Choose Joy

By Energia

Off and away

I spent the day exercising to get the stress out - I’m going to be so buff by the time this is done - and then finished packing. 

I had a little wig out. 

I made friends with someone who moved here a few months ago for a government job. She is the one who cheered me up on Monday. She thought she was safe because she helps protect us from terrorists but, as someone with less than a year on the job, she is a probationary employee and Trump has put out an order to fire them all. The DOD just let her and other probationary employees know that they are trying to get them exempted. 

To make matters rougher, she is a lesbian. Her parents and her brother no longer love her or talk to her. She has a sister in the US who was just fired because her organization gets money from the US government, or used to. She has two children still at home. One of them is expensive, needing lots of medicine and lots of therapy. 

This just hits my buttons badly. 

She thought she was so incredibly clever because she already applied for - and got - a job with a contractor to her agency. I told her that contracts have been cancelled for no reason at all. She said no, that they had funding. I told her all the contracts at my agency have funding. They were all cancelled. 

Breathing. Breathing. 

“A new Trump appointee to the United States’ foreign aid agency has a history of online posts denouncing liberal democracy and has said that the country is in the clutches of a “homo-empire” that pushes a “tyrannical LGBT agenda.””

I need a t-shirt that says, “homo-empire.” 

Before I could start exercising I was asked to join a work call. We’re doing another spreadsheet and more justification for why we are worthy. In one of the Senate hearings some church groups that used to receive USAID money to help people argued that they shouldn’t have to justify their activities based on making the US stronger, safer, and more prosperous. They should be able to argue that they help people.

There was a new comment on one of the online places that upset me with all the people/Russian bots? arguing we should not feed people around the world, we should feed Americans, ignoring that the government actually does feed Americans, and ironic because the government is about to cut food aid to Americans. The comment said, “The US does not seem to be a Christian nation.” 

Two prominent Republican senators, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, and Sen John Kennedy of Louisiana, criticized Putin, seemingly breaking with President Musk. They said that any peace deal had to have Ukrainians at the table and take European interests into account. They called Putin a war criminal who should be jailed for life or executed. 

Russia has an anti-drone defense system called Valdai. It was their latest advanced technology. It lets them detect drones 24 hours a day with a radius of 10 km. There is one protecting Moscow. Or there was. The night of Feb 6 there was an explosion in the nearby town of Dolgoproudny. Ukrainian intelligence says that an explosive device destroyed two of them. An UNDERCOVER Ukrainian agent got to the facility and planted explosives! 

A lot of military assistance to Ukraine has been countries, including the US, sending outdated weapons to Ukraine and then buying newer, better ones for themselves. That doesn’t mean the weapons aren’t effective. Ukraine used one in January to destroy a Russian fortification. They used the American M712 Copperhead. A copperhead is a US snake, it is the only poisonous one in Maryland I believe. Come to Maryland, we only have one poisonous snake. 

Ukraine used one of these Copperheads in September to destroy a tower in Kursk that had Russian equipment. 

Starting tomorrow I expect to have a break from Russian-Ukrainian news while I’m running around forgetting the world’s troubles. Also, I am not in Portugal yet. I did not cause the earthquake there. It wasn’t me. 

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