiatives for many, many years. Trump himself has steadily dismantled this system from his first day in office simultaneously while he added trillions of dollars to building American military might. If some of them would read the Constitution they profess to uphold they would recognize that a military defense is only ONE of the basic goals of the document. I'll save you the trouble of reading it by quoting from the Preamble below (highlights are my own).

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

As you can see, a common defense is only one of the basic reasons for creating the Constitution, no matter how many Republicans deny it. Without getting too far into the other goals of the people who wrote that document I think you can easily see that "promoting the general Welfare" is also an important part of why it was written. De-funding federal programs long put in place to protect us against the reality of pandemics is no less important when it comes to protecting Americans. As we may soon find out the hard way, it's a duty that the government itself is uniquely qualified and able to do.

Here is the gist of what Conservatives fail to recognize about Government. Promoting the general welfare involves a lot of things that aren't profitable. That is why we have government agencies that are created with that purpose in mind instead of private entities that are only interested in profits. They are not the same thing for the simple reason that they have completely different goals. Trump's recent defense of his policies by pointing out that it's not "good business" to keep a lot of doctors on staff to prevent outbreaks like this points out the basic fallacy of electing business people to run governments to begin with. It's not good business because it cuts into profits but it IS good government because it has saved a LOT of people's lives in the past and will no doubt save a lot of people's lives this time around because Trump and his ilk had not managed to completely destroy the CDC yet. Business and government are not the same thing. They never have been because they have vastly different duties and goals.

Trump has proven a lying, narcissistic, egomaniac with little regard for anything but his own ego can indeed be a successful businessman. We can argue all day over whether such unethical behavior SHOULD be something anyone recognizes as good business but he is living proof that a man can enrich himself without principles of any kind. Unfortunately. eventually he will also prove that these qualities are notoriously unsuited for running a government. Please think about that the next time you go vote. Either that or grit your teeth silently and hope you don't get the Coronavirus. The fact of the matter is that if you voted for Trump you have exponentially increased your chances of doing so.

Prolonged Absence

It's been a while.....

I'm going to renew my efforts here in the near future. I'll write more tomorrow.....