7.19.2024

Random Friday Morning Thoughts




That actually happened on 7/17/14. It's hard to believe. 


  • Online chaos earlier this morning as the world suffered a tech outage.  It's not a cyber-attack but instead a screwup of a security update for a legitimate firm called Crowdstrike which apparently has crippled Windows machines that use it. Our online world, which we now all depend on for the tiniest of things, seems like a ticking timebomb. 

    Excerpt from the story: 



    • DPS driver's license offices just shut down for the day because of it. Of course. 
    • Crowdstrike's CEO even had to go on The Today Show this morning to do damage control:

    • To add to the issue, there is/was another problem, perhaps related, with Microsoft's OneDrive which went down late yesterday. Editor's note: I store everything in OneDrive which is basically a remote hard drive that Windows rolled out a few years ago. 

  • Trump's Speech:
    • He went full Elvis.

    • In light of the assassination attempt, he had the opportunity for a fantastic introduction. Instead, they wheeled out the same old tired Lee Greenwood to whip us with "God Bless The USA." For a born showman, Trump desperately needs new material.
    • Before that, we had full Idiocracy. This makes my head hurt. 

    • Trump started out OK by talking about the assassination attempt. But, to the surprise of no one, he said he was saved because "I had God on my side."

    • There, of course, was a man who died at the rally -- apparently God wasn't on his side -- and Trump had his firefighter's uniform on stage. Oddly, the man's name was misspelled on the back of it, but this doesn't appear to be a Trump campaign mistake. 

    • The shooting is slowly morphing into a "shot to the head." 

    • But after talking about his near death experience, he resorted back to his normal rambling campaign speech of election denialism and demonizing illegal immigrants. Regarding the latter, he promised a "mass deportation" because they are "killing hundreds of thousands of people a year." That's a flat out lie. But I guess that lie is just a prelude for a justification for the upcoming concentration camps.

    • And he used to say that just "some" of those crossing the border were "bad people." Now they all are and worse. And speaking of insane, we had this weird moment: 

    • He seemed very beaten down last night.
    • The New York Times not only doesn't agree but also has apparently jumped the shark:

  • I'm beginning to waffle on my believe that President Biden will not drop out of the race. If it weren't for the Trump's RNC speech last night, it would be the lead story.


  • D Magazine lost a writer I really liked. "Zac Crain was 50 years old when he died Tuesday night. He’d had some kind of illness that kept him away from work, holed up at home, trying to ride it out. Coworkers had taken him food. He said Tuesday morning that he was feeling better. His ex-wife, Nikki, was the one who called police Wednesday for the welfare check. That an ex-wife would be so worried about him says something about the kind of man Zac became. "

  • Lou Dobbs, who was fired from Fox as part of the Dominion $787 million fiasco, has died. He lost his ever-loving mind in his later years on the air. 

  • The Business Second™. "Plans call for roughly 6,000 single-family homes at the development’s completion. [It] will also hold more than 5 million square feet of commercial, mixed-use space and roughly 3,000 multifamily units fronting more than five miles near I-35W."



  • Time which has passed since the Wise County Sheriff's Office, despite having a full male DNA profile, has failed to solve the murder of Lauren Whitener in her home at Lake Bridgeport: 5 years and 14 days.