Author: thegraymaniac

A couple of things on my mind. One of them is the vast increase in phishing emails, texts and phone calls since the last part of January. These intrusions, which have all gotten more detailed I.e., they have Social Security numbers and other information they should not have, …..all of them seem to coincide with the DOGE intrusions into the Social Security Network, and other federal institutions where all of our….we American citizens…where all of our pertinent information lies.

Who knows what information was downloaded onto hard drives, by young and unverified, unvetted individuals? Who knows what they did with it? Was it surreptitiously sold to the highest bidder?

Pair with with the UNPRECEDENTED release (yes I will call it a release and not a theft) as follows:

1. Data Breaches & Leaks: This is a common meaning, where massive amounts of sensitive data are released without authorization, often due to security vulnerabilities or breaches.
   Notable examples include the Yahoo breach affecting 3 billion accounts, the National Public Data breach impacting 2.9 billion individuals, and the 2024 “Mother of All Breaches” involving 26 billion records.
   These breaches can lead to significant financial costs for companies and expose individuals to identity theft and scams.
2. Government Data Sharing: The term is also being used to describe governmental efforts to collect and share large amounts of personal data from state and other entities.
   For example, the Trump administration’s initiative to amass data from state databases for immigration enforcement purposes.
   This type of data sharing can raise legal questions and privacy concerns.
3. Scientific Data Generation: With advancements in technology, particularly in fields like astronomy and physics, massive amounts of data are being generated and made available for research.
   The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, for example, will generate 20 terabytes of data per night, offering opportunities for groundbreaking discoveries.
   The growing volume of data presents challenges and opportunities for organizations to manage, secure, and extract valuable insights.
4. Open Data Initiatives: Governments and organizations are increasingly releasing large datasets to the public for analysis and innovation, fostering transparency and citizen engagement.

All this is causing my wife and I to have dozens of phone calls a day, and just today my wife has had to call credit cards companies because scammers have gotten part of her social security number and are attempting to open accounts in her name.

I’ve frozen all my accounts, and intend to use cash for personal purchases. I already did that last month, and ended up spending less anyway. I intend to see about switching all the accounts possible back to sending me statements, so I can mail them checks! My opinion is that this is only going to get worse…not just for us older folks, but for everyone! Everyone just be careful what you say when someone calls IF you answer.

As for me, I don’t even answer these calls if they are not in my contact list. Then I block the numbers. I have over a thousand blocked numbers….and they are still calling!

I got a job as a groundskeeper at the IHOP and I’m out doing my work. I’m an old dude as you know, and this is hard work out in the sun! I’m down to weed eating around the bushes, when all the sudden I’m surrounded by several guys in masks and vests with big guns! My flight or fight instincts kick in and I start to run!

The men start yelling “you’re under arrest”! …but what for? I haven’t done anything, I was just working my job! As I run, I am afraid. I point my weedeater at them…as everyone knows, it’s the weapon of choice for self defense. One of the men tackles me, and one of them punches me, as they put zip ties on my hands. Another shoves a baton roughly in my face and then against my throat…choking me, as they shove me with force and throttle me as they put me in a car. They say they are police, or “ICE”.

As I collapse into the back seat, I think about my three sons who are Marines, two of them still deployed serving this country I am in. What will they think of me now? What did I do to deserve this kind of treatment?

As of June 28, 2025, the Senate’s “big beautiful bill” has not yet been estimated by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for its budget impact. However, the bill does include deeper cuts than the House’s tax bill, which would cut more than $1 trillion from federal health coverage over a decade. The Senate bill also includes these changes:
Medicaid: The bill lowers the maximum tax rate that states can impose on Medicaid providers from 6% to 3.5% in the 41 states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. This would effectively halve the amount that states receive in tax revenue from Medicaid providers.
Medicare: The bill eliminates Medicare physician payment relief.

It has been noted that the larger part of the cuts won’t be enacted until 2028. Wonder why, don’t you?? They voted several billion dollars to shore up local hospitals temporarily, because American’s memories are short. Oh, and I thought there was a “promise” not to cut Medicare? So much for that. Oh well, they have to have that trillion to give tech companies like Google and Meta RETROACTIVE tax cuts of billions going back to 2022 for “R&D”. Don’t believe me? Look it up yourself? Don’t care? You will when people you love die because they can’t find medical care. Also, it’s bound to make insurance premiums for your work insurance go up. Winning yet?

When I heard this tonight on the news it was something that was almost unbelievable. Why would the federal government halt the sharing of this information? The only reasons I can think of is: 1. They want more people to die. 2. They want to be purposefully cruel to people. If any of you, no matter your political stance can think of, or know of a more compelling or different reason, chime right in and let me know:

A critical US atmospheric data collection program will be halted by Monday, giving weather forecasters just days to prepare, according to a public notice sent this week. Scientists that the Guardian spoke with say the change could set hurricane forecasting back “decades”, just as this year’s season ramps up.

In a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) message sent on Wednesday to its scientists, the agency said that “due to recent service changes” the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) will “discontinue ingest, processing and distribution of all DMSP data no later than June 30, 2025”.

Due to their unique characteristics and ability to map the entire world twice a day with extremely high resolution, the three DMSP satellites are a primary source of information for scientists to monitor Arctic sea ice and hurricane development. The DMSP partners with Noaa to make weather data collected from the satellites publicly available.

The reasons for the changes, and which agency was driving them, were not immediately clear. Noaa said they would not affect the quality of forecasting.

However, the Guardian spoke with several scientists inside and outside of the US government whose work depends on the DMSP, and all said there are no other US programs that can form an adequate replacement for its data.

Read that again: NO other U.S. programs that can form an adequate replacement for its data!

I feel like everything in the Universe is connected. Inexplicably but undeniably connected.

I don’t know how. I’ll never know exactly how in this lifetime. But it’s the way I feel.

I feel so privileged to have been able to have a life within the confines of the Universe. To be able to think, to touch, to feel, and to remember. To be able to develop love, affection and empathy for other lives on the same journey, at the same time is awesome.

If it is a gift from a creator…one who set this all in motion, I am grateful. I feel personally as if life is that, but for those who have other theories…whatever they are or are not, life is still a rare and special thing. Obviously, quite a rare occurrence. (I do not resent anyone else’s beliefs as long as those beliefs do not harm others. When beliefs cross that threshold then they become hostile entities and may need to be called out)

So, all of our memories and feelings make us who we are, but we are more than just that.

We are a heart and a spirit, bound together in a mysterious and intricate dance with all other things in existence…and isn’t it wonderful?

Remember this when others who do not realize the privilege of life as a positive thing, try to make your journey dark. Remember this when others try to fill your mind with fear.

Don’t give in to them. Don’t sink to their level. Their darkness is it’s own punishment, whether they realize it or not.

It doesn’t have to be ours.

It is so hot. I got out a little while to water the plants this evening, and the sun was like an oven whose object seemed to be to cook my head! I should have worn a hat. I know that, but was just too caught up in immediately setting out that I didn’t plan things out well. Something which wouldn’t have occurred to me to even care about in the least…before the turn of the century. That’s a statement which gives me an odd feeling. To be a child of two different centuries.

I do have to start planning better though. I never thought when I was a kid that I’d ever live this long. In the 1960’s the 21st century was just a shadow, looming long out ahead. It wasn’t real, didn’t seem real, didn’t seem possible to comprehend. Oh, a lot of writers and seers were thinking about it and predicting what it would be like. None of them got it exactly right. Not Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, or Jeanne Dixon. Not H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, or George Orwell. None exactly right. Predicting the future is a job I wouldn’t want. That, or a weatherman. But now it’s here, and 75 years old is on the horizon if I make it to October. With this heat, I will be glad when it gets to be October. Granny said never to wish your life away, but dang it I can’t help it.

I’ve got to start remembering my hat, my sunblock, my vitamins, my eye drops, my skin lotion, and my fiber. I have absolutely got to keep my mind on my driving, and go to my scheduled Drs. appointments. I have to do these things because no matter that my mind tells me I am still 18, my body tells me the truth. Oh, I’m in pretty good shape for the shape I’m in. I still walk 10 thousand steps most days.

We are not promised tomorrow, as many will say and having lived this long I must agree. I would like to stick around for a while longer though, because I have unfinished business. So if you see me walking around in the blazing sun with no hat on or working out in the garden., you have my permission to verbally reprimand me.

Trying to be honest….or one way to see it:

I grew up in the fifties in America. I was a great time. The middle class was growing. Most of our little families in the mill town where I lived were able to buy the houses which had been duplex apartments owned by the company and convert them into nice little single family homes. My Dad was able to buy his first new car in 1966. A Ford fairlane. It was a pretty good little car. Had a 289, 8 cylinder motor. We ate more hamburgers by 1967, where we had eaten pinto beans and corn bread back in 1958. I think we went to Kentucky Fried Chicken to eat out for the first time in the late sixties. I was able to buy two comic books a week for a quarter a piece in the late sixties, where I had only gotten one per week back in the fifties, even though they were cheaper. I found some friends who had been collecting since the early fifties and was able to catch up on some of the series I had been wanting to read, but couldn’t afford.

By the time I graduated High School in 1968, things were beginning to change in America….and they haven’t stopped changing since that year.

John Kennedy was gone. He left in 1963. He was killed in November of that year. It was the same year that Martin Luther King had given his famous “I have a dream” speech in Washington. That had been in August of ’63. I didn’t get to see it in person, but the news carried it. I remember it well. I remember him saying:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day
live in a nation Where they will not be judged by the color
of their skin but by the content of their character. l I have
a dream … I have a dream that one day in Alabama,
with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips
dripping with the words of interposition and nullification,
one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black
girls will he able to join hands with little white boy’s and
white girls as sisters and brothers.”

Sisters and brothers. He had that dream.

Up until that year, 1968, we still had Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. But they were both assassinated that year. Fighters who would fight for freedom were gone. Heroes who would fight for all people of all colors and all creeds…who would replace them? Who could replace them? Who has replaced them?

Since then we have moved forward with the Vietnam War, Johnson and Nixon…..Reagan and Voodoo economics, Bush II, and the trillions of dollars we wasted in Iraq that could have built free healthcare, infrastructure repair, and educational reform. Not to mention millions of lives lost….for nothing. Millions of lives…..

We have had a pandemic caused by….Well….that’s still indeterminate isn’t it? A lot of uncertainty, dishonesty and misinformation have circulated around this disease. I’ve tried to follow the science, but who knows. Reading that one drug company has tried to withhold information from the FDA, makes me skeptical.

We have had two other executives since then…one on each side, who have done unscrupulous things. We haven’t had a hero amongst any of the above named people, and certainly none in the other branches of government either.

I look at the people who are in this country in 2023 and I wonder…..what have we become a nation of? I realize there has always been hatred and division in America. America is a country which is grounded in division. We were born from division in the Revolutionary war. We killed each other during the Civil war over the division between North and South. We have been divided many times since then. Division and the differences between ideas which is solved through true negotiation and arbitration is not a bad thing really.

But I will have to say I have never, ever witnessed the hatred and vitriole, and the pure purposelessness which I have seen recently in the past couple of years, especially emanating from social media.

I am looking very hard for some of those heroes like we had back in the sixites….I’m not sure there are any around. Are there?

I dreamed a strange dream a few nights ago. Paula and I were in the “hereafter” so to speak. We were both young again, and we were in this huge empty house. Paula was sitting around playing the guitar and singing! “When did you learn to play and sing like that?” I asked. She replied, “Do you think I watched and listened to you for fifty years without learning something?” “I guess not” I said.

The house was huge and beautiful, but empty. I seemed to sense instinctively though, that it had once been full and joyful…and that it would be again one day.

It’s strange what our minds come up with in dreams.

During this time of the year we all see the beginnings, and the endings. The firsts and the lasts. The first Thanksgiving and Christmas for some little ones, and the last for some. Some perhaps expected, some unexpected. “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.”

I get emotionally caught up in this vortex of life we all have going on around us constantly, and often forget what I should be all about. I get sidetracked by the everyday humdrum racket of Social Media going’s on, and jump out there with stuff I should just keep “in my heart”. I gotta watch it.

There are firsts and lasts happening this year. There are holes in the fabric of Joy we naively weave around the holiday season left by those whose last, was last season. We fill those as best we can with those tiny, beautiful “firsts” who have come into our lives. We gotta do that. We also need to look around us this year very closely, and tell those around us that we love them. It’s easy for me in some cases, but a little harder in others, although it should not be. It should be unconditional. It’s my burden to bear that I cannot be as kind as I should be, that I cannot be as forgiving as I need to be. I thought about that very thing this morning while I was walking, but then ran off the track before the day had ended. Ah, the nature of humanity constantly wars against our need to be more loving. My fifth grade teacher used to punish us by making us write a particular sentence by longhand either 500 or 1000 times on paper, and turn it in to her. I need to write “I will be a better man” 1000 times by tomorrow and turn it in to God….Maybe then it would stick.

Having now rambled on far too long, I have said all of that to say this: love those around you this year. Be kind to them, and enjoy your time together. Most of us will be able to do that, but there are many out there for whom the holidays are a toil. Children get abused…cruelty runs rampant. If you find any way to help someone for whom the holidays are not a fun time, please do it.

As for me, I’m practicing more on my guitar starting tomorrow because in my dream of “heaven” Paula was playing and singing a lot better than me.

I used to lay in bed when we lived on eighth street in Trion and listen for the freight trains to roll into the rail yard at the mill. We lived just up that steep hill from Riegel textile. Back then, I had a rocket arm and I could stand in my front yard and throw a rock almost to that railroad track.

I listened for the train because the movement of it as it came in and out with loads of cotton and coal, was comforting. Strange isn’t it, what we become used to? I could tell when the cars were being coupled and uncoupled, and whether the engineer was new or experienced by how loud the “clang” was when the cars hit together or pulled apart. A lot of times I would fall asleep dreaming of riding one of those trains out of town and right across America.

I dreamed of the things I would do: cross the Mississippi River, or maybe jump off at Memphis and get a job on a boat heading towards New Orleans. I’d take my guitar with me, and make some money singing in clubs. But then, maybe I’d ride those trains all the way to California, and go into acting….become a star. I loved music so maybe I should go to New York City and try out for Broadway. I knew all the old Broadway songs because I was able to afford those types of .33 rpm records at Redford’s five and dime. They were the cheapest ones. The new popular records were usually 3.99, while “My Fair Lady” and “Broadways Greatest Hits” were .99 cents. More music for the money, and besides, I could hear the hit songs on the radio.

I dreamed and schemed the world of a twelve year old boy, laying in my bed underneath that wide rollout window. The one I could crane my head back, and look up out of at the night sky and get a glimpse of the moon, and some stars, and the occasional plane flying overhead.

Those years on eighth street went by quickly. Looking back now, way too fast. From age twelve to seventeen I lay there and listened and dreamed.

I am reminded many mornings lately of those days because as I walk around the neighborhood in the early morning, the sound of the CSX going down the tracks parallel to highway 41, drifts up from downtown Ringgold. I can easily discern it off in the distance, and having walked the paths right next to where it runs, and having taken pictures of it, I know it’s the same type of train that I remember from my childhood.

My hope is, that somewhere downtown close to the tracks, there’s a twelve year old boy laying in his bed and listening as the train passes by, and dreaming of where it could take him. He may not get there. He may follow a totally different path from what he dreams, and be as happy as I am with where he ends up. But the dreaming will do him good, and give him some happy memories. And sometimes memories are worth more than gold.

9/11/24

Has it been 23 years since the beginning of the hardest period in American history since the Civil War? I remember that day well, watching the carnage and ultimate horror of two gigantic buildings being brought down by terrorists sponsored and financed by a country that we continue to count as an Allie? Why haven’t we held them accountable? Especially the individuals who we know for certain contributed money to bin Laden.

I distinctly remember the wave of patriotism that rightfully spread throughout our country in the weeks and months thereafter, and how we went to the terrorists bases in Afghanistan and destroyed them.

But then …out goal changed to “nation building” to “democracy building” and we long overstayed our presence in that country. I remember how that wave of nationalism spilled over into another war, a needless war….a war that was bolstered by lies, in order to get into. A war more about revenge against Sadaam. A war that cost our country many lives and cost Iraq countless lives. It bankrupted our economy, and almost sent us into a depression. It turned people in those two countries against us. It led to having to plan on how to “get out” when we shouldn’t have even stayed in the first place.

All that had brought us to where we are today by a direct path. Almost everything going on today can be directly or indirectly tied back to that day.

They say 2977 people died on 911. I respect and honor those people. I’m deeply sorry for those families who suffered that loss. I totally believe in the honor that is given to those who died. It’s a chance for our nation to come together year in a non political way to remember innocent Americans who died in a horrible way.

But, even more than the loss of their lives that day, I firmly believe America lost its way that day….and still has not found the path back to where we once were. America “feels”different since that day. We may never feel the same again.