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Model Haley Kalil, or as she likes to be called Haley Baylee, revealed that the reason she divorced Matt Kalil is that his penis was the size of two beer cans and she was unable to accommodate his member.

Well, I am certainly glad she filled all of us in on that as I was concerned that it was something more serious — perhaps a fault in his character but knowing that he has huge dick makes it so much more understandable. I am relieved that I won’t have to start hating on another terrible man.

Though it does leave me asking what ever happened to just plain irreconcilable differences.

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Republicans are complaining about Virginians electing Jay Jones as Attorney General. Jones’ emails were released that showed him wishing violence on both his opponent and his opponent’s kids. Wow. What would be thought of as a disqualifying action with the voters wasn’t enough to defeat Jones.

I feel their pain. This is how I felt when Trump defeated Harris in 2024. How the voters could elect such a nakedly corrupt individual over a rather mundane political hack was beyond me. But the voters had a choice. A lot of voters felt they had a bad choice but a choice nonetheless. They choose the nakedly corrupt Trump which means that they feared Harris more than they did from Trump.

Now I disagree with the voters who opted for Trump over Harris as the lesser of two evils. But when Democrats got upset about it, I felt they were missing the point. When Trump is seen as the lesser of two evils, the problem isn’t with the voters. The problem is your candidate. Something was turning marginal voters against the Democrat’s candidate. Instead of complaining about the voters, it might be wiser to look at why people made this decision and alter your course.

The Republican brand might just be having a similar problem right now. Given a bad choice between a man who would like to see his opponent shot and a Republican incumbent then it might be time for a little self reflection on how voters see the Republican Party. I am fairly certain that they will resist this temptation. But, honestly, if you can’t beat a candidate with such negative press and a weak defense of his actions, you are in bigger trouble than you can comprehend.

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The above question is the problem. Someone has to win and someone has to lose.

Compromise, or at least as I understand the word compromise, requires that both sides give a little and take a little. Both sides get something out of the deal. That’s why they call it compromise.

The nightly breathless reporting of who is winning and who is losing the shutdown makes compromising extremely difficult particularly in the present circumstances. Trump needs to look like a winner and the Democrats are trying to look like fighters. Neither wants to look like a loser so all pretense of looking for a compromise has been abandoned because there is a battle going on and somebody has to win.

American democracy, unlike most other democratic countries, depends greatly on compromise due to the cumbersome federal system our forefathers created. There has to be a general agreement across an executive, two legislature bodies (one of which requires a supra majority) and the Supreme Court. It is extremely difficult to get things done through this system even in the best of times. These are not the best of times.

It is clear that it isn’t in the best interest of the press for there to be a compromise between the two parties. Indeed compromise is decidedly boring and unlikely to engage the press who prefer mudslinging, name calling and they particularly like winners and losers. Because the press needs to have winners and losers, they are framing the present struggle between the Republicans and the Democrats in the most unhelpful way. The press wants one side to succumb to a more powerful winning side who will then stand on the loser’s lifeless body and gloat for even more good press. All anybody wants to know who is winning the shutdown

Well, sadly — no one.

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I have lived in Southern California for over 30 years and everyone here claims to want mass transportation but very few choose, including myself, to use mass transportation. My reason, as I suspect most other people’s reason, is, despite the effort, it is neither convenient or timely. Or this is my impression of mass transportation.

Every time I have experimented with mass transport I have had the same problem — it is easier and quicker to have taken a car. Now, things change and I experiment so little, I could be wrong. Mass transport could be better, easier and quicker but that just isn’t my perception and, as an old boss told me once, perception is reality. The truth is irrelevant if people think the service is bad and a lot of people think the service is bad.

I have visited cities were mass transportation is both good and more timely. For instance, New York and San Francisco have mass transportation that any rational person would choose over a car. So I can be convinced to change my mind but nothing has happened to convince me I am wrong.

Here is my reality. My partner and I were going to a football game. On game days, the city encourages people to take the trolley as there is limited parking and heavy traffic near the stadium. A perfect time to experiment with mass transport. The trip to the stadium was uneventful but the trip home was much more problematic. Some time after departing the stadium, the carriage I was riding in filled with smoke. The passengers were forced to walk back to the station were an already large number of people were standing waiting for the next train which wasn’t coming because there was a stalled trolley blocking the track. Once the trollies began moving, every car was full. Another person couldn’t be pushed into it even if someone tried. And, believe me, people tried. Eventually we made it home but the conclusion we reached was it would have been far easier, even with limited parking and excess traffic, to have taken the car.

In case you are saying well that is unfair. I shouldn’t judge the system based on one system breakdown. And I didn’t. A few years later I had to abandon a smoke filled trolley car and walk back on the tracks to the next available station. Since I have only used the trolley system a handful of times, this has left a particularly bad impression of the system. I am not going to get where I want. I am going to end up walking on trolley tracks to station that doesn’t have my car and I will have to find some other mode of transportation to get where I want to go.

More problematic is that even a good experience with the trolley, and I have had them, you realize that taking a car would be quicker. My best experience was when a new line opened to La Jolla. This one went smoother. No smoke, no abandoned cars, no walks on the tracks. It took a good 40 minutes. If I drove my car it would have been all of 20 minutes and there was plenty of parking at the shopping center where I was going. I could have done this faster in my car and had a much more pleasant experience to boot as there was a homeless man ripping up a stack of free newspapers and throwing the torn pages on the ground. I probably should stopped him but he was much younger and appeared to be a bit crazy.

This brings me to an even bigger problem. The city parents are trying to make San Diego a mass transportation, bicycle riding city without doing any work to make this palatable to the residents of the city. The number of mid-rise buildings going up in Hillcrest, my neighborhood, is alarming mostly because the already bad traffic is now becoming even worse. Trying to make a left hand turn on the street where I live is nearly impossible at some points in the day. There are too many cars and not enough nice people to let you in. They have taken away parking along the avenues to make bike lanes. Bikes lane that so few people use that when I see someone using a bike in them I am startled and will excitedly point them out to anyone with me at the time.

The plan, as I see it, is the city parents are trying to make car driving so miserable that people will choose to take bad and inconvenient mass transit instead. Now this is a big problem because the citizens may make other choices. Like move to other cities. Or to the suburbs. Or elect a less environmentally conscious city council. The solution, as I see it, is to prove to a doubting public that the city can provide reliable, quick and convenient public transportation. This they are failing to do.

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Since Bob’s fall, I have learned the secret of getting what you want in the American Medical System — be aggressive. It is the one piece of advice I get from almost anyone who has had any dealings with the system. Be aggressive. You have to be an advocate for your loved one in order to get the treatment they deserve. This advice is given to me so often that it took me awhile to hear what people are actually saying.

I thought good medical insurance was sufficient for good treatment but it also helps to be a bit of an asshole. Now some of you will say being aggressive is not necessarily being an asshole. You can politely but firmly be aggressive. But that wasn’t the advice I was getting. People were actually saying be an asshole, get in their faces, don’t let them push you around. Some of this advice came from medical professionals.

Also, and this is important, why do I have to be aggressive at all? If my insurance covers it, why do I have to aggressively monitor his treatment at all. He should be getting it without asking. But this isn’t the impression of an awful lot of users of the American Medical system.

The saddest part of this advice is we passively accept it as they way things are. The only way to get good treatment is to be aggressive. So, yeah, mother fucker, I will do whatever it takes to get my loved one what he needs. My biggest worry since Bob’s accident is am I being aggressive enough. What did I fail to see or do. Who should I be chasing down. Will Bob get screwed by some mistake I made. This is hardly conducive to healing the patient and it is exhausting for his loved ones.

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Whoops, I made a mistake I changed an already published blog. Mostly because I was trying to get out more content because my readers are so demanding. I accidentally looked at this published article and made some changes. I come from a publishing background and vowed to myself that I would never change an already published article’s content and, up until this moment I have lived up to this commitment.

Any way it happened. I am sorry but it is really your fault. Stop asking for this endless supply of new bon mots from me. I am just one man. I am trying my damnedest, but you always want more. So really, dear reader, you only have yourself to blame if I make these mistakes. All right. End of lecture. Go back to what you were doing.

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The biggest problem I face living in San Diego is the sidewalks. I have yet to be bothered by an immigrant but I am terrorized, particularly at night, by the general disrepair of the sidewalks here. I have a trick ankle that occasionally gives out on me which means when ever I encounter uneven pavement there is a chance I will be thrown off kilter and find myself on the ground. When I was young, I just got up, dusted myself off and proceeded to where I was going. Now, at 68, I come up bruised and battered. I am increasingly afraid of breaks especially after my partner broke his ankle in a fall on a sidewalk.

That Trump’s focus is on immigrants and not sidewalks is telling. Infrastructure repair would have a bigger effect on my life than the removal of any immigrant. But criminal immigrants sell what Trump and the Republicans are pushing which is the federal government takeover of the cities. So I guess I will continue to struggle with the treacherous sidewalks while Trump rids the streets of immigrants. Something that doesn’t bother me and I don’t care about. But, anyway.

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I have spent the last few days in the bowels of the American Medical system as Bob, my partner, took a fall and has been experiencing the noxious gases of this infernal system.

The profit motive is a terrible way to make decisions about a person’s health. What may be the cheapest way to handle a problem may not be the best. Bob took a fall and damaged both legs. He can’t put pressure on either leg for now. This means that the simplest task is virtually impossible for him to perform. We are out of town in Modesto and need to get home for his surgery because the recovery could take up to three months. It makes sense to send him back to San Diego where we live.

The solution they are purposing, however, is ridiculous. They want me to pack the very injured Bob into our car and drive for 7 and a half hours to San Diego. Right now, he can’t get into a wheelchair without the help of two medical professionals. Yet they want me, a 68 year old man alone with a 76 year old physically incapacitated man, to make this car trip.

Now this is where things get interesting. When we balked at this suggestion, the case manager at the hospital decided to argue that it was cheaper for a medical vehicle to take him back San Diego than for Bob to stay in the hospital until he is physically able to make the trip. Brilliant right.

Brilliant and horrifying. The thing that is deciding how to proceed is the cost to the insurance company (in this case Medicare) and not the health of the patient. Even more horrifying is that the people who look at spreadsheets could decide that it still makes more economic sense for me to drive him home.

Now I get it, money has to be taken into consideration at some point but it seems like this is not one of them. The bean counters are weighing the economic cost of two options — paying for an ambulance or paying for a hospital stay. The deciding factor isn’t the health of the injured man. And, more importantly, why do the bean counters seemingly have the final decision. And don’t say the doctor has the final say. The case worker’s argument is financial because he knows the bean counter has the deciding vote. If Bob’s health mattered, the argument would be it is better for his health to be driven home in a car with medical professionals. Right?