Hungry Pets

  By now, most regular readers are familiar with Smokey the Cat, the third resident in my humble home beside my sainted wife. Together, we produce fodder for stories each week, and enjoy doing so.

By way of background, Smokey was adopted – he was, and will always be, a feral feline. He came to us fourteen years ago as a tiny cat that easily fit in the palm of your hand. A veterinarian visit surprised us with the news that although Smokey was so small he was an adult, largely because he was malnourished.

Living in our dilapidated garage, Smokey was eager to move into our house to complete our meager family. And the adventures began.

Litter box, litter, water and food bowls, a bed, toys, and eventually a neutering job, all rounded out the necessities for making and keeping a safe home and community. Because he likely spent most of his time outdoors in survival-mode, we thought it best he be reared and nurtured as an indoor pet.

My sainted wife selected a brand name cat food, whose name I won’t disclose because we’re not being compensated, but rhymes with “Durina,” to help Smokey with his until-then lack of sustenance. And it worked.

Growing into a normal frame in short order helped him adjust to our hectic lives together. And has been well since.

Smokey the Cat (smaller than actual size)

But it was with interest that I recently caught television commercials for pet food that I normally disregard because we have a cat, we have a food the cat eats and enjoys, and we have our sanity due to having a cat that is not a finicky eater. A real cat owner can testify to those words.

Cats are a different breed of animal that march to the beat of a different drummer. While not being a cat psychologist, I can tell you with authority cats do not take orders well or relish change in their routines.

For all you non-cat owners, a daily routine is structured thusly:

5:30 AM Awaken, stretch, eat some dry food, back to sleep

5:52 AM Awaken again for a bathroom run followed by a case of “Cat Crazies”

6:03 AM Back to sleep

6:22 AM Awaken yet again, this time to get the balance of the household out of bed

6:41 AM Jump into window to watch birds

6:59 AM Back to sleep after a few more kibble bits

10:17 AM Awake and stretching again, ready for mischief

10:26 AM Searching for rays of sunlight in which to bask

2:02 PM Drinking water followed by bathroom run

2:33 PM Nap time

4:00 PM Treat time

4:37 PM Back into a window for more bird watching

5:05 PM Play with toys until they are “lost” under the furniture

5:47 PM More kibble

6:02 PM Ready for some petting and interpersonal time with human suckers

8:22 PM Preparing for bedtime

8:23 PM Sleeping – until 5:30 AM tomorrow

Any break, diversion, readjustment in that schedule is not acceptable to the family cat, and therefore everyone else in the home. Period. It’s the law.

So what piqued my interest was a slick pet food commercial showing a starving cat gobbling-up dry kibble in a bowl. Clearly that cat was trapped in a cage for weeks with whiny Taylor Swift and ready for death, rather opting for new culinary options.

FYI, there is no such thing.

Still, advertising their cat food as “healthy, “best,” “quality,” “veterinarian recommended,” and “no by-products,” are all hard-sells to any long-time cat owner.

I’d love to know how a vet knows whether or not a cat likes anything other than deviltry and sleeping, much less food. And just because food doesn’t contain by-products or chicken meal are not good barometers to how contented a cat is.

For the record, Smokey, probably because of his feral roots, has been known to ingest anything he finds moving: houseflies, moths, an errant spider, as well as clumps of freshly mowed grass clippings inadvertently drug in by me on my shoes. Somehow, these examples seem to be more satisfying to a cat than “vegetarian diet” cat food.

But the dirty little secret herein is that ‘what goes in must come out.’ and by ‘come out,’ I mean throw up. Being an indoor pet means they throw up indoors. Okay. I said it.

Unfortunately, cats – as intelligent as they are – do not associate vomiting with eating bugs and such. Alas.

There you have it. Cats are mentally wired to survive off of dropped garden tomatoes, birds, insects, string, toy stuffing, ribbons, and washing it all down with stagnant gutter water. I seriously doubt processing cat food with imported long grain rice and braised duck breasts will impress anyone other than Durina.

Nice try, though!

Loopholes

  We hear the word awfully regularly and perhaps too often: loophole.

Regular users of this word include bankers, car dealers, and lawyers. But the most common users are politicians.

Politicians are those sub-humans that have two distinctive traits that always give themselves away. One, is that when their lips are moving, they are lying. The second trait is that when their lips aren’t moving, they’re smiling. Two dead giveaways.

Whether making pious speeches about gun violence, drug influx, preserving rights for the homeless, encouraging illegal entry into America, or releasing hardened criminals from incarceration, politicians usually reach into their velvet bag of sleazy words to help slither their way out of the truth.

Inside that bag are notes with words such as: racist, misogynist, “I can’t recall,” “I don’t believe so,” and “loophole.” These are “wiggle words” permitting tattoos of arrogance to disappear before the eyes of the world.

Years ago, Our Lady of Perpetual Grievances, St. Hillary Clinton, was caught with a hammer in her grubby hands, breaking her cellphones into teeny weeny pieces. It seems as though she was suspected of nefarious activities to include having foreign sources create and distribute fictitious documents.

Those documents which contained phony accusations against her once close friend, Donald Trump, including his “collusion” with Russians who supposedly had clout. All a giant lie aimed at hobbling Trump in order to punish him for telling the truth.

At a Congressional trial, Clinton, often touted as “The World’s Smartest Woman,” used the words, “I don’t recall,” or a variation thereof, hundreds of time. Pretty convenient. That’s an example of a loophole.

The long and short of it is the ability to tell an overt lie and get away with it while the world watches. The official definition of loophole is: “an ambiguity or inadequacy in the law or a set of rules.”

So, to avoid criminal or civil prosecution for lack of candor, a person on the stand in court can defer to a poor memory; who’s to know if one’s mind in unable to remember? Then it’s on to more shenanigans back in the office until the next subpoena.

But it’s the mother of all escape routes, the “loophole,” that we’re going to examine right now.

A cousin to ‘I can’t recall,’ the loophole is a terrific toll for the smarmy politician to blame their shortcomings – or intentional escape route – when writing and introducing bills.

For example, politicians are always in the game for votes. Votes are needed to get elected as well as remain elected. To do so behooves the politician who would rather loaf around their multiple offices than put on a pair of gloves and perform manual labor.

In order to win those precious votes, incumbents resort to giveaways in the form of benefits. Free child school meals, free bus tickets, coupons for electric vehicles, house down payment assistance, free cell phones, monthly cash and food stipends for the underprivileged, even student loan repayments for the wealthy.

None of the criteria make sense, though. Electric vehicle (EV) coupons offer thousands of dollars to

An EV wealth redistribution effort
in the form of a loophole

people well-off enough to afford a $75,000 - $100,000 EV without extra funding or help. Middle income families are now footing the bill for these bonus dollars that amount to wealth redistribution.

The same holds true for gratis bus tickets, cell phones, and other cash stipends for illegal aliens and American underprivileged folks, alike.

But as of late, politicians – on both sides of the aisle – have been carping over guns. Not only guns, but those guns in the hands of individual citizenry. Guns, they say, are just fine in the hands of police and the military, because they have been trained in their use.

Crazy talk from political baboons who have never held nor touched a real gun are circling their wagons in an attempt to outlaw firearm technology that is roughly a century-and-a-half old. Created around the time of Reconstruction, inventors tested and manufactured firearms for a variety of uses known as “semi-automatic.”

After 90-years since the federal government created the National Firearms Act of 1934 – a law that limited public ownership of fully-automatic firearms – this law, and the firearms and accessories associated therewith, continue to be debated.

Subject to that debate is a relatively new product called a “bump stock.” A bump stock is an inanimate device using the recoil action from a bullet discharge. Normally absorbed by the shooter’s shoulder in long guns, the recoil alters the rearward motion against the shoulder to be directed toward the shooter’s finger.

That stationary finger, in conjugation with the bump stock, is now being closely examined by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE). It seems as though some mentally ill guy bought semi-automatic rifles and fitted them with completely legal bump stocks. He proceeded to shoot hundreds of innocent concert and festival goers in Las Vegas, for no apparent reason.

Politicians immediately lined up as if someone yelled “Free meal!” to offer their opinions to the world.

“Loopholes! We need to immediately close the loopholes on bump stocks! They’re dangerous!!!” they piously yelled, ad nauseam. Of course they’re not dangerous; the finger pulling the trigger belongs to the guilty party in this equation.

Catching the attention of other even less-knowledgeable pols, they finally decided to outlaw these stocks with then-President Donald Trump signing the authorization bill. Naturally it was challenged in court after court after court. It is now in the hands of the Supreme Court.

Not unlike watching a jellyfish attempt to climb a ladder, The Justices appear flabbergasted, admittedly turning to YouTube for advice about exactly how a bump stock functions. (As an aside: I’ll wager they still don’t have a clue.)

For the record, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was baffled when asked about the definition of a ‘woman,’ not string theory. She publicly stated, “It’s really not about the operation of the thing. It’s about what it can achieve, what it’s being used for… The function of this trigger is to cause this kind of damage, 800 rounds a second or whatever,” per Fox News. Yes, she said 800 rounds per second! Quite the eye for detail that could affect more than 500,000 current non-criminal owners of these stocks.

This should come as no surprise, though. The legality, or illegality, of the bills under review are penned by the very people – lawyers/Senators/Congresspeople, most of whom have law degrees – who actually wrote them. But as is evident, they’re not worth the paper on which they are written. That’s because they are chock full o’ loopholes.

I’m not condemning these political gasbags, but they might want to know there are already in excess of 22,000-gun laws on the books to prevent gun crimes. Any new bills will likely contain new loopholes for future media attention following the next crime. That being said, what makes you think this bill will prevent anything?

Of course, we know the answer: nothing will prevent the illegal use of guns. Our British brethren fought a mediocre fight a handful of years ago by outlawing most firearms in the name of public safety.

Just within the last few weeks, English lawmakers began scribing a new bill to outlaw knives due to the out-of-control crimes being committed with knives. Soon it will outlaw cricket bats, cast iron skillets, and sharp sticks, all in the name of public safety.

Perhaps its not the knives, machetes, hatchets, hammers, poisons, cars, or guns. Maybe it’s simply crazy people – people that are mentally deficient and/or evil. That’s where I’d concentrate my efforts.

But I’m not a media whore like our politicians. 

Making What?

  
People use words to communicate, unfortunately they often don’t know what they mean. We, as a society, recently found ourselves desperately trying to recover from a situation that helped cause exactly this linguistic mayhem.

It was the hoopla behind the COVID-19 pandemic that drove our school kids into a lemming-like charge to educational oblivion. Unfortunately, it was intentional and actually sanctioned by medical professionals without the benefit of science.

According to Psychology Today (PT), children not only use, but need facial identification to learn how to recognize speech while forming words. Further, kids, per PT, watch for approval of parents and other familiar faces, while being introduced to new people, activities, even toys.

But it was COVID-19 that erased years of this learning because “scientists” created rules for society out of whole cloth. Without the benefit of research, largely based on over-inflated egos, laws and rules were instituted while the balance of society obeyed.

Keep six-feet of distance between people, wash your hands for 20-seconds, wear a mask, stay home from work, incorporate distance learning in schools, “you’re wearing the wrong mask,” and cough into your shirt sleeve, were some of the dictums that the self-anointed leaders ordered of the unwashed.

Curtailing activities such as surfing, gardening, walking, swimming, sunbathing, and car washing, were all banned, because those actions would spread COVID. Guaranteed.

All the while, kids suffered because they were resigned to lives inside their own homes, wearing masks, unable to see the lips of others move, thereby associating sounds and word enunciation, to eventually be successful in later life.

We now find ourselves in a place where not only kids, but adults are unable to formulate thoughts and correctly pronounce the words. But more troubling than that, people are using words of which folks do not know the meaning.

Take, for example, the 2020 presidential election slogans. Back then, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., was running against sitting President Donald J. Trump. Biden’s slogan was the alliterative “Build Back Better.” Cute.

President Trump had a very different slogan, though. His used the famous words: Make America Great Again. Abbreviated MAGA, those letters are now used to vilify any and all supporters of the former president.

Now-President Biden is taking every opportunity possible to vituperate honest, loyal voters whose choice of candidate for president in 2024 is not Biden. Using weasel-like tactics to insert MAGA into his speeches, Biden has created a habit of making his intolerance for MAGA supporters known.

Always with an angry growl, his often-indecipherable sentences offering “proof” MAGA supporters – just like MAGA itself – cannot be tolerated in America, lest we witness incivility at the hands of MAGAs.

Unfortunately for Biden, something called history, linked with photos and video as well as audio recordings, regularly demonstrate his personal weakness with the truth and facts, plainly evident in between his slurred, incomprehensible tripe.

Demanding voters not even consider Donald Trump for the Office of the President, again, Biden appears to have been using all tactics and methods – legal or illegal – to put the brakes on Trump’s effort to reach a second White House term.

Applying the biased Department of Justice, along with its offspring, the FBI, have regularly harangued MAGA supporters – especially Donald Trump himself – with one legal action after another, thereby creating a giant mess of the United States, over the past three-years.

Opening the Southern Border to anyone and everyone for any reason has allowed an estimated 11,000,000 unvetted, unidentifiable migrants into America all the while the Biden administration lying about this invasion.

And “invasion” is the appropriate word to use. Initially, in 2021, immediately following Biden’s Executive Order (EO) inviting undocumented individuals into our nation, he proudly informed us they were largely made up of single women and their toddler offspring.

It is 2024, and most of the illegal invaders consist of able-bodied, young to middle-aged men. They climb over hazardous razor wire following a swim across the Rio Grande River, in hopes of receiving a free cellphone, gift card, housing, food, and eventually a job and citizenship, with impunity.

Criminals unaware razor wire is there to 
prevent them from breaking the law

Forcing the redistribution of services and supplies from Americans to invaders, these free-for-all “gifts” do nothing more than entice other illegals into America.

Of course, the Biden administration denies these sleazy tactics to bring more soon-to-be Democratic Party voters into their fold. He insists this huge influx of societal leeches are the result of Trump and his MAGA supporters. But that’s pure hokum.

Throughout his three-years in office, Biden and his Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have insisted “The Border is closed. The Border is closed!” It isn’t. They lied.

The mainstream media abetted – as they have been complicit for years – the Biden folks in covering up the aforementioned invasion, as well as hiding photos and facts from the American people. This crisis is not the making of anyone except Biden himself.

To attempt to place blame on anything and everything MAGA is ludicrous. Yet here we are. To get a better idea of the lies and disinformation being spread, please note once again, MAGA is an abbreviation for: Make America Great Again.

Only the stupid wouldn’t want that.

Morphing Into Oblivion

   Each of my days begin with an identical routine with few exceptions.

Since the remaining newspapers are very few in number or liberal rags, it has become arduous to find preaching-to-the-choir news (PTCN). PTCN is simply news I want to hear because I prefer my hair not catch on fire after reading their printed tripe.

You know to what I’m referring: the economy is robust, the border is closed, Ukraine is winning their battle with Russia, electric vehicles (EVs) are the solution, crime is virtually non-existent, and Donald Trump drowns baby kittens, are just modest samples of garbage spewed by the mainstream media (MM).

The MM also ignores other stories that are of interest to me, personally, because it proves their false claims as, well, false.

Donald Trump was duly elected President in 2016, COVID-19 was over exaggerated, EVs will create a giant mess with the power grid, Ukraine is losing the was with Russia, CO₂ is necessary for plants to live, China is not our friend, and fences really do work, are just few truths that have been covered-up and contorted to fulfill their agendas.

But going back to where reliable news is derived finds us turning to our cell phones – the internet – and television media for what we individually want and need. Both Conservative and liberal information is available via these two sources with the Big Three broadcast channels, plus PBS, MSNBC, CNN, and others on the Left, while Fox News Channel (FNC) and Newsmax acquirable on the Right.

My interests lie with the Libertarian and Conservative side of this slanted array so, I gravitate toward FNC and Newsmax for my news and information.

In the FNC vs. Newsmax arena we find two very different styles of content and delivery. FNC’s morning lineup went from ‘okay’ to ‘awful’ with the exit of its founder, Rupert Murdoch and the ascension to the throne by Lachlan Murdoch, one of Rupert’s sons – apparently the more liberal one.

It didn’t take long to modify its content by adding more human interest stories to augment their tilt to the Left. Adding liberal guests such as racist Juan Williams, Geraldo Rivera, Donna Brazile, Marie Harf, and Jessica Tarlov, to mention a few, they seemed to be heading for a more ‘balanced’ agenda, likely an attempt to attract a more liberal clientele.

Seeming brilliant on paper, this bone-headed move did nothing except push people away from the FNC Church of PTCN to the Church of the What’s Happening Now.

As a Plan B, I decided to adjust the TV channel dial to Newsmax to find a more palatable source of news and information. It was there that I learned Newsmax was the purgatory for reporter and news-reader faux pas victims of times past.

Roughly a half-dozen of those displaced sinners wound up with their mugs on my 55” HDTV. They appeared to have “moved-on” from FNC because of infractions that were once considered career enders. Surprise!

Newsmax appeared as though they were the new go-to morning information source replete with familiar faces and a decidedly Conservative tilt which I enjoy.

To extol their virtues, Newsmax actually got me hooked because of their cross-media system which allowed me to watch and listen to their TV broadcasts on their app. They were also inviting due to the fact their host and guest lineup contained no identifiable Leftists and America haters. And all was good.

That is after a few months passed by and Newsmax number crunchers thought a change was critical for them to capitalize on the Fox News exodus.

Changes arrived in the form of removing their free app, eliminating watching or listening to their take on prominent news stories. And suddenly Newsmax had an epiphany by including more radical Leftists as guests on a variety of their once-stellar channel.

To add insult to injury, Newsmax had pulled the plug on any free perk, substituting a monthly paid subscription for anything gratis. Although a seemingly modest move, they just bit the hand that fed them.

It didn’t take long for me to wonder where I could now turn in order to return to the PTCN church I so enjoyed. For your information I picked up a subscription to The Washington Examiner, as well as the weekly edition of The Washington Times.

As of today, I am still searching for a viable replacement on the television and radio media; there seems to be a deep void there. But my search continues.

There you have it: Two once-stellar sources of news have decided to morph into oblivion by committing media suicide all for the sake of viewer numbers and money. They achieved their desired results.

Congratulations!

Pony Rides

 Easter Sunday, the most holy of days in the Christian church, just whizzed by us. It was celebrated by an estimated 210,000,000 people in the United States – roughly 63% of our population.

It is considered the holiest of days because Jesus of Nazareth was persecuted to die on The Cross – and was resurrected three-days later. He died for our sins – so that we would be saved; the fact he rose from death to enter Heaven is the miracle.

Sure this holy day is not as commercial what with all the wrapping paper, ribbons and bows, shopping days counted down from Thanksgiving, Santa Claus, carols, and official days off from work and school as Christmas is. But Easter belongs in this part of the calendar for true believers. Amen.

Imagine your boss from work was excited about having a party for the entire office to show appreciation for all the employees’ hard work and dedication. To demonstrate that appreciation he has scheduled a party, of sorts, at his sumptuous home – the one with the in-ground pool.

He expects every staff member to show their delight by RSVPing to this gala. You see, there will be a Smoke Master there preparing briskets, barbecued ribs, bratwurst, plus a caterer will be supplying an array of potato, macaroni, and seafood salads, to round out this gesture of thanks.

You gladly return your invitation with “Yes” for both you and your spouse, and begin your fasting diet until the two-month wait for this extravaganza is over.

But the wrinkle in this fine cloth comes in the form of the unexpected death of your mother. She was well, showing no signs of illness or discomfort in the months leading up to her untimely demise.

Funeral arrangements, as well as burial preparations need to be expedited; her house needs to be tended to, as do her finances and bills to prevent her estate from being legally extorted. Needless to say, there’s plenty to do, and quickly.

Gossip back at work is rampant that there may even be pony rides for children at the bosses’ party. Unfortunately, timing couldn’t be worse. The party and the funeral happen to coincide this Saturday.

Throughout this logistic hurricane, your boss should be expected to be more understanding, but he’s not. And those pony ride rumors suddenly include your name as someone using an excuse to not attend this first-of-its-kind shindig.

You were forced to choose and did: your mother’s funeral. It was a personal decision that was rather easy simply due to your affection, and the familial connection and love involved with blood relationships over less fly-by-night connections such as those as a mere employee.

And this is where we find ourselves – as Christians – following our Easter Sunday 2024.

El Hefe – Joseph Robinette Biden – proudly proclaimed March 31^st as Transgender Day of Visibility, to help the smattering of transgendered individuals deal with “bullying,” “harassment,” and “discrimination,” according to the proclamation.

Once again, though, Biden missed the mark with staunch Christians when proclaiming March 31, 2024, a special day for sexual undecideds. Was this merely an oversight on the part of the White House?

Hardly. This “special” day for transgenders has been in existence for more than a dozen years. It just so happens that this year it coincided with Easter, and Biden chose poorly by recognizing the psychologically abnormal members of our society over Christians.

Still don’t believe this was intentional?

The annual White House Easter Egg Roll was forefront with Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra promising to honor the “great transgender, nonbinary, and two-spirit leaders” while promising to “double down on our commitment to push the tides of progress forward,” the New York Post asserts.

Admiral Rachel Levine

Rachel Levine, the male Assistant Secretary for Health, vowed to provide children who identify as transgender “across to the 988 program counselors with professionals specially trained to work with them,” according to the New York Post. That sounds awfully intentional to me.

It seems as though well-funded trans-activist organizations are behind this effort to exclude Christ’s followers in favor of the latest political oddball cause, largely to garner more votes come election time.

There you have it.

President Joe Biden and his gaggle of freaks chose the bosses’ barbecue picnic over the responsible option.

Voters should mark this on their calendars so that on November 5^th, they can remember - without fail – for whom to cast their ballots.

On the other hand, they may get a pony ride along with all the business that accompanies the pony.