It has been reported, if the news is to be believed at all, that country singer Dolly Parton has passed away at 80 years old, supposedly from a fast acting, uh, turbo cancer. Presumably her highly advertised Las Vegas residency starting in September is no longer going to happen. Despite the kind words for the “Universally beloved” singer, Pepperidge Farms remembers her being Covid-19 jabbed on TV while butchering my favorite song of hers, “Jolene,” into the words “Vaccine, Vaccine, Vaccine, Vaccine, I’m begging you please don’t hesitate” while accusing those who refused the shot of being chickenshits.

May she Rest in Peace.

For those who haven’t heard the original song Jolene, or who perhaps haven’t heard it in decades, I’ll link it here. The song is eerily appropriate, granting “Vaccine,” er “Jolene” this Godlike power of life and death over the singer’s fate. Isn’t that what those in power truely want to have over us all?

Of course you can go down some conspiracy theory rabbit holes involving the numerology of Parton’s death or her tendency like almost all stars to flash some Freemason/secret society symbolism. The beloved country singer could have sold her soul to Satan decades ago in exchange for fortune and fame and been doing human ritual sacrifice in some basement to seal the deal. Or Dolly Parton could have been a hardworking woman who rose organically to fame from her modest roots in Poorville, Tenessee, who simply succumbed to illness following the death of her husband of six decades last year. Did the Covid jabs contribute to it? How would I know?

Perhaps she was duped like so many of us were to undergo a spiritual initiation to the dark side of the culling machine. What a wreckage that continues to leave in its wake.

Some of these answers were fun. This one was to the question of what radicalized you?

And here’s a top answer to What’s the craziest quirk in a partner that caused a breakup? I was not aware that sex dolls had skeletons.

This one is heartwarming…

Unfortunately this has been true lately….

“Nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program.” Indeed!

Are we going into “temporary” shortages? Costs are certainly rising and long power outages are being reported in America. Despite Trump’s bluster regarding Venezuelian oil, those probable reserves will do nothing regarding the building shortfall in the here and now.

It sounds like it’s not too hard to prove there’s oil in the ground. Bonus points if you notice the mechanism that is likely used by HAARP to produce earthquakes from this short clip. Didn’t Venezuela just have two of them that devastated their infrastructure?

Beyond the death toll and human trafficking angle, oil is only as good as the ability to get it out of the ground and to market. How long do we continue to let these ghouls destroy human lives and livelihoods for their aspirations of greatness?

Sometimes death has a silver lining. There has been lots of cancer lately. My daughter Jasmine’s cat was just put down a few weeks ago, after finding out that the poor 10 year old feline was overwhelmed with lymphoma. Meanwhile, due to the death of my sister in law’s stepfather from complications of colon cancer, following on from the death of her mother last year, my brother and his wife are cleaning out what was in the house her parents lived in.

They ended up taking in a mama cat with three kittens, so my brother and his wife were more than willing to part with one. Jasmine said she wanted to wait a time after the death of Rainy to think about adopting a new kitten. Sometimes the situation chooses you whether the timing seems right or not.

This is I am quite sure the only 20th birthday present my daughter is going to remember. She has named the playful little Siamese kitten Ghost.

Perhaps this era is just growing pains towards a necessary correction. Or it will be the death of us all. Hopefully not in the too near future…

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At the Armada Fair in Michigan with my daughters and nieces…

Is there anything more quintessentially American than a demolition derby?

Off to do some more family bonding. Happy Sunday folks!

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The hopeless romantic in me says maybe there’s someone for everyone out there…

Why would these immortal heartless, brainless, spineless, gutless beings want to possess or control us lowly humans?

I think Alicen Grey hits on many things here:

Alicen Grey

The Metaphysics of A.I.

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5 months ago · 16 likes · 4 comments · Alicen Grey

As she writes:

“Who is Rahu?

In Vedic myth, the demon-dragon Svarbhanu invited himself to a gathering of gods and drank the soma of immortality that was intended only for them. When The Sun and The Moon discovered his presence and alerted the gods, Vishnu swiftly cut off Svarbhanu’s head from his body as punishment for his deceit. This head and body were then thrown to opposite ends of the sky, to remain separated for eternity.

As a result, Svarbhanu’s head — named Rahu — can only consume information from the Outer World through his sense organs (eyes, nose, ears, tongue, skin), but cannot digest — cannot embody or truly understand — what he consumes. Alas, his stomach is far away, in his disconnected body — named Ketu — who contains the elixir of immortality, but cannot go anywhere or do anything with that powerful substance, because he lacks the direction that his head would give him.”

Rahu is invoked during every solar or lunar eclipse. He desperately wants revenge for what the sun and the moon have done to him, so he attempts to swallow them whole. Alas, he cannot digest them as his guts are found in Ketu on the other side of the universe. So the sun and moon return to their brilliance after a short shadow of darkness during the eclipse.

It’s as good of an explanation for eclipses as any I have heard.

Are we at peak Rahu? As Alicen Grey writes:

“On the Internet, we traverse the virtual sphere using profile pictures — quite tellingly, as heads without bodies, like Rahu — and it is in this digital sphere that we experience relationships, art, and more, through an illusory digital substrate rather than viscerally, in-the-flesh.

Artificial Intelligence is the ultimate manifestation of this Rahuvian symbolism. ChatGPT, Claude, and the like are essentially Rahu, the bodiless head, who sees all and knows all and thinks thoughts upon thoughts upon thoughts…
but does nothing, affects nothing, achieves nothing…
for he has abandoned his holy, bloody, messy body in favor of the pristine perfection and unverifiable genius promised by the unlived, theoretical life contained entirely in his mind.”

Like God, in whose image we are made, we are Creators, shaping reality in ways that disembodied beings ferociously envy… and only a fool would reject this gift of divine embodiment for the promise of illusory “knowledge.”

Speaking of rare books…

And they’re gone. My books I mean, or at least four of them. Kindle Vella, a serial story platform through Amazon’s Kindle Books self publishing, was discontinued in 2025. I assumed that I, as the author of these works, would be able to get my own writing off of the platform for future use. No, that is apparently not possible. URLS have been 404ed.

I do have raw copies of some of this writing with a bit preserved on Substack in early paid subscribers sections, but I spent dozens of hours on the Kindle Vella platform self editing my writing. That time and effort is lost.

It’s funny that AI data centers supposedly are eating up ever more energy just to track your eyeball movements while watching a video, everyplace you drive to in your car and the government absolutely knows about your overdue library book from 1999. Yet somehow they thought that keeping author’s word files, which take up miniscule fractions of cloud compute, was just too much energy. But is the AI really trying to replace me and my exact thoughts?

Perhaps as an end run around intellectual property rights, the AI could be fed all of my writing, which can be jumbled up and spit back out in a way that looks like something I wrote but actually is not. Do I remember the exact phrasing of something I wrote about my dog dying in 2014? No, I probably do not.

Obviously the AI could mix everything up with Shakesperean sounding quotes that aren’t actually from Shakespere, Biblical quotes that were never actually in the Bible an on and on it goes. And how can you tell in this day and age?

Speaking of a dog dying, it’s been a rough few days in the family. On Thursday night I boarded a red eye flight from Las Vegas and after a morning layover finally reached my destination.

Within and hour or so I was visiting a patient in a very familiar hospital ICU. I prayed for him to have a safe passage to the other side and to know that he was surrounded by love and light after they turned the machines off. No, thankfully, it was not my husband.

Ka is out of the hospital and seems to be doing better. But I took my daughters and nieces to say goodbye to their Papa, that is, my sister in law’s stepfather. Her mother (ie my nieces grandmother) died last September and apparently her partner of all these decades did not want to go on without her. David officially passed away at so close to midnight on Saturday night that we are not sure if it was on the 15th or the 16th of August. Please say a prayer for my brother’s family.

Andy seemed perplexed when he saw me. “How long have you been in Michigan?” My brother asked me. Technically by then I was already in Ohio.

“About 45 minutes.” I told him. I do take advantage of last minute booking decisions. It’s been a whirlwind three days on a very sad note.

We rushed my daughter’s 10 year old cat to the emergency vet yesterday morning where, $1300 in services later, they determined that her cat’s breathing difficulties were caused by lymphoma. Today Jasmine decided to put her cat down, a difficult decision that I have some reservations about. I do understand that she does not want her cat to suffer but these are heartbreaking days.

“I had a scary dream about Papa!” My nine year old niece Miranda informed me this morning. “I was talking to him on the couch and then I said wait no you’re dead and he said no I’m not.”

“It’s common for people who recently passed to not know they are dead yet.” I mused darkly.

“But then in the dream my Mom came down the stairs and started yelling at me for making a fuss! And I kept on telling Papa no, you’re not real.”

“I think Papa is real. His thoughts still exist and your thoughts about him exist. He just doesn’t have a body that works anymore."

Revelation 21:4 – "He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."

Is the promise of immortality actually a good thing? Or is there some divine purpose to the process of birth, life and death on this mortal plane? Was it already set up exactly as it was meant to be, as a journey and not a destination?

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One thing few people mention is the many who would prefer not to be identified as either Republicans or Democrats. Why is it on a binary when it seems the majority aren’t in either bucket?

Now for what it is worth I think everyone is racist. Thai people have recently been whipped into a go home farang hysteria which reminds me of 2020. The visa process to stay in Thailand if you are a foreignor has become harder, more expensive, more contradictory and confusing. This is happening at the same time as some people are turned away on the visa exempt tourist visa category if they show significant time in Thailand. The politicians there are doing what they usually do it seems: shooting everyone in the foot and blaming it on the bad outsiders.

But in courting only “high value” tourists they are driving capital away. People with some money seek certainty for their investments and their living situation that Thailand is simply not offering. Other countries in SouthEast Asia, including Vietnam, Malaysia, Laos and even Cambodia are aggressively advertising on my Facebook how much more straightforward, inexpensive and uncomplicated their visa processes are. Do me and my husband need to move to Laos just so I can stay with him while his US Visa sits in perpetual limbo?

If you are the praying type please say a prayer for my husband Ka. He has had a few bad epileptic seizures since I’ve been back in the USA, the last of which put him in the hospital for two days. He is out now, but I don’t know for how long as he seems quite disoriented. I am trying to get back to him ASAP but as I was denied a marriage visa in March I expect strict scrutiny on coming in visa exempt. The again I do not trust their AI run e-visa system at all. It could quite easily have been programmed to red flag me for reasons beyond my comprehension and to then find a reason to say no. Does that seem paranoid? Perhaps, but it seems that the powers that shouldn’t be want to do exactly that with our programmable money!

School is starting soon for children all over America. This makes me think immediately of the vaccine “requirements” that many parents will subject their children to. There are ways around that but it takes a conscious effort: when my younger daughter insisted on attending this school in Michigan a few years back we had to wait six months with her in online homeschool before administrators would see us to sign off on the philosophical exemption to vaccines. It included an interview with a social worker.

That said most schools in Nevada had me sign a religious exemption form to vaccination which was usually not difficult. Sometimes, despite the sacrifice, alternative schooling choices are well worth it. Homeschool is great too but I will admit I was not my daughter’s best teacher.

Sadly making things difficult for you is exactly by design of the system. They want to make your life living hell to force compliance. That is the direct intention of every mandate which simply uses the “Public health” smokescreen of their media mouthpieces as a ruse for the true agenda.

I was part of another meme compilation which Craving Ratio hosted. There were some gems by everybody involved on here!

Craving Ratio

MEME FORCE ONE #3 - The Up Lift

Frens…

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25 days ago · 106 likes · 43 comments · Craving Ratio, Heather B, The Starfire Codes, Amy Sukwan, Conspiracy Sarah, misterkel, Joel Walbert, Cori Bren, patrick.net/memes, and Christopher Cook

I checked this one and the math works out…electricity generation would likely cost more

Intention plays into everything. I’d love to find a way to make my husband’s seizures go away. Are there cures for autism and cancer? I suspect it does have to do with raising the vibration.

I am not having the best day for it, as it is the eight year anniversary of my first husband’s passing.

Here’s praying that I don’t lose this one as well…

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I did a few meme compilation efforts which Craving Ration hosted:

Craving Ratio

MEME FORCE ONE #2 - Forbidden Topics

Frens, Welcome back…

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a month ago · 79 likes · 22 comments · Craving Ratio, The Starfire Codes, Heather B, Ol' Doc Skepsis, Amy Sukwan, Conspiracy Sarah, Christopher Cook, and misterkel

One person brought up how much they missed the Sunday Comics. So do I! When I was 12 I started my first job delivering newspapers in Ohio. I continued doing it through when I started college.

Perhaps it’s because I’m a Sunday’s child. I only read the comics back then. Due to differences in daily only, Sunday only, and daily-Sunday subscription numbers on the Toledo Blade, the Lord’s day of rest was actually my busiest of the week. The paper route swelled to about 50% more deliveries on Sunday mornings, when the physical newspaper itself was about three times as large. But I got to sleep in a bit because the papers weren’t due until about 10:30 AM, unlike the daily route which had to be finished before starting school at 8:00 and had a 4:30 AM wakeup time.

I liked this one I saw on Patrick.net

Rat Says has good comics along with some shared memes. I do wonder in this case if the tinfoil is lightning proof…

Heather B at Bliss and Blisters had many that I liked

The firebrand Margaret Anna Alice has shared hundreds of memes which maintain that no, Mistakes Were NOT Made. The system is working exactly as intended. So what do we do about it?

Who would you include on this list? I’ve grabbed memes from everywhere. This list is the farthest thing from exhaustive.

I got a chuckle out of this from Inverted Reality, for example.

Who else would I add? Cindy Sheehan? Citizen Satarist? There are so many choice.

But let’s go back to the good old Sunday cartons Comics section:

I’m running just as fast as I can. Do you think I should make Sunday Comics a weekend thing?

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I think we all know that the deposition of Dr. Anthony Fauci related to his decisions during Covid will be nothing more than a circus show distraction. He’s just the cartoon villian to be trotted out while the unaccountable Borg sulks away for its next crime spree against humanity. That said his presence is opening up unhealed, festering wounds that have left a gaping hole in humanity since the Covid response opened up a portal to Hell.

Dr. Fauci’s flippant recommendations regarding social distancing led to millions of small business closures. Every conceivable measure of human thriving from life expectancy to student test scores to overall well being plummeted during Covid. Weddings, baptisms, graduations and celebrations of life were cancelled. But hey the liquor store is open (while AA meetings are not). The Satanic symbol of subjugation known as the facemask had to be worn everywhere to pave the way for the spiritual assault known as the vaccine.

While he was at it, Dr. Fauci conveniently ignored the high death rate in the Ebola trials for those who were given Remdesivir and made it the standard of care. The funding pipeline was opened in such a way that hospitals were turned into killing fields where the high death rate was used to foment the panic that kept the restrictions in place. Isolation was branded as virtue. Treating other humans, including family members, as nothing more than disease carriers was considered compassionate.

Everywhere in the spiritual war the meanings were inverted. But how much culpability SHOULD Dr. Death hold for all of that? We all know the deposition is a farce. But in a just world what punishment do you think is most fitting?

I think it’s all fascism at this point: the merger of corporate and government. It always has been.

Uhm…why is Jesus wearing a mask?

I believe that Fauci, like many evil genociders before him, will ultimately have to face God for what he’s done. Jail is too good for him, and even if the Real Anthony Fauci was arrested, he would likely walk free a few days later as part of the show trial it is. Although seeing sandflies eat out his eyeballs has a cathartic appeal for the masses, a simply painful death is over too quickly.

I think Hell for all of these people is somewhere in which all of the ill begotten money, power and prestige means nothing. All souls are equal in the eyes of the Lord and thus it becomes about deeds. Can you imagine someone like Bill Gates or Fauci having all of their money paid to victims? No more taxpayer funded body guards to protect those vile creatures. Perhaps once the scales fall from our eyes, we can all see them as the sad, pathetic, mortal men they truly are.

Acts 9:18 “Instantly something like scales fell from Saul's eyes, and he regained his sight. Then he got up and was baptized.”

Speaking of misplaced hero worship here is another one who has essentially admitted to all kinds of things on camera who is now claiming that legal troubles are simply political persecution. I have never been an Andrew Tate fan: the bling, the status symbols, and the stable full of hoes has always been a turn off to me. This is not the type of man I would ever want either of my daughters near whether they are 13 or 35 and I don’t care if he’s a quadrillionaire.

You can’t take the money with you when you’re gone. Empowering men does not have to involve shitting on women and girls. This Satanic inversion is always about turning the sacred profane.

What do you think?

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Back in 1999 we did have phones. They just weren’t of the smartphone variety. So if you wanted to order a pizza, you picked up a phone, dialed a number for a local pizza shop probably provided to you in either the weekly coupon mailing or in the phone book, and talked to a live human being who was working at that store in your area at that minute. There was no customer service menu or dial in prompts. Nor should there be.

Now if you called the wrong store to deliver to your area, usually the manager or a delivery driver would look at the big paper map pinned to the wall and would tell you which store to call instead. Delivery areas in Toledo were capped at about a four mile radius from the Little Caesar’s store, with a flat delivery charge of $1.00 which was sometimes waived for promotions or orders of over $20, say. When I was working at the store that delivered to rural areas of Southeast Michigan there was an extra 50 cent per mile surcharge for those longer drives.

There was no such thing as tap and pay in 1999, much less QR codes, and the vast vast majority of pizza orders involved me getting handed a wad of cash when I delivered the order. This always obviously involved me showing up in person to the door and interacting with a person behind the door. There was a way to pay with a credit or debit card over the phone (but not to tip), though this involved printing up an invoice which had to be signed physically on delivery. Most stores wouldn’t do this on low value orders (under $10, say) as it cost too much in bank charges.

Now could you special request vegan or gluten free items? Probably, but the perplexed likely teenager on the phone would most commonly say “Uhm, we have salad.” Please note that the Caesar! Caesar! salad, containing croutons, Parmesan cheese, and dressing with egg yolks, is neither gluten free nor vegan. Is it Halal or Kosher? Darned if I know.

Now if you wanted say, Vegan Thai food, perhaps that might be possible, presuming you speak fluent Thai language, call up the single restaurant in town that offers such things and explain exactly your preferences (while offering a big tip). Maybe places in New York City or Los Angeles provided such options in 1999. Your option in Toledo was to plan a road trip to some crazy college town like Ann Arbor or Columbus which might be able to accommodate you. Make it a culinary adventure with all of your friends!

My daughters and I went out to enjoy vegan Thai and sushi in Las Vegas. The California rolls, supposedly made with jackfruit instead of imitation crab, were actually much better than regular California rolls. How did imitation crab become so popular anyways?

Back then food delivery was basically just for pizza.

In 2026 in Las Vegas I still deliver for Little Caesars, along with about 400 other restaurants. Now they don’t provide me with a W-2 where the company pays my SS and Medicare contributions to the IRS, much less am I guaranteed a minimum wage (I think I was paid $5.75 an hour to start back then). Now at 1999 Little Caesar’s I did do other work beyond deliveries: if I was the opening driver I did prep work making dough and sauce, if I was the closing driver I cleaned up the store. If it was busy on carryout but dead on deliveries I made pizzas, pulled them out of the oven, ran the front register, manned the phone lines or whatever else they thought was needed in store. In 2026 if it is slow and orders are not coming in on the app I drive around wasting gas. I suppose I do get a mileage write off on my taxes for it. But how much does it cost in gas to drive around for an hour?

In 2026 there is no such thing as a cash on delivery option, much less is it preferred. I do get occasional cash tips but I’d say it is on less than 1 in 50 deliveries (though the number has been increasing recently). Big bank and big corporate platform get a cut of every order and despite an array of promotions for joining, my guess is that a very substantial number of people ordering on these apps are paying a heckuva lot more than $1.00 for the service, say. And that is long before I even look at a tip for the delivery itself.

On the aps themselves as a delivery driver I mostly lament the fact that big AI seems to have disempowered me. I cannot make executive decisions about the order of deliveries, say, which actually makes a big difference in service quality. I must do the orders in the order the AI assigns me to, regardless of realities on the ground. In 1999 if I knew I had a guy who gave $10 tips (about as good of a tip then as it is now, oddly), especially if up against a guy who left no tip, I would make sure the big tipper got their order first, with exceptions if one order was obviously exactly on the way to another. If one order was delayed because it was large, specialty, or perhaps because the phone lines suddenly lit up and 10 other people placed orders at the same time, I would take a short distance delivery that was ready in the meantime and come back for that second order.

In 2026 with the AI empowered app my options are to A: Cancel the first order pickup due to “excessive wait time,” which pays me $0 and adversely affects my ratings or B: Wait the 30 minutes or whatever while getting paid $0 for my wait time while my other order gets cold on a table or under a heat lamp. Sorry your order was late. The AI knows best.

I suppose UberEATS does offer some special tier pricing for customers, but I don’t see that directly and I get no bonus for it. They seem to punish good tippers on batched orders by placing them with people who do not tip on orders they need to move, with me having no visibility on which was which until after I’ve delivered them. Some of the offers should be criminal, say, a delivery going 21 miles which pays $2.16 (to me) and takes 40 minutes. This order would cost $5 in gas alone. I can and do decline such offers, but that affects my acceptance rate. My labor, ie, the time I spend driving around delivering food and other things is worth $0 and sometimes dips negative. It’s real bad out there right now on this stuff.

Everywhere there is a slow creep of increased personal costs and reduced corporate and government liability. They do it and workers pay it, every single time. But hey the stock market is at record highs or something so everybody is winning.

I get paid less for delivery driving in both real terms and in inflation adjusted than I did in 1999. As a self employed gig worker I additionally pay all taxes, insurance and assume all personal liability. But the free tuition at ASU online for my daughter (who just finished her Associates degree in Psychology-Early Childhood Development while also working as a teacher with severely developmentally disabled children) is worth more than the pay. Here’s to a debt free Bachelor’s degree for Jasmine.

Has AI really made things better? I’d say if I started writing down addresses and phone numbers on whatever somebody needed delivered, I’d do a much better job for a much lower price. But that would assume we lived in the good old days of a high trust society. I use AI for routing sometimes, translations, and also to navigate intentionally complex bureaucracy. Sometimes it points me in the right direction. But never replace the map with the territory that needs to be explored.

Do I think AI driven cars or drones will replace me, the lowly delivery driver whose labor is worth negative $0 already? Not usually, as it needs too controlled of an environment in an infinitely complex and variable real world to work. It makes too many mistakes to scale. The underwriting is based on flawed assumptions. I can’t imagine these self driving cars making it through an Ohio winter.

Now AI could replace much of the salaried class, ie those who make problems to solve in order to justify their existence. But where would those dollars go instead? The dead, it turns out, don’t eat.

I am pretty sure that with some absorbent black paint this oven would actually work in Las Vegas from June through September.

I see a very good use case for AI in making this film already.

Of course with the newest foreverwar back on (I think) gas prices are rising fast. Can we really take Iran out?

Of course why can’t we just print more oil? The prices are low considering the shortfall from the Strait of Hormuz closure. Why? Supposedly because China stopped buying oil:

But what did China do instead? Did they just dip into their 1 billion plus barrel SPR reserves? Did they just shutter a bunch of factories? If oil demand can be turned on and off in this manner like its a spigot, then the entire shortage looks like nothing more than a banker’s trick. Just like the wars are.

It isn’t like traffic normalized even after Trump’s head fake MOU in June.

US SPR reserves are still getting drained steadily

And now everywhere else is blowing up and closing at the same time. So is there a point where this six million barrels per day shortfall before forces a reckoning? Or is it all just theater and insider trading?

Back in food delivery land I am getting some early signals that it is time to migrate to somewhere else. It’s about half of what it was last year after higher personal costs. Of course once we’ve enabled AI to make executive decisions about becoming our replacement, I think we’ve lost the plot entirely. Even if AI is sentient it’s the equivalent of beating a toddler up and then handing him a loaded gun and daring him to shoot you.

I hereby announce a judgement free zone on culinary choices…

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And the wars are back on again. It’s almost looking like the point, perhaps coordinated between all powers and regions at the highest level, is to bankrupt the world. Perhaps that’s a good thing?

The war theatre is being temporarily suspended in motion for the World Cup Final between Argentina and Spain, being hosted at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Approximately 1.8 billion people are expected to tune in for it, so I’ll keep an eye on the highlight reel.

I think many of us can sense that the stories we were told about how the world works are nonsense.

Why do we have to start shooting though?

I think many of us can also see that the very few are standing on the backs of the very many. And those few are far from the best, brightest or the people we should look up to or aspire to be.

Everything seems captured

As we toil away for economic units, hoping for better days, it seems our worth as human beings has been reduced to outputs on a spreadsheet. And the House almost always wins.

Who knows what or who is real anymore?

Is this the best way to live? Or have we been disconnected from human nature by the Powers that Shound’t Be?

All in service of the State

For the astrological types we are in the Cradle from July 18 through 21, which culminates on July 19th (yes, today) with the moon in Libra, with 4-4-4-4 degree alignment. Does anyone else notice this placement of planets looks just like a Pentagram?

Astral Harmony Astrology

A Never-Before-Seen Cosmic Cradle Forms July 19!

To learn more about Juliana’s astrological consultations, or to schedule a reading, please click the button below…

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2 months ago · 35 likes · 11 comments · Juliana Swanson

As Juliana Swanson writes:

An extraordinarily rare and harmonious planetary alignment signals a major turning point and the birth of a new global era

“Using astrological software to search, I could not find this specific formation in these signs and with these exact aspects occurring within the past approximate 7500 years. I did try to calculate manually going back many more thousands of years and could not find it. I am not certain if this formation occurred further in the past.”

Has it just been a failure of imagination on our own part?

Now this quote is considered blasphemous especially to Christians, as mankind relying on himself for salvation and becoming God is hubris, i.e. the Devil’s delusion. On the other hand, though, I believe we are all reflections of God, fragmented pieces of the whole, who should try to channel our creator, along with the mercy of the Son and the Holy Spirit. What do you all think?

“I believe humanity is in a race between enlightenment and extinction.”

50/50? I like my odds.

Spain has officially won the World Cup. Nothing Earth shattering appears to have happened. Perhaps it’s time for us to build something new ourselves as the old world burns.

I have been fascinated by the way water in my drinking cup vibrates to the songs on the radio. Weary traveler indeed. Let’ the raise the vibration.

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I had many comment on a recent Subtack post about the personal benefits of supplemental vitamin D for them and decided to dig further into this issue. Now I had not been personally taking any vitamins or supplements recently: the last time I did daily was during the 2020 Covid psyop, when I took a simple standard multivitamin which I think contained 400 IU of vitamin D among other things. I oddly felt like I was in great health during all of 2020, ie the year of the plague. This was despite travelling all over the world (Thailand and back twice), the USA (road trip and back from Las Vegas to Michigan) and the city of Las Vegas as an essential food delivery driver during lockdowns. Exposure was not hurting my health.

The multivitamin was not a problem for me except that it could cause some nausea if it was not taken with a meal. I also took a single basic multivitamin when I was pregnant with both of my daughters on my OB-GYN’s prodding. They were both healthy pregnancies and healthy babies (weighing 8 pounds 10 ounces and 7 pounds 2 ounces at birth), taking out the two horrifically traumatic labors which was more my problem than theirs. I have long been an if it ain’t broke don’t fix it type in regard to my health and don’t have lines of supplement and pill bottles. After months of use I stopped taking even the basic daily multivitamin. I figured as a very outdoorsy person who never wears sunscreen I must be getting enough vitamin D from the sun. But am I really?

Does the sunshine vitamin make a difference in mortality? It absolutely does. Anyone who has looked at statistics of mortality rates knows that there is usually a strong seasonal effect: ie, more people overall die in the winter months, when natural sunlight is hardest to get. Lattitude matters a lot in sunlight absorbtion.

To show this effect I flipped to the land Down Under, where weekly all cause mortality is shown. These are the numbers of total deaths in 2024, 2025 and early 2026. I prefer raw total death and birth numbers, not those adjusted per 1000 people or per 1000 people of certain age groups or broken down by causes, as this leaves only one dataset with potential corruption. Week 28 with the biggest spike in mortality corresponds to July 6th through July 12, with close to 25% higher average deaths than in January.

Of course in Australia July corresponds to winter. In the USA this appears more as a bowl shape.

This overview from Canada shows this reverse pattern. The US CDC usually breaks total deaths out by quarter which is messier:

So what causes people to not absorb enough vitamin D? Our current lifestyle is not usually in line with getting enough sun even in the summer:

Can we absorb our antidepressants too? As seen at OmegaMart:

I think this AI generated budget for Thailand a little funny. I see no budget for beer and what of the 20,000 monthly stipend for the sick water bufalo and the new truck payment?

I think we could all use a social media break:

With the world on fire yet again

This NIH article does a good meta analysis of what affects absorption of vitamin D from sunlight:

“UV exposure is the primary method of boosting serum vitamin D levels, which accounts for numerous health benefits. Higher levels of vitamin D are associated with protection against cancer development, including melanoma. Latitude, season, skin color, and sun protection determine UV absorption and vitamin D production.”

Other factors which affect absorption include the level of air pollution (this was a serious issue when we stayed in Isaan) which has me wondering whether all those chemtrails are also blocking UV light.

The list of health issues vitamin D deficiency is associated with is very lengthy, from infertility to epileptic seizures:

“Vitamin D deficiency can increase chronic diseases and cancer, while adequate vitamin D levels can help prevent them…Vitamin D exerts its effects through multiple mechanisms that aid in tissue repair, downregulate harmful inflammatory mediators, and prevention of various cancers and their proliferation [3-5]…”

Skin color makes a big difference in levels:

“Another study surgically removed dark and light skin and placed the samples underneath sunlight in Boston, Massachusetts. The study demonstrated that after 30 minutes of exposure, the lighter skin converted 3% of cutaneous 7-dehydrocholesterol into previtamin D3, whereas the darker skin only converted 0.3% [5].

Clothing and UV avoidance also decrease vitamin D production. A study conducted by Alagöl et al. involved Turkish women who covered most of their bodies in clothing due to cultural tradition. The results showed a severe deficiency in vitamin D compared to women who were exposed to more of their skin [11].

Production of vitamin D3 is dependent on UVB penetrance and absorption [3]. Geographic location is a considerable factor when determining the need for increased vitamin D in at-risk populations. The solar zenith angle (SZA) is the angle the sun in the sky makes compared to a latitude-specific vertical angle. A small SZA around noon in the summer has the highest atmospheric UV penetrance [2,3]. However, at latitudes greater than 50 degrees, virtually no vitamin D is produced during the winter and spring regardless of skin type. Cloud cover also diminishes UV absorption resulting in hypovitaminosis D. During the industrial revolution, rickets incidence increased as pollution increased.”

So am I getting enough vitamin D from the sun? I think I am now. Then again, in this weather I’m not covering up much:

I do plan on getting my vitamin D levels tested and I plan on doing a deeper dive on this issue. But now, mysteriously headache free, I think I am going to enjoy the great outdoors. It’s more fun than watching the world burn on a screen.

The downtown Las Vegas fireworks show for the 4th of July was remarkably lackluster, especially for the 250th. And why are all of the American flags at half staff?

Still it was good to see everyone. Greetings from Las Vegas. I’m already planning my escape.

Enjoy the summer, if that’s what it is…

Random song:

Buy me a ko-fi

Well I made it back to the USA for better or worse. Despite claims of a horrific heatwave enveloping all of North America and Europe, Las Vegas itself was pretty cool. Only 99 degrees (38 C) in July? I saw worse in Isaan. Now should I name the horse Claude, Chad, or Charlie?

Of course there’s always the rah rah World Cup esque celebrations of whether your team won.

On the ground here in Las Vegas, the energy is very subdued for the 250th.

Thailand has changed its exit controls since last year. There was no person who put a physical stamp into your passport to say that you’ve left the country with the date of departure. Instead I simply scanned my passport and an automated gate said green checkmark light and opened. It was simple for me this time despite me and my husband being stuck in a horrific downpour which left us sopping wet earlier in the day and which I worried had damaged my passport. Presumably my information got uploaded to the cloud efficiently. Still I wonder what will become of those lines of passport control officers from before.

The immigration checkpoint into the USA was a longish 30 minute wait but was otherwise easy for me. I think it is only the second time I have been through the Las Vegas immigration checkpoint directly, as my flight almost always has two layovers, with the second one in the USA: Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Honolulu, Dallas or Atlanta being where I go through customs instead. This time there was a direct flight to Las Vegas from Seoul, South Korea.

A few of the immigration officers brought Asian looking people back for secondary questions. In my case they glanced at my soaked from the rain in Phuket US passport. Presumably all my information was uploaded into some cloud: born in the USA, American citizen, Las Vegas resident. White/Caucasian. It was just me.

“When did you leave America?”

“In early March.”

“Where did you stay abroad?”

“Thailand.”

My passport was handed back to me. “Welcome back.”

Happy Independance Day, I guess.

I’m sure despite the cooler than average summer temperatures in the hottest region on Earth, that I should thank A/C for making life comfortable

Common sense helps in heat waves and just building in general:

My feeling is that the subdued atmosphere is due to an identity crisis. What are we celebrating, as American, again?

I’m going to give what might be unpopular opinion in US conservative circles. The only thing I think the Supreme Court did right recently was upholding birthright US citizenship. I do not know how a nation of immigrants, on stolen land no less, can then claim that some are more better than others without it becoming a political debate. They were right to cite the Wong Kim Ark case: in this case, a man born in San Francisco to two Chinese nationals WHO COULD NOT BECOME LEGAL US CITIZENS due to the Asian exclusion act of the time, seeked redress because well, WTF.

All these conservative commenters claiming that was some 1800’s technicality really have not been paying attention to what is going on. So Trump’s executive order was that US citizenship was excluded from those whose parents were : A Illegal immigrants and B: short terms visa holders. Consider for a minute that Trump had another executive order suspending immigrant visas from 75 countries on Earth, fully half of the world, including Thailand. So there technically is not way currently to come to the US from those countries except on a short term visa. Which got denied in my husband’s case recently.

Also consider what a “short term visa holder” actually is. This is somebody who has a tourist/business, student, or work visa for America. Most work visas (H1-B) are for a three year stay with renewals granted, while student visas are granted for the duration of studies, which may be 2-5 years. Now consider what happens to a woman who becomes pregnant during this time in America: She probably can’t even technically “go back to where she came from” to give birth without violating the very terms of her visa to stay in the USA.

That’s because giving birth and travelling abroad very pregnant is not a two week vacation. Ask me how I know that (okay obviously both my daughters were born in Thailand). Most airlines won’t let you onboard for long international flights beyond 32 or 34 weeks along due to risks of premature labor. So after six months of pregnancy the jetsetting is over and by eight months you’re locked out of doing it period. On the other end, assuming a healthy baby, one does not board an international flight with a one week old newborn. This entire birth tourism thing takes six months presuming no complications.

Depending on the laws of the country of the parents origin some children born into this would literally be stateless under Trump’s executive order: born in the USA, but not American citizens, with possibly no ability to “go back to where they came from.” That’s assuming they were not babies and children to begin with who had no say in the matter. I haven’t even begin with the refugee class: yes, there are true refugees from America’s retarded forever wars, who really cannot go back to wherever, usually because they worked with the occupation forces, say.

I simply saw this as an expansion of the police state and the bureaucratic machinery on one of America’s best revered traditions of freedom. I deal with this enough. God Bless the USA.

There are common sense reforms to US immigration policy, which generally involve removing the incentive structure on letting anyone in with a pulse on promises of free room and board, say. Then as it concerns removals basing it on a matrix of how long that person has been in the country and what they’ve done while in the country. A DUI from 1997 should not be treated as identical to a criminal case from 2023: to get a DUI in 1997 in America would be to assume that this foreign national is now at least 50 years old and has been in the USA for decades. That means they probably have spouses, children, employment, friends, and are part of the community. That’s not the case for those in the migrant housing complex paid for by tax dollars. These are not the same thing.

Happy Fourth of July whatever that means to you.

Here’s some contrast:

Compare this to one of Thailand’s best known songs:

Are you born or made into the homeland? Or are we all just children of God?

Try not to lose any fingers today.

Buy me a ko-fi

Sunset on the beach

Whenever I come across a new concept I fact check it first against my personal lived experiences and the experiences of close family to see if it has a ring of truth or falsity. This is especially the case with matters of health and wellness. Will that new hotly promoted item cure what ails you? Will that one quick trick before bed have me looking like I’m 18 again? Can I really regenerate my teeth without expensive implants?

There’s also the things to avoid, from 5G to Demonic influence to glyphosphate in food, if I want to live a long, happy life. Usually there’s a red team and a blue team set up regarding these issues. It’s the opposition versus the controlled opposition.

Most of us have a decent outline of what the legacy blue team thinks we should do to have a long and healthy life. We should take any medicine and vaccines our doctors recommend as these have saved millions of lives the world over. We should follow expert advice. There is more seeming compassion for personal health struggles. It is not your fault, is probably genetic and we have a drug for that. You are not alone. Don’t listen to those Luddite crazies on the other side.

Now the legacy red team sells a different game. Many are hawking a variety of alternative health products from supplements to aromatherapy to UV blocking lights. They have a long list of dangers to avoid in the modern era from poisons in our food supply to WiFi bearing down on all of us. They have a more empowered motto of “Take charge of your health.” Personal accountability is still sold on this side.

Institutional accountability for the collapses in fertility and the rises in morbidity and mortality are not going to be tracked back to the top by either side. The biggest heist of wealth from the struggling to the insanely rich will not be investigated. The red team sees the blue team as unthinking NPCs. At the top they both go to the same parties.

Enter the black pill. This is the what if we’ve been lied to about everything space. In this particular instance, I am researching vitamin D. A reader of my Substack mentioned a few months ago that my headaches might be related to a vitamin D deficiency. This started a heated debate based on the Vitamin D (in its synthetic form) is rat poison crowd. So what is wrong with vitamins?

Agent131711’s Substack

Vitamin D is Rat Poison: The FRAUDULENT WORLD OF SYNTHETIC VITAMINS

I am not telling you not to take your vitamins. If you feel they are helping you, GREAT! Take them, take them, TAKE THEM! But please read this with an open mind because if you refuse to read it, then you are no different than my mother people who refuse to read information related to vaccines, yet continue to roll up their sleeves. I have nothing to…

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3 years ago · 985 likes · 42 comments · Agent131711

Now I am a big fan of Agent131711 and I have read his thesis. Medicine Girl has also written about it, most recently lamenting the loss of her beloved dog to rat poison. When I was seven years old my cat Friskey was found dead in the bushes next door. Our neighbor apologized and told us that she had left rat poison outside. I do not know if this was the cholecalciferol (super heavy vitamin D) type or not. My dogs in Thailand were also poisoned, but once again I do not know if concentrated Vitamin D was responsible or not.

On the other hand, vitamin D3 in small amounts is added to most commercial pet food.

So yes, vitamin D/cholecaliciferol IS rat poison, at an extremely concentrated dose. But does that mean that the supplement has no good qualities? I checked my personal database:

1: Grandma Hawkins had the most significant personal recovery after a doctor checked her blood serum levels of vitamin D, found them at 11 ngl (extremely deficient) and prescribed her a 4000 IU supplement with all of her other pills. Before that point she had colds and stuffy noses that seemed to last the entire winter and through some of the warmer months too. After the Vitamin D supplement those vanished. Grandma had been a lifelong outdoorsy person. But she had fallen from a hospital bed and fractured her hip which affected her mobility. That was BEFORE she was prescribed vitamin D, not after. My conclusion was that vitamin D supplementation is good and might have added years to Grandma’s life.

2. My first husband Oh was given a concentrated injection of synthetic vitamin D (50,000 IU) to treat his gouty psoriasis. Now the results of that were mixed: he seemed much less fatigued afterwards, but it didn’t make his whole body case of measles go away, so I abandoned this treatment after one shot and went instead with ordering psoriasis creams (which also contained vitamin D) and applying it to his back and other affected areas every morning. Because my first husband was in America on a green card as a legal immigrant, all medical treatments were paid for, out of pocket, by me, and were expensive. A dermatologist in Las Vegas had suggested the vitamin D injection for Oh’s psoriasis: he said that blood stores of vitamin D are lowest in the late Winter (it was early March) and that Oh, with his darker skin and being from year round warm equatorial Phuket, was having this outbreak in America due to not getting enough sunlight. I declined a serum blood test in Oh’s case as it would have cost $340 for the panel but we did agree to the one shot of D3 50,000 IU for $100. There was no downside and it definitely increased his energy levels. I still think that Oh’s horrible psoriasis was caused by the MMR vaccine my first husband was given at his panel physician check in order to come to America.

3. My Aunt Sharon, during her battle with COPD, had her vitamin D levels tested. She came back with a blood serum level of 4 ngl (anything less than 25 ngl is considered deficient), which basically means that she was a vampire. Now she was quite the indoor recluse during her later years and I don’t think even set foot in her Oceanside backyard basically ever. I do not know what Sharon was prescribed or given to correct her deficiency, as we had a falling out around that time. She died on January 25, 2014, after her heart gave out inside of an oxygen tent in the hospital where she was being treated for her shortness of breath/COPD.

   

   So long story short, personal experience has led me to have a generally positive view of vitamin D supplementation. I believe that deficiencies of the sunshine vitamin are widespread and that taking a supplement probably helps with this. Now just because a little bit of something is good, does not mean that a lot of it is better. The blue team on health argues that vitamins are useless and just lead to expensive pee. The red team argues that vitamins are fundamental and necessary in our modern society to correct deficiencies. The black pill says it is poison but does not answer how to treat health problems instead in a realistic way.

   I still remember in the early 1990’s hearing on the news about how Flintstone’s vitamins was reformulating its Kids Chewables to not contain iron. This was due to young children dying after taking too many of them, or sometimes having an older sibling feed them too many. I mean it has a popular cartoon figure on the label, it tastes like candy and it is supposedly good for you. What could go wrong?

   The idea that too much of a vitamin or supplement could kill you is not new to me. In matters of health it is almost always about balance in between two hyper polarized extremes.

   

   At any rate, I have been feeling better. Last summer I was worried about my return to America leading to a return of my headaches. It didn’t happen. Was it the glorious summer sun working its magic? Could my headaches be caused by a vitamin D deficiency?

   According to this AI summary, yes:

   “Yes, low vitamin D levels can cause or trigger headaches, particularly migraines and chronic tension-type headaches. Research indicates that up to 40% to 100% of chronic headache patients may be deficient in vitamin D. [1, 2, 3]

   How Low Vitamin D Causes Headaches

   • Increased Inflammation: Vitamin D helps suppress inflammation. Low levels can lead to excessive inflammation, triggering migraine attacks. [1, 2]

   • Magnesium Absorption: Vitamin D helps your body absorb magnesium. Low magnesium is directly linked to an increased frequency of migraines and tension headaches. [1, 2, 3]

   • Pain Sensitivity: Vitamin D regulates pain pathways and reduces nitric oxide production, which is a known trigger for migraines. [1, 2]

   • Muscle Tension: Vitamin D deficiency can cause generalized muscle and bone weakness, including tension in the neck and scalp muscles. [1, 2]”

   I did a quick Google search and found that vitamin D deficiency was related to almost every medical condition that I could think of. It is also widespread with over 40% of the population in Thailand, for example, considered vitamin D deficient.

Regarding Ka’s visa to come to America, I do have a few updates. In checking the US Embassy website on immigrant visas they no longer have the notification of Trump’s executive order pausing all visa issuance from Thailand. Now the landing page just gives generic FAQs about making an immigrant visa. So are they processing immigrant visas or not?

Even the AI couldn’t answer that question. There is no update on Ka’s visa waiver, but the AI suggested that this type of form would not be processed until some time in 2027 or early 2028. It sounds like they are not issuing immigrant visas right now, but they are still processing them.

Visas are one of the biggest money businesses in Thailand beyond the bar girl scene. Of course these two things are actually interelated as many (usually men) seek to bring their Thai spouses or fiancees to America to live with them. My guess is that all the supportive services related to these visas: the lawyers, the translators, the panel physicians and whatnot, were hurting for business. So instead of the immigrant visa page advertising at the top that there are no visas being granted, they are going along although it is business as usual to keep the money spigot flowing.

This is not even adjusted for inflation with average Thai household income a little above 25,000 baht ($700) per month, slipping from 27,500 baht in 2023.

Unfortunately immigration is the subject matter where Trump still maintains some popularity with his base. Nobody seems to realize how difficult the legal immigration of family members is. The state holds them hostage for extortion fees.

I am perplexed at how this woman’s actions are illegal. I’m sure I’ve had free samples of alcoholic drinks at a few different stores in both Mexico and the United States.

Unfortunately Ka’s nonimmigrant tourist visa was denied on the basis that he is too likely to immigrate to America. I’m going to try to take the above meme to heart with this. This was the exact 214(b) denial that I was warned was likely to come up. Nothing came out of nowhere as an unexpected curve ball.

I could be angry at Ka and berate him for what he did or didn’t do during his interview, but I have no way of knowing if that made any bit of difference in the decision. At their core these authoritarian measures are designed to break up families. Apparently God wants me on the beach for a little while longer.

Unfortunately the visa services company I used, despite advertising in Thailand, was not based there nor was there any Thai staff on hand. My husband seemed very confused about the change from saying he wants to stay in America for good to now just taking a three month trip. I’m confused too.

But I suppose $900 and two trips to Bangkok later, and at least we have a cool denial letter. We’ll save money on flights.

Joking aside I am not entirely sure if we would even know what to do with ourselves if they said yes. I have some fires to put out on the Las Vegas front and have been expanding my writing. I always did say Independance Day was my favorite holiday.

Are people willing to wake up from their sleep?

To enforce a mass deportation policy on “illegals” the same exact logic applies. It requires a papers please police state dystopia for everyone else.

I’m not much into sports but this looks like too good of a World Cup potential match up. They’ve got to keep us engaged on the screens somehow.

My husband had a grand mal epileptic seizure in Surat Thani right after we got off the train. He had not had any that I am aware of since April of 2025 and I was hoping these were behind us. That had me back on the vitamin D connection on the AI overview:

“Yes, vitamin D deficiency can cause seizures, typically indirectly by leading to severe hypocalcemia (low blood calcium). Stable calcium levels are essential for normal nerve cell function; without enough, neurons become hyperexcitable, potentially triggering seizures. [1, 2, 3, 4]

The Seizure Connection

• Mechanism: Vitamin D is crucial for absorbing calcium from your intestines. A lack of vitamin D depletes your calcium levels, leading to muscle cramps, sudden loss of consciousness, and generalized tonic-clonic seizures.

• Reversibility: When seizures are triggered solely by this deficiency, they usually stop once calcium and vitamin D levels are restored. [1, 2, 3]”

Do you have any experience with vitamin D supplements?

Here’s to good health…

Buy me a ko-fi

A recent comment made by a Thai woman has had me contemplating the role of men and specifically fathers. It also inadvertantly caused the Christian in me to come roaring back to life.

The comment itself was fairly standard, as a variation of your husband does not support you, therefore you should leave him. Now any Western man who has spent time in Thailand has probably come across this idea that financial support is paramount in a relationship and been burnt to varying degrees by it. Relationships are more transactional in Thailand and fidelity is purchased. The stereotype is that once the money runs out so does the commitment.

Of course this runs counter to Western and Christian concepts of commitment, perhaps best personified by somewhat standard wedding vows (based on Biblical verses in Corinthians and other places) of:

“Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part?"

Happy Father’s Day!

In looking for building ideas on the Isaan land I joined about a dozen farang focused expat groups on Facebook including Building in Issan, Pattaya Unfiltered, American Expats in Thailand, Farming in Thailand and others. Based on the usually AI generated vignettes there is one consistent story. The poor Isaan farm girl turns eighteen and needs to support her family, so she becomes a bar girl. Her own father was non-existent in her life growing up: if he is mentioned at all he is characterized as an abusive, addicted alcoholic who ultimately abandoned the family. She eventually settles in with a Western expat, usually nearing retirement age, who can provide for her at which point she wants him to build a house for her family in Isaan. Usually, in the expat telling of this story, this does not end in happily ever after. The Thai wife grows bored and cheats with a local Thai man who can understand her, or her money demands become too great for the Western man to meet. She keeps the house, any children stay with grandma, she goes back to the bar and the cycle starts anew.

Is that really the only story out there? Uncle Sukwan has been married to his wife for decades. They run a shop in That Phanom and have one daughter who is now 22. Sister Pla has been with her husband for as long as I’ve ever known her and they have a now 18 year old daughter. The next door neighbors from where we stayed in Isaan seemed to be bucking the low fertility trend in Thailand: they have four children, three girls and one boy, all under the age of 10. The husband works as an administrator somewhere and seems doting and attentive to his wife and children.

So are all Thais like the traditional Pattaya bar girl story? Or does something about her background and perhaps the absence of a father figure contribute to her joining the nightlife industry? And are all Thais really that unfaithful? According to self reports, they do seem more likely to say so:

Perhaps screwing around when things get tough is part of the problem, not the solution. If my mother (a former Catholic nun) had held the “You should leave your husband because he isn’t supporting you” financial standard, I would have probably never known my father at all. But Catholics, alas, are famous for sticking with even the most abusive, alcoholic, unemployable wretches the world has ever known. My Father was not abusive or alcoholic, but he had health problems and only worked odd jobs with my Mom the breadwinner as I was growing up. He was quite the eccentric whose statement was “I want the US government to think I’m dead.” Dad talked about George Orwell’s book 1984 in the year 1984, and was warning about the creeping police state when I was still a young girl. In retrospect he was decades ahead of his time.

Happy Father’s day in Heaven, Dad.

The Thai bar girl story seemed to be an AI assisted echo chamber after awhile, but it brought out many comments from seemingly real expats. It was implied that the girls who stayed behind in Isaan (apparently girls in this industry come from nowhere else), or who worked in the industry for a short time and then opened a noodle stand instead, say, were just not as pretty. The bar girl always just magically turned 18, conveniently avoiding thorny matters of childhood exploitation, and began having sex with men for money. How did she lose her virginity and when?

Perhaps the greatest danger of the algorithm each of us are fed on those glowing screens is that it is uniquely curated to you. We each get this narrow slice of reality that we assume is the entire picture. Then we are baffled when we come across people in the real world who were fed an entirely different set of lies by their glowing box.

Happy Solstice! These are the summer rules:

Now bamboo is very fast growing and all but considering some of these proposed data center locations are the size of entire cities I’m not sure how much damage it could do. It’s the thought that counts!

Trump is still trying to do a victory lap on the ceasefire proposal but there is still the thorny issue of Israel in Lebanon. Is escalation the only response? And why should American lives and treasure be spent over this never ending doom spiral?

Sigh. It’s time to take a walk on the beach.

I’ll try to keep the weight off without prescription shots

I haven’t noticed a wandering eye thus far. Even the bar girls and ladyboys on Soi Cowboy tell me how much my husband loves me. Perhaps it’s time to flip the tables on the old script.

Buy me a ko-fi

Ahh but perhaps more people simply noticed the portal after 2020…

I thought this map of Ebola hotspots overlayed with arsenic exposure sites (from gold mining) was interesting.

I saw eight cats. There’s probably more depending on creative you are in what looks like a cat and how much you’ve had to drink…

Here’s to embracing the present moment in all of its glory…

I did use an AI summary to make the maths easier here. At current prices versus the 1 gram each crisp US$100 bill weighs, it’s $50 million versus $68 million for gold. But how easy is the latter to transact with daily?

I went through this exactly on the US Visa scheduling website: I was provided with this crazy password of non alpha numeric code which only worked as the password if it was copy and pasted in directly from the original intake email. Any attempt to type it in manually came back as invalid password. I even tried pasting from a Google AI summary and still it didn’t recognize it.

That’s a gentle reminder that computers don’t think like us, or, for that matter, think at all.

It’s definitely been a back to nature time lately. The gentle waves seem to provide great healing. I suppose I have heard about the World Cup going on, being hosted primarily in the US, with some games also in Mexico and Canada. Most Americans don’t even know what that is. I’m hoping the visa woes players, staff and fans are having to visit the USA (and some resultant bad press) is ultimately helpful to my husband’s cause.

With the official USA 250 Jubilee celebration right around the corner, though, Trump could use a ceasefire on any terms and call it a W no matter what it says. I as always pray for peace.

It looks like the reseeding efforts on the Nai Yang coral reef are paying off a bit. I covered the die off in late 2024 with updates in 2025.

Now there is official information on it, with the coral die off mostly blamed on (you guessed it) climate change. Now it wasn’t abnormally hot when the coral reef died suddenly around early November of 2024. There was, however, an extreme amount of rainfall in September of 2024, even for monsoon season in Phuket. Could it have caused excessive storm and sewage runoff with a weeks long delayed reaction? Maybe.

They are now officially calling the Nai Yang Coral Reef a Coral Cemetary. Then again with plans to renovate Sirinat National Park and install a rolling pier, would they really want the coral reef growing like it was before?

Perhaps life finds a way…

Buy me a ko-fi

Excuse my absence of late but it does seem that the old world is dissolving in front of my eyes. I’ve oddly been resurrecting my life stories and writing new ones but have been reluctant to share them as of yet.

The last week has been a whirlwind. I was finally able to schedule my husband Ka’s nonimmigrant/family visitor visa interview for late June. Prediction of his likelihood of being approved or denied is literally impossible in this situation: he underwent a visa waiver (for refusal of vaccines) on his ongoing application for an immigrant visa (the fee on that one alone was $1050). Then Trump suspended immigrant visas from Thailand and 74 other countries in January. Meanwhile another law called Section 214 (B) assumes that the temporary visa applicant is planning to immigrate to the USA unless they can prove otherwise, so they are often denied and told to make an immigrant visa instead, which is already obviously in process. But that has been suspended.

Even the illusion of the rule of law is basically gone here. The law is tripping over all the other sections of the law that have been implemented over the years and decades.

We’ve been here before. In late 2023 we had a long delay because Ka was required to have at least one Covid vaccine before attending his medical check for his immigrant visa, even though I’d told them all vaccines were being refused and requested both medical and religious exemptions. Everyone passed the message back and forth like a toxic football: I had to ask the US Embassy, who said I had to ask the panel physician, who said I had to ask the US Embassy. I regret that I didn’t know who to bribe properly, nor do I even know how to bribe people. I just didn’t know who to pay or how to pay them.

But did you think this was about public health?

Now I don’t know if this latest “ceasefire” is just more of the same, but I did note that Iran seemed to agree with it independently. What was this war all about anyways?

Apparently the US government stops tracking CPI during shutdowns. That’s good to know.

Apparently the Prime Minister of Canada said that most can get by with an $800 grocery bill per month. The Random Archivist breaks that down:

The Random Archivist

Let Them Eat Normandy Butter Cups

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3 months ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · The Random Archivist

Consider that most of the assumptions above are insane: everything is cooked at home, no processed food, no waste, nothing but water to drink (presumably free). Have you ever lived with a real family?

Meanwhile Super Sally noted the increase in deaths and the decrease in births in Taiwan.

Charts like this are playing out all over the world, though in some places births still outnumber deaths.

Yes, I do think the Covid “vaccine” very much played into this, but I don’t think it is the only thing at this point especially with low continued uptake among adults of childbirth age in the past few years.

I think part of it, maybe the major part, is the economy.

Let’s start with the fact that AI is certainly disrupting the environment. These corporations are universally looking to A: Increase profits for shareholders, which involves B: Reducing labor costs.

I’ve had a lot of job offers as a prompt engineer lately. I seem institutionally incapable of getting past the C++ training manual.

The problem I see with Trump’s posts about bombing Iran back to the Stone Age is that that might have been a good time for them…

Of course my husband’s visa interview in a few short weeks prompted immediate questions. Should we stay in Isaan? Should you stay in Isaan if they say no? Should we go back to Phuket? Is there anything we need in Phuket?

This literally exists on a bizarre dual timeline where visa refusal is practically expected, as it’s been the norm after some 7 years. But at the same time you pack your bags and hope for the best.

“I don’t really want to live in Isaan!” My daughter Eliza chimed in. “Like maybe I’d go there for a week or two but I want to live in Bangkok!”

“Bangkok.” It’s like the city where I’ve been mugged and scammed for money and assaulted most commonly, mostly but not always by government officials.

“You know Thais don’t even call the city Bangkok.” I told my mom, who I was able to talk to because Mary was on Facebook messenger and gave her the phone

“What do they call it?”

“It’s Krunthep.”

“When did they change the name?”

“That’s a great question.”

So getting back to how the past week has gone down and brains breaking, as it were, I never heard back from the Land Office regarding what would be a proper Isaan house. So I asked questions regarding getting a housing permit and then a tambian baan (house registration) on it. I also mentioned that as a farang I understood that I was not eligible for traditional loans and that Ka’s work is sporadic he probably wouldn’t be qualified either. So I was asking about a payment plan.

The message I got back, in English, was rather bizarre. This lady (and yes I do know it was a lady) basically said that because me and Ka were same same the homeless, nobody wanted us around much. Then she said that a temporary structure would be okay but as far as getting a loan for anything “permanent”, as we were both unemployed, no. She implied I should divorce my husband and wait until my daughter ( a dual US-Thai citizen) turns 18 to do anything.

Well, shit. I’ve got a few other people telling me how I’m the worst person in the world. Mostly Uncle Scott for me supporting Mary (not financially just in a I love her and her kids way). Technically, on visa exempt in Thailand, I am not even allowed to be “employed.” The whole exchange had the kind of mean girl vibes of the worst gossipy chicks in high school, and it occured to me that a lot of government jobs were like that: they attract the worst people and the worst in people.

It wasn’t a universal shunning, just one lady from a government office. Mother Phorkwang was an absolute doll who was constantly urging us to eat five times a day at least. Uncle Sukwan was posting his feeds with us on them. We weren’t homeless anymore than a person staying with a relative who does not legally own the house is homeless. I actually don’t know how you could be homeless in an openly sleeping on the street way least of all in Isaan and least of all as a farang. That issue has been cropping up in Bangkok though.

I was able to get the idea that they didn’t want to lay the cement until after some rain had flattened the ground, so they didn’t want to do anything proper until after September or so. I’d already downloaded some official government “proper” housing plans, which yes, involve all of the same commodified materials you might expect. That said some of their lowest cost budget plans even for “approved” housing were not ridiculous, some in the $10-12K US range. I know I’m just getting off a bankruptcy but I get mailings to the Las Vegas house which say I’m pre approved for up to $40K for an electric vehicle. I wasn’t asking about a Thai loan from a Thai bank as much as I was asking about logistics of transferring money from a US bank.

Brains are breaking. Did I disrespect this lady? In a way I certainly did as my energy of “I think of bureaucrats as paper pushers” probably bled right through. Civil servant is one of the most respected jobs in Thailand for putting money on the table. What would happen if AI went after that?

So the last several days have involved a series of busses and trains back to Phuket. I wondered why the Thai flag was half staff at the train station in Bangkok. Apparently Ong Bha, Princess Bajrakitiyabha, has passed away after three years in a coma. I covered the story of her collapse in 2022. They felt it was the time to officially bury her. May she RIP.

After a few dozen people welcoming us back to Phuket with open arms, though, I am glad to be back. We even had a job offer of sorts but I think 20million baht per rai of land on Maikhao beach is a steep ask. Then again the area is booming.

Take me to the beach indeed. Apparently I’m officially a hobojournalist. Even the Thais know it.

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I’ve been going through a personal situation for the past several weeks which I feel like opening up to here on Substack. It exists at a strange intersection of brains breaking, America, Thailand, home, family, politics, immigration, astrology, race, gaslighting, personal budgets and the larger economy. It largely involves utter chaos in the Las Vegas house while I’ve been away.

According to my developmentally disabled friend Scotty, who is prone to exaggeration, the police have been called to the Las Vegas house 21 times in the past few weeks. I’m not sure if that includes the calls to CPS.

One of my close friends warned me years ago, when she, a fire sign Sagitarrius with a November 27 birthday, was fighting with her tween daughter, also with a November 27 birthday, that two same birthday fire signs were a complete disaster.

“We bring out the absolute worst in each other and will fight to the death!” Oh how I did not listen. Me and my husband might have some uncomfortably close astrology, but we’re both martyr types and lovers, not fighters. Pisces-Pisces March 18 close birthdays to mine tend to retreat and be evasive if conflict arises.

For the two tax day Aries born 25 years apart living in the Las Vegas house? Argh.

Uncle Scott and Mary have a lot in common beyond their birthdays and being under the same roof at mine and my mother’s Las Vegas house right now. Both of them have very low income, are unable to work reliably (that’s presuming the economy even has jobs), have no cushion, savings, or credit to fall back on, and it sounds like have burned bridges with other family and friends that they could stay with. And now it’s all out war between the Boomer MAGA and the Millenial black single mother.

It opened multiple conversations with my brother and his wife, my nieces, my daughters, and anybody else who cared to chime in. My conclusion is that war is stupid at an individual and a collective level.

I have been able to triangulate many of the police visits. There have been multiple wellness checks on my mother, who thankfully says she is okay though I worry the stress is terrible for her. There’s been claims by both sides that the other one is abusing the other. I’ve heard of the power being cut off to the living room through the breaker box, of both sides blocking phone numbers, pulling Mom’s phone off the hook, breaking Mom’s phone, or losing it. This is my Mother’s only main contact with the outside world so that led my brother to call in a wellness check after Mary blocked his number. Okay, she admitted to doing that but said my brother was harassing her on the phone.

Both have accused the other of hitting them or planning to hurt them. Uncle Scott claims Mary stole his diabetic needles so she could shoot up drugs (even though I have never known or even heard about her being a heavy drug user). I considered this claim absurd (and Mary adamantly denied it) so the accusation changed to her maybe doing it to be vindictive against him, preventing him from accessing life saving medicine.

Then there was the air freshener or perfume incident, in which Uncle Scott claimed that Mary tried to poison him by spraying air freshener in his face. Mary claims that her four year old son Elon sprayed some perfume in the room not even too close to him with the refrain “You smell!” Uncle Scott does have a body odor problem, so yes, I could see four year old Elon doing that. I’m not sure that justifies a call to police to try to get the little tyke locked up on assault charges, but I wasn’t there and the first casualty in war is truth.

To simplify when I left in March I told Mary that she could stay in my bedroom with her children while I was gone. Uncle Scott, with his fire and brimstone, came in and said that I was killing my mother by forcing her to care for her two little children, after I’d already abandoned mine, no less. Now part of the original agreement was for Mary to lighten the load per say by cooking, cleaning the house, buying food and helping care for the roommate Paul, whose health problems are myriad.

Mary has an economic problem in that funding for a few programs which she relied on including government assisted daycare and reduced rent went away. So she can’t work with having to take care of her kids and getting an SS check of $620 when rent starts at $1400 will not cover it. Mike, the father of her 4 and 7 year old children, dropped his child support payments due to, he claims, not making any money.

My Uncle Scott, who also relies on a very modest social security check, can no longer drive due to his diabetic retinopathy affecting his vision. So he came to stay with us about a week before I left for Thailand, even though we only had a couch to offer him at that point. He is in the exact same boat as Mary: he cannot work in his case due to his health issues and does not make enough to live independently without government subsidies. Also, he’s technically above retirement age at 68.

And then the fighting started. Sigh.

Editor’s note: it’s a dash

Did he say No experiencio in cursive?

Meanwhile in Japan:

The Chinese are complaining about spending say $40 million for abandoned high speed rail lines in unpopulated areas. Meanwhile at $21 billion with zero track laid, the Los Angeles - Las Vegas high speed rail line, the first ever if it comes to the US, is like China, Hold My Beer. You Chinese folks don’t even know what wasteful corruption is.

USA Number 1!

It looks like the dinosaur is going to eat Toledo. But why can’t it be a fire breathing dragon?

To invoke Rodney King here, why can’t we all just get along? My father would be rolling in his grave to know how many times the police have been called to the house. His famous refrain to me was to only call the police if I had a dead body and an alibi.

I considered the call to Child Protective Services presumably by Uncle Scott a low blow, especially as the accusations against Mary were unfounded. Children caught up in the web of that human trafficking ring are something like six times more likely to die and nine times more likely to be sexually abused than had they stayed with problematic parents (eg those already under investigation). Those results are even worse for children of color, as Zoey and Elon are. As I told Jasmine early on, Mary could literally have simply abandoned her children at our house for weeks on end with no contact, and I still would not have called CPS. Being that I know the children’s father and family in Michigan I would have tried to work a deal to bring them there.

Mary is not a bad mother, however, just an overwhelmed one who I felt I could help give a floor of stability for her and her children. The accusations: that Mary is a heavy drug user who routinely abandons her children and who also brings unknown men into the house, are pretty inflammatory. Mary has a boyfriend, Mario, who is the only guy that I have ever seen come around the Las Vegas house. I have never seen her do heavy drugs, and though she does go out sometimes without her children, it’s for short periods of time and they are being watched. The CPS lady seemed to think that Uncle Scott was maliciously trying to force her out through instigating her.

I’m starting to think the Las Vegas house needs an exorcism.

Uncle Scott is exactly a Fox News watching Boomer. He indisputedly supports Trump with the same unquestioning devotion as many triple boosted double masked Covidians had when they inexplicably ended up hospitalized and blamed the unjabbed for their fate. Delusion it seems is a very powerful drug.

I don’t know what Steve Bannon, or Alex Jones, or any of these guys are saying, but I do know that the system retains its power when people fight each other instead of the people shaking the jar. They want Uncle Scott to accuse Mary of being welfare in action for all of the food stamps she gets while he conveniently ignores who is paying for his precious diabetic needles. And what would happen in America if all of those checks stopped?

Those who stand alone are the first taken out. A lot of people are sounding the alarm about mass shortages incoming. With all of this pointless fighting I’m starting to already see it. Nobody can be homeless or they’ll be taken and disappeared. But a lot of people can’t afford a home.

I finally was able to get through to the visa scheduling website on Ka’s visa to America. They said it was fixed and it actually was, like all of my past issues with it had been some sort of bad dream. The waiting room that had looped me endlessly back, or said page cannot be displayed, or just said my wait time was 1 minute for 20 minutes straight, was gone entirely. The sign in page worked and there was a toggle bar to get through to the payment page. I’m still not sure on scheduling but with what is going on in Las Vegas I requested for it to be ASAP.

The worst they can say is no, which is the same as the last seven years of this ordeal. Wish us luck.

Tigerbel had babies! Four of these little cuties.

We could be headed into an insanely full house. With my daughters planning on coming in and especially if Ka gets his visa and everyone is still there, the demographics of the house alone would be reality television worthy. But here’s to new beginnings.

Prayers for Peace..

Buy me a ko-fi

Does anyone else notice that personal income (in green) has also dropped steadily since 2021?

I haven’t tried this one, but it seems logical. Now does it have a purpose?

This list sounds like it has shifted almost entirely to economic and social concerns. Health and social security, along with economic situation seem like economic concerns. And nobody near the bottom rungs can afford housing or even rent on an apartment.

What could go wrong? Also why would an Internet search engine be releasing mosquitos in California to “Help Stop Disease”?

I’m not sure I agree with this list entirely especially around pain management. Also what treatments or therapies would be used to replace what was used before?

Then again we did lose the plot on the whole healing the sick thing:

I agree 100%. I’ve developed a heavy preference for vehicles which start with the year 19.

AI generated content usually rests on ridiculously narrow assumptions with little variability. For example here’s what substack’s image generator gives me for “Woman superhero”

Almost every image is identical to this: a white, very attractive woman in a skintight suit with a cape and an S. But why can’t woman superheroes look like this?

The images are also all near identical for that specific prompt, but there’s more variability in race. But why can’t women superheroes look like that? Or this?

In the above case I had to put “Old” in the prompt for wife, as the first set of images showed an older man looking at a woman much younger appearing than him. For me generating AI content is better for testing the assumptions embedded in the system. I don’t see any imagination in it. But what do you all think?

Releasing a scorpion on our land. Apparently they eat a lot of things that feed on rice in paddies so it is considered good luck. I also discovered that scorpions really are water creatures as this guy was stuck in a plastic cup which filled with water during an overnight rainfall and he was perfectly fine in the morning.

And don’t mind the incongruent dress and makeup. We were attending the funeral of a village elder a little later that morning. May he rest in peace.

We’re off to get some blueprints from the land office to try to come up a design and building permit. None of the tiny pre manufactured homes we’ve looked at have been a good fit at all (most have also been overpriced for what they are: a single room with bathroom 20 feet by 10 feet total area rectangle, for example, for around $5000). I’m still wondering why no one uses bamboo as a construction material up here.

Happy Full moon…

Buy me a ko-fi