Work

Kadizzle worked hard today clearing the local trails.  After finally getting the pushable string mower to run right a lot of trails got trimmed.  The isolation has resulted in a lot of phone calling. Stroupini, and Shanika have been donating daily reports from Hazen, and Mandan. Winky and the rest of the trail crew went up the mountain where they are trying to rehabilitate the trail to Davy Gowhen's grave. If you are interested you can look him up on the net. He is an old gold miner they buried where they found him.  Kadizzle gets the sense the disdain for Trump is boiling among those with functioning brains.  Of course the cult members are dreaming every excuse to stay in the club.

Nothing is happening

The Kadizzles are in a wonderful natural setting with flowers of the desert in full bloom, but boredom ie exuding from every direction.  We tore open an MRE meal and Cliff sampled it. Not too bad MREs are Meals Ready to Eat.  The meal is for soldiers, but some are used for firefighters. 

Took a motorcycle ride yesterday and saw a rattler on the road.  The lake is about full and maybe it will top out while we are here.  Winky is going crazy worrying about social distancing and spreading virus.  All is well with us, and our children are holed up in Denver,and Phillidelphia.

Donald Trump vs God on Easter PPV

Insanity

Kadizzle took Ken, Rita, and Winky out to hike.   During the drive the number of people around was astounding.  Although the campgrounds are closed people are everywhere camping in the woods and on public land.  It makes no sense.  The biggest crowd all winter and the campgrounds are closed.  These campgrounds are set up with plenty of social distancing.  There is not much about them that is conducive to spreading the virus.  This all means a lot of peace and quiet at our location. 

The Kadizzles slept in until the bright sun forced us to the coffee bar.  The internet has been terrible here.  Kadizzle has been fighting Verizon.  Why pay for full service when you get about half.  It was a silly go around with one of their managers.  Kadizzle asked why not just pay for what you get.  The guy kept saying we have different plans.  Kadizzle said when you go to the gas station they don't have a plan for five gallons, and a separate plan if you want to buy ten gallons.  All the gallons are sold at the same price.  Why not simply sell gigabytes at the same price.  The simple answer is that you can charge people for what they don't get and don't use with a clever plan.  Kadizzle would like to sick the class action lawerys on these greedy rats.

Republicans Unite

This is the time for Republicans to unite. Trump needs to have his rallies, invite the fundamentalist, go to church, shake hands and declare victory. Now is the time for Fox News to encourage all Republicans to expose the fraud of the Democratic virus hoax.  If Republicans get together in mass meetings people will see the liberal fraud.  This is Trump's chance to hit the Democrats hard.  Trump could kiss a Republican baby, and encourage others to do it as a blessing.  How better to enrage liberals than to use Republican social distancing.  All Trump supporters should hug and kiss just to rub it in to the liberals. Now is the time for Republican science to shine.

The new Kadizzle

There he is with his friends the new Quinnie, Cheeche's latest creation.  Multiple births is a chore, but Cheech pulled it off.  Grandpa is happy to welcome the gang.

What we could have done

Up on the mountain yesterday two old men spent hours repairing steps on a trail.  Now what if that $1,200 everyone is going to get was used to pay people to work on projects like this.  If you paid someone one hundred dollars an hour to help us they could have worked for twelve hours.  What happened to common sense? Back in the old days when they had to get cash to trickle they did public works. Why not now?  Why not pay people to do something useful?

Go up on the mountain.

Kadizzle is planning to go up the mountain with the crew today.  He is going to fix some steps on the trail up by the four peaks.  Hopefully there will be a burning bush and some tablets.  Maybe the new tablets will say Thou shalt not watch Fox News, Thou shalt not believe Trump. Thy shall tax the rich, Thy shall not vote Republicans.  Thou shall read science and factual information.  Thou shall put no god before thee and use common sense, facts, and science.  Thou shall not be greedy. 

Anyway if Kadizzle gets the tablets he will share them.  Does God have time to make new tablets?  God might be busy choosing the next president, starving some kids, or handing out some cancer.  God is sure strange.  You pray to God and ask him to do the right thing. Why do you have to ask God to do what he should do anyway?  Would you ask little Johnny to quit hitting his sister?  Seems like little Johnny if he was a good boy would not hit his sister.  Kadizzle just simply does not understand God.   God can control everything, but chooses not to.  God could shut off the virus instantly, but instead he choose Trump to do it.  This sure seems strange.  Weill if Kadizzle gets hit by lightening while he is up on the mountain, rest assured there is a God and he is just like a little kid who gets mad.  It seems God is a lot like Trump.  Maybe that is why God chose Trump.

Silence

Yesterday we helped chase everyone out of the campgrounds.  Kadizzle will spend the day very alone. It may be nice, the sun is up and bright.  Winky is going to hike up the mountain with Rita and Ken. The animals should love the place without all the troublesome humans.  Could be a good day for music.

The big question is will people get smarter?  The great depression made people smarter.  People saw through the trickle down economy.  Changes were made.  The rich were taxed, workers were protected, and things got better. 

Ronald Reagan led the way in the greed parade and Americans forgot all about sharing, unions, and the common good.  Me, me, me was the Republican motto.  Income inequality soared.  We became a nation of " I got mine, the hell with you".   Republicans invented the idea that if you worked hard you would be rich in no time.  It did not hurt to inherit a million or two for a good start.

Now we sit here with the whole greed economy exploded in an instant.  In 1978 the CEO made 47 times more than the worker.  Now it is 350 times what the working man gets.  All the benefits companies used to provide evaporated. 

Worst of all people got stupider.  Fox News spread stupidity faster than the virus.  People fell in love with idiocy and Republican lives.  Will be get smarter or sicker?

Shut down the forest

Today Kadizzle and the trail crew will help shut down the campgrounds.  The visitor center is locked and closed and soon the campgrounds will be also.  No sure it is such a good idea.  Few better places to keep people isolated than out in the wild.

Here we sit with the coffee and the sun popping up.  Winky is jumping around as usual to go to "work".   Winky is taking this virus isolation very serious.  The social distancing is strictly enforced by the Queen.  So far it is working. 

The lake here is just about full and maybe it will go over the top before we leave.   It would be neat to see the dam release water.  This dam shoots the water way into the air when there is a release.

Back to the virus game.  It is interesting that when it comes to helping people Republicans want to make sure the poor don't get too much, and secondly the money does not go straight to them.  In North Dakota there is 6.8 billion dollars that could help those in financial distress.  However, that money is hoarded to protect the rich from paying taxes.  Then you have Trump and his gang of thieves who want to have a 500 billion dollar slush fund to reward their friends. 

Kadizzle did a calculation and found that in North Dakota you could give every person in the bottom 20% economically 40,000 dollars.  Of course poor people could not be trusted with the money, so you could set some guidelines like paying them better, providing them with insurance, and so on.  Republicans just pretend like the money is not there.  The real irony is the fund is called a rainy day fund.  If ever it rained it has now, but it takes a lot of rain to flush money away from the rich.

Hammered

The retirement fund has dropped by one third in value.  Does that mean Kadizzle has to die sooner?  Another choice might be to cut back on life style.  That seems like the preferred solution at this time. Kadizzle was going to buy a new toy.  Maybe a new truck, boat, or motorcycle. Not anymore.  Now we are in survival mode.  The desert life is not bad, but at some point we will have to pull the plug and head north.  If nothing else the heat will drive us out. 

Things seem to be slowing down here and people are holing up more.

The Ride

Kadizzle and Al took off for our ride in the mountains.  All is well that ends well was the theme, well maybe.  We decided to take a new route.  Kadizzle did have a good plan.  Send Al ahead to look for danger.  It worked, Al went ahead and wrecked on a very steep grade.  The roads were all very bad and difficult, but this was a part of road that if you went down you could not come back up. Al needed to either go down or up. For awhile we puzzled.  We might make it down, but if the road was cut off or dead ended we would be doomed.  At last we decided to push Al's cycle back up the hill to where he could ride again.  At this point we found our had a leak in his radiator from the crash. Not good.  Kadizzle though oh no,  maybe we would have to leave the cycle here and come back with the truck to get it. This would be a very bad unpleasant trip in a truck.  It turned out the leak was not that bad and we could refill the radiator enough to get back to camp.  Without too much trouble we did make it back.  Kadizzle has realized he is an old man now 71 and terrible mountain roads are harder than they used to be.  Al said his cycle magically went out from under him.  Kadizzle had a minor similar incident. 

Terrible Internet

Hopefully today will be nice enough to go on a long motorcycle ride with Al.   Under siege from the virus keeping entertained is a chore.  Once irritant is the internet.  Our only access is through the hotspot on the phone.  Verizon does not have the capacity to provide service during peak hours, so if you want have decent service you have to wait until two in the morning.  Kadizzle is going to call Verizon on Monday and suggest if they have half service we pay half.  

Kadizzle may ride up to Nonsuch Rocks with Al.  Over on that mountain we may get off, look at the Indian site, and hike up the slick rock. One problem will be hiking in cycling gear.  It can be done, but no real comfortable.  

The whole virus thing makes one wonder about if people will come out of this thinking differently.  The NYT says how pollution in big cities has gone way down.  Can we learn from this?  Since the subject is learning Kadizzle might recommend a book he is listening to on the Google.  Sapiens tells the story of human evolution from some interesting perspectives.  Kadizzle rarely has the patience to plow through a book, but this one has got him going.  In the time of the plague nothing could be better than a half decent book.  Another reading blessing has been the magazine The Economist.  Kadizzle took them up on some cheap offer and now can read some good articles.  The Economist goes into the virus in great detail and explains exactly how the virus operates.  

Another interesting educational thing was in the NYT today.  They have a neat visual of how the virus spreads.  It seems they tracked the spread with peoples cell phones.  Your cell phone is following you around, and so can the government by tapping into it.  Kadizzle checked on Google his travel history via the internet and cell phone and was amazed how well big brother can track you for years back.  Kadizzle found he had gone places that totally slipped his memory.  The day is a little overcase and off to a slow start.  Stay well my friend. 

An Excellent bike ride on the Apache Trail

If someone comes to visit you in Phoenix you automatically take them for a ride on the Apache Trail.  It is a scary cliff hanging ride.  However, there is now a problem.  Last fall there was a rain that obliterated the roadway, but you can make the trip by bike.  So today we took off with Deb and Al to ride our bikes down the trail.  The scenery is some of the most spectacular in the country.  It is like a bike ride at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.  Kadizzle had the electric bike and made sure he conserved the battery.  This was a mistake there was plenty of reserve power.  The road was terribly  washed out in many places, but the worst place was where the road hung on the side of a rock cliff.  Here the huge boulders the size of small homes sat in the road.  We could carry the bikes past the boulder, but thought it best to quit with the bikes and walk.  Al kept going with his bike and rode to the top where there is an incredible view.  The sun was in all its glory, and the temperature was just right.  Since Kadizzle was conservative with the battery outward bound he decided to go luxury on the way back and had plenty of electric assist.  If you ever get the chance to make the trip do it.

Pounding the same post into the ground

Kadizzle had a long conversation with the Hazen correspondent.  Stroupini was critical of the blog for pounding the same post into the ground. Stroupini suggested Kadizzle predict the future.  So here goes.  When we come out the other end of the virus game Kadizzle predicts people will be smarter.  They will see the fallacy of our economic system, they will understand who lies and who deceives. 

Kadizzle predicts things will get better.  When things fell apart in the depression people got smarter. We came out of the depression with better social safety nets, we decided to tax the rich, and people realized how much we depend on each other.  Kadizzle predicts this virus will teach us the same lesson over again.  Well maybe there was some post pounding in this, but unless Kadizzle gets different glasses it will be hard to see the world differently. 

Maybe the time has come

Long ago and far away Kadizzle spent summers on a family farm in West Virginia.  Call the place a farm was a misnomer.  In actuality it was an overgrown farm that had been abandoned around World War two when everyone left to work in the war factories.  Kadizzle's father bought the place and it basically served as a retreat in the wilderness of West Virginia.  The real beauty of the place was it's isolation.  To get to the farm which was nicknamed Bonnieville one had to first cross the Hughs River.  Normally you could drive through the water with some caution.  Other times you simply had to leave the car or truck and walk across the river.  If there was a vehicle on the other side you were in luck.  Once the river had been crossed a journey up the valley on a very poor road put you at the farm house.  The farm house had no electricity, no running water, but it did have two wonders.  There was a phone, and free natural gas piped directly to the house from the gas well.  The house was equipped with gas lights salvaged from old banks by my father.  The refrigerator was run by gas.

This virus insanity has inspired Kadizzle to consider going to the West Virginia wilderness and living in isolation.  The challenge would be the fun part.  You could work on solar power,  have a little lumber mill, and work hard to raise food.  Social life could be a visit to the Hill Billies over the hill.  Internet might be non existent. That might be a good thing. 

Existing in the woods might require very little outside input.  The biggest issue would be food.  The gas well would provide all the heat, light, and energy one could want.  Raising food on the West Virginia soil could be a problem.  Over the hill there are real hill billies.  They have made a science out of living in these woods.  They know how to harvest deer, blackberries, persimmons, and welfare checks.  They have survived just fine for generations.

The cost of living would be damn near zero.  The entire estate is about four hundred acres.  The tax on the land is miniscule because the land is essentially worthless.  My father paid 14 dollars per acre and some land was bought for 23 dollars per acre.   A social security check would go a long way there.  Boredom would be the biggest problem.  Back in the old days it was nothing to go three weeks without seeing a soul.  Sometimes some odd traveler would drive past on the road, which happens to be a state road that never gets attention.  Well let's just see if Trump can golf us out of this mess.

Mind Boggling

What you can sell people.  Religion is the classic case of fraud.  Getting millions of people to live on the basis of a made up fantasy seems impossible, but it happens.  Donald Trump shows us lying and fantasy in action.  Religion has sold walking on water, virgin birth,  and a host of nonsensical crap.  Trump can contradict his own lies within minutes and people believe it.  Republicans sell trickle down economics and the dolts buy it by the truckload.  What in the hell is wrong with people? Most people who go to the magic show ultimately walk out an know they were fooled.  How do the same people go to a Trump rally and never figure it out?

Now we have a hell of an economic mess and people relying on the mafia to fix it.  This virus insanity is doing so much economic damage. However, anyone who pays attention will quickly see the silver lining.  The lying will show up like a bump on the end of your nose.  The economic falsehoods will also become evident.  The deficit will be shot to hell.  Watching the unwinding will provide a lot of panic and entertainment.  Hopefully the little stooges like Kevin Cramer, Kelly Armstrong, and the gang will melt.

The real test will be the election.  Will people buy one more scoop of stupidity?  Wait and see.  It is a bad sign that we are turning to old white goats for answers.  Who created this mess?  Yup it was old white goats mostly Republicans.   So lets get some more goats to run things?

Up on the mountain

Kadizzle had not been up on the Four Peaks for a few years, but with a huge bucksaw on his shoulder he was headed up the trail.  The mission was to clear the trail of large trees that had fallen across the trail.  You can see for almost a hundred miles in every direction from the peaks.  It was surprising how quickly the old fashioned saw could go through a tree.  Rules and senseless regulations prohibit chainsaws in the Wilderness.  Certainly we want the wilderness to be quiet and peaceful, but sometimes common sense should prevail.

It was a nice day.  Several young people passed us working on the trail.   Talking to them later in the day it was amazing how quickly they sprinted to the very top of the peaks.  It is a very difficult climb and one this old man may never make.

Nested out here in the desert our little group is self isolating.  Hard to find a nicer place to hole up.  In the background Pence is on NPR with his suck up personality talking about the virus.  What a sad man who cannot see what a dolt is Trump is.  Pence is assuring us we can trust Trump.  How stupid can we be?

The Isolated Life

Where do we start? Winky is like a spinning top going into the future and finding some virus problem to worry about.  The Kadizzles sit in one of the most isolated places possible.  We are in an encampment with few people separated by a lot of distance.  We are in a gated community.  Only a few people are allowed in where we are.  Even as isolated as we are Winky can imagine all sorts of ways the magic death can get here.  If the virus can live for several hours then avoiding it is pretty hopeless.

Some good news is the virus has slowed down in China.   Perhaps China is over the hump.  In reality very little in our life will change. Maybe we will not go up to the marina to have dinner.

Maybe some more good news.  This panic will show the fallacies of a lot of systems.  Income inequality will shine out and people will see that no health care,  and not savings affect mostly the poor.  This exercise will show how fragile the existence of so many is.  The Democratic Hoax has already shown all but the most hard core what an idiot Trump is.  Anyone who cannot figure what a liar Trump is by now has a real problem.

Ideally we all are getting smarter and many myths about the world we live in are being destroyed. 

What about trickle down?  If rich people can trickle on poor people and that is how the economy works, then now is the time for trickling.   Trump should demand trickling to start immediately.

How dead can you be?

Forty thousand people get killed by guns, no one cares.   A few people so far have had death by virus.  Solving the gun problem is simple, but not much fun so forget about it.  Now, lets have some virus hysteria.  The virus is a problem, but how does it merit so much attention when other problems are ignored.  If a gun nut goes to school and shoots your kid, you kid is dead.  The virus on the other hand may make your kid sick or enable your kid to give it to grandpa, but it more than likely will not kill your kid.  The virus is going to wake people up to reality.  If people have awakened to the idiocy of Trump we have already won a major victory.

All of this reminds Kadizzle of his all time favorite cartoon.  A man is tied to a post and he is about to be executed.  One of the men assigned to shoot him offers him a cigarette.  The man about to be shot says " No thank you, I am trying to quit'.    This is the state of the United States.