Category Archives: angry rant

December 17, 2018 · 5:18 pm

Today’s IRS Rant (but please don’t garnish my pension)

Yes, the IRS always wants more of my money than I have already paid.

Last year at about this time, the lovely russet potato with a wig of uncooked spaghetti and a heart of black obsidian who we elected to run this country passed a tax bill that gave huge tax cuts to some people who didn’t need the money and a small amount to others in the middle class.  When I complained about the tax bill on Facebook, my Iowegian conservative friends pointed out that if I didn’t like the tax cut, I could always send the money back to the government.

But, no, I couldn’t.

You see, I didn’t get anything back from the government.  In fact, they wanted $1,300 more.  The tax bill made adjustments to withholding requirements for pensions.  And because Don Jr. wanted to get millions back last year, the russet potato made the tax bill retroactive to cover all of 2017.

So, I should’ve paid off what I owed last month when the IRS debited my account for $200.  Then, the first of this month, they debited again,  By my calculations, this time was for money I didn’t even owe.  $200 dollars is a big bite, especially when I am paying off a Chapter 13 bankruptcy and three hospital bills.  

So, today, I called the IRS customer service line, where the telephone operator put me through to what was apparently the proper office out of the 300,000 layers of the IRS to find out what went wrong.  I got put on hold for only 30 minutes (shorter than the hour and a half I waited the last time I called) and then I got cut off about 15 minutes in.  So, I tried finding out what my tax bill looked like from irs.gov.  This involves setting up an account which I failed to successfully do last time.  This time I tried to verify I really am me with, first, my credit card (which I am paying them off with) and they didn’t accept it because it is technically a debit card, and then with two of the account numbers to our mortgage loans, which didn’t take because my wife’s name is on the mortgage and mine is not.  So, I am not me, and three failures mean I can’t try again until tomorrow.  Perhaps they will identify me by my shoe size tomorrow.

The conclusion I am forced to draw is this; when you owe them money, the IRS is the most efficient and dangerous organization in existence.  But when they owe me money, they are suddenly the Three Stooges.

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November 26, 2018 · 10:53 am

Dump the Trumpy Grump

This is the best Trump cartoon I have done of him so far, so I will use it multiple times.

The current President of the United States initially seemed to me to be a gift from the gods of comedy.  I figured it would be easy to make humorous blog posts about a clown who wears orange face paint, wears super-long red ties, and is more cartoonish behavior-wise than Yogi Bear.

But the Grumpy Trump leadership style is more depressing than even that of Rodeo Clown in Chief, George W. Bush, though Trump has managed to be accused of fewer war crimes by international tribunals.  He is so relentlessly inhuman in his every deed that you can’t use exaggeration humor against him.  The reality is too far over the top for that.  And you can’t rely on insult humor, because he does it so much more often himself than any comedian can,  and he really MEANS it.  He doesn’t tell or comprehend jokes unless it makes a good excuse to claim he was only joking.

One of the things he does that bothers me the most is the use of criminals in his cabinet and departments that do all the dirty work.

Sleepy McBoing-Boing, the HUD secretary seems to be in his job to screw things up for poor people who were barely hanging on and turn them into homeless people while he commits crimes to put an expensive dining table in the HUD office for his personal use.  “Let ’em eat cake,” right, Ben?

Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke, heads of the EPA and Department of the Interior are so busy spending Federal budget monies on personal uses that their departments are falling apart, and so the air we breath and the water we drink are now more at risk than they were under Obama, where it was a very real crisis having very real effects.

I think I am through posting criticisms about Trump.  Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, and Seth Meyers do so much better at skewering the pumpkinhead than I ever could, so look to them for actual political humor of the thoughtful kind.

The only thing I want from Trump now… Now that his tax cut has cost me extra money and his healthcare meddling has made the price of insulin out of my reach… Is for the whole thing to end.  He won’t resign.  You can’t expect Ebola Fever or brain tumors will go away on their own.  But it is so obvious that he has committed impeachable crimes that, for the good of us all, the Congress needs to get rid of him.  The Dark Lord with White Hair, Mike Pence, though deeply evil, would be better.

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November 18, 2018 · 5:41 pm

Resolving Unsolvables

This week saw two difficult problems arise that took a whole lot of problem-solving, panic, and unbelievable luck to solve.  I had considerable evidence that my laptop computer was fatally infected with a trojan virus in spite of the subscription I had to Norton anti-virus software.  And on top of that, I had to renew my driver’s license since yesterday was my birthday.  And not an ordinary renew-by-computer sort of thing, but a dreaded trip to the horrid hated DMV.

The DMV was a thorny problem because Texas is a Red State and fully committed to keeping certain people with the wrong color skin, the wrong sort of last name, or the wrong size of bank account from acquiring picture IDs for the purposes of the foul crime of voting for Democrats.  So, specifically, of the long list of things you were supposed to bring to get a license renewed, the birth certificate was a problem for me.  I have a birth certificate, but because of a courthouse fire in Iowa in the 1970’s, it was only a photocopy of a handwritten replacement document.   They had warned me when I called and asked that this would never do.  I had to have an authenticated copy issued by the records department of the State of Iowa.  So, I spent 50 dollars on an expedited official document by express mail, still likely to arrive after the expiration date of my license.

Of course, once I lucked out and received the document only three business days after I requested it, I discovered that the DMV had been moved from the location I had relied on for almost ten years.  And when I did find the DMV office and waited in the cold in the early morning for the doors to open, I discovered that the DMV I had found didn’t actually issue driver’s licenses.  Bummer.  I had to try again the next day ten miles further away in Lewisville. 

I fully expected to be turned away again that day for some unforeseen and petty reason.  Instead, I found the opposite to be true.  They saw an old white guy walking with a cane and thought, “Oh, Republican voter!”  I was moved to the front of the line.  The Indian lady ahead of me was not given a license because she did not have both a birth certificate and a valid passport.  But I got my license with only the expiring license to prove my identity.  They didn’t even need to see the birth certificate.

 The computer virus was just as frustrating.  The only option was to try to find the right software to remove the bug by using the infected computer to purchase one online.  Since Norton had been overwhelmed, I went with McAfee and, fortunately, got a year’s subscription for 60% off the regular price.  I downloaded it, spent three agonizing days on a full scan, then got a result of zero problems found and fixed.  So, as further programs began crashing, I called their tech support and got a guy with a heavy Indian accent to remotely fix the problems for me.  In three hours of time, he miraculously restored my computer and even removed some other unwanted programs slowing my computer which I had been unable to remove myself.  It turned out that the problem may have been caused by another anti-virus program whom I accidentally downloaded with another program package, but then I refused to pay for the upgrade when it reported that it had found five seriously infected files on my computer.  You can’t be too careful when downloading things from the internet, though being careful and vigilant is almost impossible when there are so many horrible things out there that you never suspected people might be capable of.

Anyway, I survived both ordeals and still managed to finish a novel manuscript and got closer to publishing another one. 

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November 2, 2018 · 4:29 pm

Toxic Politics

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Earlier this week I voted in the early voting for the midterm election.  I voted for Beto O’Rourke in hopes that he will cast enough sunshine on the Vampire Ted Cruz to turn the old smirking blood-sucker into dust. (You can see in the picture that Cruz smeared on a lot of sunscreen, but hopefully, he didn’t have enough time to slather it on thick enough to cover some of the worst things he is trying to cover up.)

I did, however, hear before the day was out that some people who voted straight-ticket Democratic ballots saw their results come out of the machine on the check screen as if they had voted for Cruz for senator.  How absolutely evil and vampire-like is that?

I desperately need Democrats to win at least the House of Representatives.  There has to be a check on Trumpism.  I am a diabetic retired schoolteacher who has gone bankrupt over healthcare expenses and can’t afford to go on insulin even before the Republican overlords finish hacking at and slaying Obamacare with its provisions to protect people with pre-existing conditions.  And it comes as no surprise to me that Republicans in Texas are willing to cheat to win elections.  Non-white and poor voters vastly outnumber the millionaire and billionaire white people who own and operate the State.  There is a need to cheat to hold on to power so the downtrodden don’t try to rise up and take back what they have a right to, and in the process possibly accidentally eat the rich people.

And Fearless Leader has adopted tactics that are alarming as well.  Not only has he promised to send 15,000 troops to the border with Mexico to fight a “caravan” of asylum seekers and put them into tent-city prison camps, but he has given them permission to shoot to kill if someone throws a rock at them, after a nine-year-old immigrant girl threw a rock at a soldier.  His autocratic tendencies are now in full view of the public, and the majority can see the parallels to Nazism, and 44% of Americans polled seem to like it.

Calling Republicans names and lamenting their rule is exhausting and probably pointless.  I fully accept that they probably do have the power to keep winning in spite of not representing the majority of the people of this country.  But I do what I have to in order to fight against toxic ideas.   I voted against them. I wrote a post that insults them.  And now I need to get back to the serious work of writing stuff that makes people laugh (okay, actually stuff that makes me laugh, and maybe a few other people too.)

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October 30, 2018 · 7:15 pm

I Did It!

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I never voted a straight ticket before.  And technically I still haven’t.  I voted for 15 Democrats and two Libertarians*.  This is my first time voting for zero Republicans,  I have voted in the past for Republicans like John Cornyn and Charles Grassley.  That was back when there were still moderate Republicans.  John and Chuck have both yielded to the dark side.  There were a couple of Republicans that might have tempted me, but they were both running unopposed, so zero Republicans this year.  Take that Sith Lord D’arth Donaldious.

*I do realize that most Libertarians are at least mildly insane.  But some of them actually support liberal education agendas, probably because they are not completely sane.

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October 26, 2018 · 4:11 pm

Being Excessively Creative

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It is an unusual position to be in as a kid in the school room to be the creative kid.  First and foremost because you will forever be known as the weirdo, the spaceman, the egghead.

How do I know that?  Because I was that kid.  And I grew up to teach that kid.  And now that I am retired as a teacher, I am still that kid.

If there was a problem to be solved, a picture to be drawn, a group assignment that required somebody to actually think, I was the kid that everybody wanted to be in their group or be their partner.  (That time that Reggie and I blew up the test tube of copper sulfate in Mr. Wilson’s chemistry lab doesn’t count because, although I am the one who dropped it, he’s the one who heated up my fingers with the blowtorch.  Honest, Mr. Wilson, it is true.) But if it was picking teams on the playground, I was the last loser to be called, even though I was pretty good at softball, pretty good at dodgeball, great at volleyball, and usually the leading scorer in soccer (of course we are talking an Iowa schoolyard in the 60’s where soccer was a sport from Mars.)  And as an adult, I enjoyed teaching the creative kids more than the rest because I actually understood them when they explained what they were doing and why, and I was even able to laugh at their knit-witty jokes (yes, I am including those jokes made of yarn with that pun).   Creative kids speak a language from another world.  If you are creative too, you already know that.  And if you aren’t creative… well, how foo-foo-metric for you.

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And another unfortunate side effect of the creative life is that you make stuff.  You don’t have to be seriously infected by bites from the cartoon bug or the art bug to be like that.  My daughter is making a suit of armor for herself from a flat sheet of aluminum that she is pounding out by hand, painting with spray paint and painter’s tape, and edging with felt.  After she’s done with it this Halloween, it will go on one of the piles of collections and models and dolls and stuffed toys and… Of course, sooner or later one of those piles is going to come to life and eat the house.  There is no place left to display stuff and store stuff and keep stuff that is far enough away from potential radioactive spider bites.  I have scars on my fingers from exactor knife accidents, oil paint, and acrylic paint and enamel permanently under my fingernails.  Shelves full of dolls rescued and restored from Goodwill toy bins, dolls collected from sale bins at Walmart, Toys-R-Us, and Kaybee, and action figures saved even from childhood in the 60’s are taking over the house and in an uproar, demanding to be played with rather than ignored.  (Didn’t know dolls can actually talk?  Haven’t you learned anything from John Lasseter?)

Anyway, it is tough to go through life being excessively creative.  I have art projects growing out of my ears.  And book publishers are calling me because my award-winning book is not generating sales in spite of two awards, 5-star reviews, and generally good quality, but the only solutions they have cost ME money I don’t have.  Oh, well, at least it isn’t boring to be me.

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October 24, 2018 · 4:50 pm

Terminal Thoughts

This is not an essay about what I am thinking while sitting in an airport terminal.  This is about the end of things.  Not just my own personal end, which via heart attack or stroke may happen at any moment.  But the ends of hope and dreams, of birds and bees, and possibly life on earth.

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On his last hunt, Eric bagged two illegal immigrants and a lion.  He would’ve bagged the girl too, but his dad the President reminded him that Judy Garland is a white girl and he doesn’t have a current hunting license for that.

Now, I just eliminated 75% of Trumpkins with that last joke, mainly because they didn’t understand, but also because they feel insulted by it.  Whenever I say anything about how the current government policies have impacted my health, wealth, and happiness they tell me I am a snowflake and they insult me further because I hurt their feelings.  25% will keep reading to find ammunition to use in hate memes on Facebook and rage tweets on Twitter.  After that last Facebook kerfluffle, I am tempted to disengage from social media.  They are not buying my books because of it.   They are only getting madder and madder at me and hating me more and more for being a goddam liberal.  Though, when asked, they still assure me they would never unfriend me.

Relationships with people I have always known and cared about are one of the things threatened with imminent demise.    The domination of politics and government by the Republican Party is the reason why.I

I myself don’t have to worry too much about the demise of prosperity.  I am already bankrupt and planning for a future life living in a cardboard box.  But as Trumpian economics continue to work on world markets, everyone else will soon be joining me in suburban-yard farming and eating insects for protein.  Tariffs and trade wars are already destabilizing the world’s economy.  Stocks are beginning to fall.  Of course, the consequences won’t fall on us like a ton of bricks until after enough Republicans win re-election in 2018 to protect Cinnamon Hitler from the crimes he committed to become President.

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Of course, the biggest coming demise that I wish to lament in this post will basically take care of all other things.  The demise of all life on earth will pretty much take care of anyone’s need to lament about anything.  As the world becomes hotter and hotter, and the oceans turn to acid and rise to swallow Miami, and the planet becomes more of a twin to Venus, the Koch Brothers and others who profit from polluting will be laughing about it.  They will either be safely dead of old age or ensconced in gilded survival bunkers.  They may even have another planet to live on already.

Okay, as I hyperbolize and carry on about doom and gloom, I need to remind you that I am a pessimist.  I always plan for the worst so that I can only be pleasantly surprised.  And it really can’t get worse than what I am planning for here.  But that is not to say there is no hope.  All of these problems have solutions.  But I don’t anticipate they will be solved under present conditions.

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October 14, 2018 · 8:18 pm

Extreme Strangeness That is Probably True

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  • The Russians decided the election in 2016 and put a criminal in the office of the President of the United States.  Enough concrete evidence and testimony of expert investigators now exists and is freely available enough to make a clear case for the truth of it.
  • They will probably get away with it.  Republicans control the government even though they get fewer votes than the other party.  This is because they cheat.  They use voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other dirty tricks to stay in power supported by a base that is controlled by fear, prejudice, and partisan tribalism.  They ignore the rule of law when it favors them getting what they want.  This country is no longer a democracy.
  • 9/11 is a terrible event, but it was not perpetrated by terrorists.  It was done by government organizations working together to hide the truth and cover the wealthy elite who made money and gained power from this horrible event.  The airlines that were hijacked made money for Wall Street investors who bet the stocks for those specific airlines would make a sudden fall in value.  The airplane (or possible missile) that hit the Pentagon hit the budget offices that were investigating the missing trillions of dollars, and the money was never found.
  • Aliens are real and routinely visiting our planet.  Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan all knew this for a fact, and the rest of the presidents since Truman may have known it as well… Though probably not Trump.  He would attempt to steal from the aliens or find some other way to make money from them.  The evidence is there in the form of testimony, artifacts, whistleblower testimony, photographs, and documentation that sometimes slips out of the government’s grasp.  The very real cover-up of the truth of it is also evidence of the reality of it.
  • The human mind is an incredible thing, with bizarre capabilities that we are only beginning to understand.  Synesthesia and savants with mysterious brain powers are also a documented reality.  Remote viewing and other mind powers have not only been studied by the government but used by them.

Bizarre things are often more true than the ordinary mundane things we all believe in every day.  You are welcome to argue with me.  I wish many of these things were not true.  But I know better.  And that sick feeling in your stomach is evidence that you know better too.

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October 7, 2018 · 7:55 pm

Zero Sum Living

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A new art project that will (hopefully) depict the negotiations of young love.

Human relationships do not work as a zero-sum game.  Let me take a moment to explain.  A zero-sum game is where one side wins, which means the other side has to lose.  In mathematical terms -1(the loser) + 1(the winner) = 0.  So, everyone who plays this game will either go all out to win or they will end up losing completely.  Faced with only those two outcomes, the game player is tempted to cheat.  Especially if the stakes are potentially life or death.  After all, in issues like the national debate over health care, the loser gets to die.

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This is, of course, what we have seen played out over the course of the last two weeks in the appointment to the Supreme Court of a radical right judge who was accused by a credible witness of a disqualifying action.  It is only a matter of the destruction of a judge’s career versus the defaming of a professional woman who was a teenage victim of attempted rape and sexual assault.  It is a very serious zero-sum game set up maliciously in order to achieve political power for the white male ruling elite.

This zero-sum game was won by the grinning evil cartoon mutant man-turtle over the minions of Mad-Looker Booker and the forces of “being right but never winning”.  The consequences are decades worth of malignant conservative rulings like the Citizens United Ruling and rulings about health care that take away things like protections for people like me with pre-existing conditions.  Losers get nothing.  And eventually, the winners have nothing to show for it because the sum is zero.

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The orange-faced Trumpinator was right when he predicted we would soon reach a point when we were tired of so much winning.  I am definitely tired of Trumpkins winning all the time, especially when they are so heartless in the way they bully and cheat.  The problems with the court would not be so severe if the Republicans hadn’t cheated on Justice Merrick Garland’s nomination and stolen that one from Obama to give to old Pumpkinhead.  And when it came time to let the FBI investigate the allegations brought up in the confirmation hearings, they cheated again by forcing the investigators to ignore so many corroborating witnesses.  You can’t find proof of something by not looking for the proof.  (Of course, they were obviously motivated to NOT find anything.)

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The solution comes from the fundamental principles of representative democracy being explained repeatedly on various news outlets by Ohio Governor John Kasich.  He has been pointing out that what we really need is bipartisanship in government.  All sides need to bargain it out so that everybody wins something and nobody wins everything.  Compromise is what the Congress is put in place to create.  The Supreme Court solution would have been to rescind the tainted nomination and find a candidate that could be broadly supported by both sides.

But in the current era of ruthless Republicans obliterating and overruling diminishing Democrats, non-toxic bipartisan solutions are not going to happen.  The two sides, the Neanderthals and their bonkable warclub targets, will continue to bash away at each other with their warclubs.  And the Neanderthals will continue to cheat.  And in the long run, everybody loses.  The overall sum, after all, is zero.

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September 16, 2018 · 8:10 pm

Predictions Using Mickey Math

Dr Phool

Mickeys are by their nature pessimists.  When mostly bad things happen to you in your life, you learn not to expect good things, only be pleasantly surprised by them.  And bad things happen only when you are prepared for them if you are expecting only bad things to happen.  In fact, the bad outcome will probably seem good in comparison to the terrible thing you were planning on happening to you.

For example, my car is in the shop being fixed for accident damage that prevented me from earning extra money through Uber for a month and a half.  I was told on Thursday that the car doors were fixed and it was in the paint shop.  It was possible I was going to get it back Friday afternoon.  I was not upset or surprised that I never got the call Friday.  In fact, I fully expected somebody had dropped the car off a lift or painted it neon puce or something and that it will take another two weeks to fix the new damage.  So if it turns out to be ready tomorrow, which I sincerely don’t expect due to Mickey Math, I will still be pleasantly surprised.  I might even go into happy shock.  After all, I clearly remember one time watching a tow truck operator load my malfunctioning car onto a flatbed tow truck, only to see it roll off the front of the truck to further damage it because he had not properly secured it.  That yielded happy shock because the body shop owner who also owned the tow truck ended up repairing my car for free.

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What is the science behind Mickey Math, you say?  Oh, you didn’t say anything?  Well, I will tell you anyway.  In a world where 2 + 2 = 4, if Mickey desperately needs the answer to always be at least 4, you can be certain by experimental proof and past experience that it will surely come out as 2 + 2 = 3.  Life and physics always disappoint Mickey one way or another.  So the science tells Mickey to always be prepared for the worst.

That being said, here are some predictions for the near future figured out via Mickey Math.

  • Since Trump’s tax cut last year retro-actively re-figured withholding deductions on my pension and I owed $1300 in tax penalties for 2017, I will surely pay twice as much in additional penalties this year in spite of the letter from last December telling me readjustments were being made for 2018.
  • Trump is in all kinds of legal peril and the scandals of his presidency will probably lead to the Republican loss of control in Congress.  Therefore the Republican Party will have a governmental coupe (in case Russia fails to swing the elections to them) which seizes absolute power for them and makes Trump President for life.
  • If hurricanes don’t wipe Texas as clean as a marble tabletop, then we will experience our first day of 200-degree temperatures in early January.
  • The baseball Cardinals will not make the playoffs, and the football Cardinals will return to having endless losing seasons.
  • Termites will eat our entire house, and mosquitoes will drink every last drop of my blood.

Now, it is quite possible that things will fall short of most of these dire predictions, but that is how Mickey Math secures happiness from a miserable life.

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