08:08 – My favorite TV series, actually the only one I’ll bother to watch, has been renewed for a ninth season. Last October it became the longest-running Canadian one-hour drama series when its 125th episode was broadcast. With the season 8 finale that runs the end of this month, it’ll be up to 139, 140, or 141 episodes, depending on whether and how you count the double-length episode s04e9.5 that was run as a TV movie. And now I have 18 more episodes of Amber Marshall to look forward to.
I knew that Amber was very special by the time I finished watching the first episode. She’s one of those few people who make me happy just knowing that she’s in the world.
13:33 – Holy Cow! This is my kind of conservative politician: Insanely Hot Conservative Danish Politician Gains International Fame
I’d never heard of Nikita Klæstrup until just now, but I suspect she has a big future in Danish politics. If not, she has something else to fall back on. Additional NSFW images here.
After having heard Bob go on and on about Heartland, I pulled up Netflix one day and showed it to my wife and told her she would love it. Surprisingly, I like it as well. Now I’m wondering if Netflix will ever add the episodes after season 5.
I’m sure they’d love to. The problem is that a US TV channel (formerly Gospel Music Channel, now UP TV) bought the rights to first broadcast in the US. Supposedly, UP TV is to be up-to-date through S7 soon, if they’re not already. At that point, Netflix can license it, which I suspect they will.
I download the HD torrents each Monday after a new episode is broadcast and use them to make my own DVDs. I then buy the DVD set when it’s released, which is usually right around the time a new season starts. I think the S7 DVD set was released last October as S8 started broadcasting. I order them from Amazon.ca, which is much cheaper than the US site even counting shipping costs.
CBC has such bad financial problems that even a hit like Heartland could be canceled. I’ve already suggested to Netflix that they buy the series if CBC cancels it.
This is the best commercial that I have seen in quite a while. OK, the screaming goat was cool too. Android: Friends Furever:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnVuqfXohxc
I’m not quite what the point of the commercial is but the Disney Robin Hood song is awesome:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx_4C1cyUZA
HBO to offer streaming service in April, “Report: HBO Now streaming service to cost $15 a month”:
http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2015/03/report-hbo-now-streaming-service-to-cost-15-a-month/#29861101=0
You know, they could easily use AWS if they are concerned about reliability. Oh wait, Netflix uses AWS. And HBO cannot be like Netflix.
HBO doesn’t have enough content to charge that much.
“Japan projects to spend 43% of tax revenue just to pay interest on the debt”
http://www.sovereignman.com/trends/japan-projects-to-spend-43-of-tax-revenue-just-to-pay-interest-on-the-debt-16338/
“When the powder keg goes off that sets the global financial system ablaze, it will most likely be in Japan where the match is lit.”
That is a heck of a prediction. Japan is purposefully limiting its economy right now by not running its 50? remaining nuclear power plants. And solar power is not working for redistribution due to the problems of backfeeding the distribution system:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/business/international/japans-solar-power-growth-falters-as-utilities-balk.html?
“I’d never heard of Nikita Klæstrup until just now, but I suspect she has a big future in Danish politics.”
She’s wearing too much clothing…
I agree with Greg down in Oz; she’s got too much clothing on. As for “conservative,” well, let’s just theorize for a nanosecond that an actual conservative woman would not be all over the net half-nekkid.
Back from the VA group thing; new guy came in today; Desert One vet, former Army Airborne, in the Sandbox and the Suck. He is super fucked up; has some kind of totally wack physiological condition that fucks up his heart and stamina, both knees shot, can’t work, can’t drive a car, and lives with his wife in her parents’ basement over in Alburg on one of the Champlain islands, on 240 acres with three dogs but can’t do anything outside anymore and sits in a chair all day chain-smoking. Plus he has the PTSD and is on all kinds of meds that don’t work real good. Filing for the various disabilities has been a fucking total ordeal so far. Has warned us that he will sometimes randomly just pass out on the spot but he assures us he’s OK and recovers quickly. Jesus wept. Let’s all have another fucking war somewhere, shall we? Who shall be our enemy next year? And our best bud ten years later?
Another ‘Nam guy, ex-Marine infantry, has gone through six wives so far and has one son in prison and another one about to go. He is himself an ex-con and ex-addict.
And so on.
Fuck, I’m in the best shape of anybody there so far. Sure, a little psycho, but so what? Isn’t everybody these days?
The rabid commie/pervert mag Salon, online, is wondering why everyone’s allegedly moving to the great Lone Star State:
“Newly released census data shows the five fastest-growing cities in the country, and the results might surprise you. Houston, Austin and San Antonio have experienced a dramatic upswing in population, despite the Lone Star state’s national reputation as a land of crazy people and even crazier legislators.”
” Austin’s reputation as an oasis in the cultural desert of Texas most likely led to its 12 per cent population increase. And even though Beyoncé was snubbed for Best Album at the Grammy Awards this year, her shout outs to Houston could be a boon for the city.”
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/05/why_on_earth_is_everyone_moving_to_texas/?source=newsletter
So there you have it: ’cause Austin is super-cool and a cultural oasis, and well, because…Beyonce.
Hey, Mr. Lynn, if you ever start wondering why you’re being inundated by waves of people, this is the deal.
Salon has a “National Enquirer” phony nooz style now from the Stalin-Mao perspective and they’ll lead off allegedly informative articles by their cadre of Young Pioneers with “Here’s how to think about…” or “Here’s why…”.
It’s a riot to read some of the fantastical chit they come up with and the lockstep commie mindset they have, based primarily in the SF Bay area and Manhattan, natch. If a Martian came down and only had this stuff to look at and our own “Seven Days” weekly here in Vermont, said Martian would conclude that most of the population here on Earth is composed of gay and trans-gendered minorities who are joyfully celebrating their lifestyles in every possible venue, but are being relentlessly persecuted by fascist orcs from Hell, known as Republicans, “ultra-conservatives,” and “the extreme right.”
Yesterday’s goblins were the Koch brothers; today it’s that Nazi governor Christie.
Austin is growing so quickly because Silicon Valley is abandoning Kalifornia and moving to Austin. Just remember Austin’s official city motto, “Keep Austin Weird”.
http://www.austingunter.com/2013/03/whats-the-difference-between-austin-and-san-francisco/
Houston is still growing, despite all the layoffs. When the layoffs hit flood stage, then Houston will start to drop in population as people look for work elsewhere. $25/bbl oil is going to hurt Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and the Dakotas bad, real bad.
Well maybe Beyonce can slide on by and pump things up a bit, eh? Give a shout out. Or sumthin.
Mrs. OFD will be back in San Antonio the week after next; I will have her investigate all this chit, comprende, Senor Lynn?
Austin is also the lesbian capitol of Tejas. Just though you’d want to know.
I agree with Greg down in Oz; she’s got too much clothing on. As for “conservative,” well, let’s just theorize for a nanosecond that an actual conservative woman would not be all over the net half-nekkid.
Conservative in Europe doesn’t mean the same in the US. At least it doesn’t in the UK and some other areas. And there are more flavors of conservatives than SoCons. The SoCons just get all the attention.
A link among diet, gut biota, and obesity has been found. Emulsifiers in processed food. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v519/n7541/pdf/nature14232.pdf
The abstract:
I have some minor physical maladies directly related to military service. The worst is a sporadically bad knee which probably can be traced to jumping out of an airplane without a functioning parachute. (Though I was also in two car accidents which smacked that knee. Always the same one. Some years later I got smacked with a metal bar … in the same knee. What the hell?) When I was in my 20s these maladies seemed significant, but as I accumulated more damage over the years, plus just plain joints wearing out and such, the military maladies became less and less important by comparison.
Mentally, I don’t think the military gave me any damage. At worst the molding of my childhood was strengthened — I already had a severe distrust of authority figures, the knowledge that none of the people who were supposed to take care of me or society would do so, and a low value on human life. The Army reinforced that, but added nothing new. I had killed seven men before going on active duty — mostly fools who tried to mug me with deadly force; no need to think you’re talking with a serial killer here — and what I did in uniform was generally much more straightforward and publicly acceptable. (I mention killing muggers from time to time, and have been called a murderer. Often I’m told I should have just walked away and maybe called the police, never mind that cell phones didn’t exist when I was a teenager and generally the target of the muggers was myself.) Yes, there were a few incidents or orders which gave me pause at the time and bugged me afterward, but even the stuff I can’t talk about has never cost me a night’s sleep.
That said, I have a lot of trouble with nightmares. I don’t think it’s from the stress of military service. Even coming under fire never bothered me — get under cover, get away, kill whatever’s targeting you. Tell good stories afterward. (Except for the ones I can’t talk about, which annoys me, but whatever.) I’ve never lost sleep from the people I’ve killed. I have lost sleep from some people I haven’t killed — several times I could have after they’d done something — something like beat up a girlfriend who was the sister of my girlfriend — but didn’t because I generally don’t kill where I don’t need to, and then they went on to kill someone in a mugging or badly hurt a little kid or whatever. Some of those incidents still bug me, 20 or 30 years later, and I still haven’t worked out an intellectually, morally, and pragmatically satisfactory approach for dealing with them.
That’s just some of the fuel for the nightmares that wake me up several times a week. The rest I think is just the pressure and aggravation of day-to-day life — as the saying goes, stress is the continuing refusal to choke the shit out of some bastard who desperately deserves it. I hit some of the stigmata of PTSD, but not enough to put me firmly in it (I hit a higher fraction of the stigmata of psychopathy, and I’m not a psychopath, just sorta borderline) and anyway I’m pretty sure that any PTSD I have would be from my childhood, not from the Army.
What to do about the people who really got messed up in the service? Beats the hell out of me. I’ll take OFD’s word that the groups help; I don’t have anything like a statistical basis for judging, nor any personal knowledge. I do suspect that if the economy were better and especially if there were more jobs that weren’t service work or desk work, a lot of vets with problems could just busy themselves with the day-to-day routine of making a living and have an optimistic outlook for the future. Now? Hell, the economy is still sucking dead goats, freedom is limited, we’re being told constantly to be afraid all the time, and the government is throwing away any territorial and population gains that were made and implicitly spitting on the dead and insured soldiers who made those gains. If I’d been over in Iraq, I’d be wondering just why I bothered. It’s one thing to lose half a dozen friends and a year of your life if you’ve made the world a better place. It’s another when you did all that for nothing. Add to that not being able to get a job better than “you want fries with that” and the government saying you’re a potential terrorist because you had military training and, well, depression and stress would be expected. What to do? I don’t know.
I do not know you personally but would nevertheless hazard a guess that a significant portion of the PTSD symptoms you experience/d can be attributed, at least partially, to your mil-spec experience. It is not common or healthy for regular folks to have nightmares that wake them up several times a week, and possibly also anyone else with them at the time, but it’s certainly a frequent scenario with combat vets, no matter how long it’s been since the actual combat.
And like most folks, there are experiences before and after military service that may dovetail quite nicely, if that is the word, with bad chit from that service. It tends to get all bollixed up together, so stuff that happened to us as kids gets reinforced or not in the military and then more chit happens afterward, and periodically various little triggers set us off again, whether it’s nightmares, hyper-vigilance, paranoia, temper and rage problems, that startle reflex, defensiveness, etc., etc.
My guess is that between your military-connected physical injuries and the conglomeration of PTSD symptoms, you clearly qualify for VA disability status and whether or not you want it or need it or whatever, there is zero question that you and I deserve it.
Your final paragraph kinda sums up the present situation in this country; we’ve got zillions of vets coming back from various wars, or those of us here from earlier wars, who, as a result of combat experiences, are suffering a bit, to various degrees. A question that was asked of me: how did that experience fuck up your later life? And I began to count the ways…and they were Legion.
When the country is so screwed up and the economy and job situation sucks so bad, and guys come back with their heads ringing with all kinds of shit, they find very quickly they have no one to talk to about it. The spouses don’t get it, not usually, and at least not at first. Siblings, other family members, friends, neighbors, countrymen, nobody gets it. And they start to isolate themselves, rather than go to the trouble anymore, and isolating oneself can take many, many forms; some of us are experts at it.
With luck, they may gravitate somehow to groups of fellow combat vets who DO get it, and who will fucking listen. And offer various levels of help in dealing with ALL kinds of shit. We have guys coming in who are in absolute fucking crisis; it may take months or years or whatever, but at least someone is listening to them now, someone who’s been there, and someone at last who gives a shit.
I’d say you may, if for no other reason than to dump those nightmares, look into talking to somebody about it, and that includes me, bro.
That’s the thing, I don’t think the Army did, either emotionally or physically. Sure, I got banged up during my Army years, but I got banged up a lot more before and after. Often this was through stupidity (sure, let’s have three kids on a bike going down a big hill with a lot of potholes in the pavement, and put the stupidest one on the steering and brakes; I abraded off a good chunk of my face when it hit the pavement, but fortunately I heal like no one’s business) and sometimes through other issues (it’s not normal for a child to have three skull fractures before he can talk). On the emotional side, between home life and the public schools, it’s a wonder that I’m not a full-blown homicidal psychopath; a deep mistrust of authority figures is getting off pretty cheap, I figure.
None of that, nor my Army experiences, are the main driver of my nightmares. My first child and her mother were killed by a drunken driver shortly before I went on active duty, which messed me up a bit. Years later, my son almost died several times because of his mother’s inattentiveness, eg, not noticing the symptoms of a ruptured appendix in a five-year-old. (And the family court still kept him with his mother, as that court did in 100% of cases; ref previous statements about distrust of authority figures.) Years after that, my daughter almost died twice, once because her mother, my current wife (which phrasing is not meant to sound quite so transient), is a terrible driver and once either because of the terrible pollution in the PRC or because of bird flu/swine flu/what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you-people flu, whatever was going around two years ago. That is what wakes me up in a panic half the time, the feeling of helplessness regarding outliving my descendants.
As for disability benefits, -shrug-. I’m doing all right, financially, and would be in fat city if I could get my wife to stop spending more than we make. (Yah, yah, I know… that kind of talk will get me hauled in for drug testing.) (Fat city is relative, of course. I grew up very poor by American standards and still have hillbilly kin who seem to get by on about $10 per month and the game they shoot. Most of our neighbors make more than we do, but that’s much of the problem: she wants to keep up with the Joneses.) Anyway, if I understand right there’s a limited budget for benefits and definitely a limited budget for VA stuff, and there are plenty more who need it, and most likely deserve it, much more than I.
Thanks for listening, OFD and anyone else who made it through this TL;DR comment.
“Anyway, if I understand right there’s a limited budget for benefits and definitely a limited budget for VA stuff, and there are plenty more who need it, and most likely deserve it, much more than I.”
We can’t worry about the allegedly limited budget nor the staff shortage; we plug on anyway, and though I used to say so myself, worrying about the “plenty more who need it, etc.” and whether or not they deserve it more than us is, frankly, wrong thinking. I would see kids coming back from the Sandbox with missing limbs, brain injuries, blinded, burned, etc., and say to myself, “what the fuck am I doing here; these guys need help more than me and I’m taking up their time and bennies”. Wrong.
We’ve been told by those guys that they don’t fucking envy us; their injuries and conditions are visible and can be adapted to; ours last forever and are invisible. They have modern prostheses, advanced burn treatments and some of the new med technology may even restore at least partial vision and hearing. But how do you treat a fucked up brain and spirit? It’s harder, much harder. There were one or two pioneers in the field during the Great War in England and Scotland, maybe a handful since, but finally more medical professionals and military brass are starting to pay attention.
One more word and then I’ll shut up; all of us combat vets, so far as I have seen and heard, have had a pile of other shit happen in life before and after our military service; this is all one big pile of stuff in our lives, and it’s merged and caused problems that may or may not have been made worse by that service. We here can certainly do without any VA bennies (well, maybe not medically and insurance-wise right now; I get treated and she’s on the you-know-what plan); that’s not the point. The point, as made today, for instance, by one of the Marine ‘Nam vets, is that, as he was told by a VA doctor, we’ve already PAID for our treatment and any benefits we get from the VA. Period. We’ve got it coming.
So maybe not now, maybe not ever, but if you end up needing or wanting to file, it’s there, and there are other guys who will listen and can attempt to help, just as you could possibly help them.
“Thanks for listening, OFD…”
Anytime. Least I can do.
OFD, you might be interested in this story about Aussie “Diggers” (former army members) who aren’t addapting well to civilian life…
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/thousands-of-iraq-and-afghanistan-veterans-homeless/6285252
I keep my mouth shut about this stuff because I don’t understand it and never can, never having been in the military. I used to wonder why some people seemed to be affected and others not, but I later started wondering if it wasn’t universal among people who’d been in actual combat. For example, I never even in retrospect noticed my dad showing any signs of it, except as I think I’ve mentioned here that the one time I was on a commercial airliner with him in about 1965, twenty years after his last combat flight on a B-17. He kept looking out the window and was obviously very nervous. I was starting to tease him about being afraid to fly when my mom told me to shut up and explained that he was watching for Messerschmidts. It brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it.
That would be a very typical PTSD symptom, Dr. Bob, and if you think about it a bit, you may recall other bits and pieces over the years that might fit.
Thanks for that link, Greg. All of that is pretty much the same chit we’re dealing with here. Again, it sucks that these wars have been/are being fought, but us old troops never forget our Aussie and Kiwi brothers, all the wars of the 20th-C and currently.
I’m not surprised. I’ve tried to imagine what it must have been like for those bomber crews, having to fight their way in past swarms of Messerschmidts and Focke-Wulfs, then having to fly straight and level through the flak to drop their loads, and then having to fly back out through swarms of fighters, and try to get back to England, often with wounded aboard and usually short on fuel.
I remember being stunned the first time I saw actual footage of German fighters making head-on passes against B-17s, closing at something like 700 knots. There’d be an almost invisible speck in the distance, and within a second it’d grow into a fighter closing with all guns blazing. The B-17 gunners would have literally a quarter to half a second between the time a fighter got within range of their .50’s and the time it blew past them. Nothing even remotely like the movies. I have nothing but admiration for the bravery of the air crews on both sides.
Same here; it was astounding stuff to have to do and live through. A bit different from the heroic and chivalrous dogfights of the Great War and then the Battle of Britain. Another war theater that doesn’t get much attention was that of the Red Army women pilots on the Russian front; just amazing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_women_in_World_War_II
Thanks for the thoughts, OFD, but really, I’m doing OK. I’m perfectly functional in society; even if I do prefer to keep to myself, I’m able to conduct myself at parties so that no one realizes that I don’t want to talk to them. I’m steadily employed (within the vagaries of the contracting biz), don’t beat or even yell at my wife, my daughter adores me* and doesn’t have to watch out for me having a bad day, my wife’s Chinese friends are jealous of her because their husbands are typical Chinese men and not at all helpful with the kids or doing things around the house, and my neighbors think I’m great because I get their snowblowers working or help carry heavy things or whatever.** Compared to all that, nightmares a few times a week are nothing.
* The sons, eh, what can I say. Nineteen and twenty-one years old, call or email only if they need something. Pretty standard.
** Including breaking into one house because the wife’s sister, who was staying with them and watching the baby, went out to throw away some trash and locked herself out. She walked barefoot through the snow to my house, screwed around for at least twenty minutes trying to figure out her sister’s telephone number before mentioning to me that there was a sleeping baby in the house. At which point I stopped talking, stopped listening, grabbed tools, and had the door open for her within five minutes, and the only reason it took so long was because I was trying not to cause visible damage. The baby’s parents, my actual neighbors, were very grateful to me and very annoyed with the sister, and put her on a plane back to Malaysia very soon after.