MARCO IN THE DARKO

Daylight Saving Preoccupation in Florida

The United States Senate in Washington has voted unanimously to flip the entire country into Daylight Saving Time year-round, but they didn’t think it through — at all. Little Marco Rubio, a US Senator from Florida, ran this bill up the flagpole and everyone in the chamber voted YES. Problem is, there was extraordinarily little thinking and no debate, no discussion and no research.

The bill’s name is the Sunshine Protection Act of 2021 (S. 623). Of course, our sun doesn’t need protection. it’s just a ball of fire constantly burning, you know, nuclear infused gases. No, this bill would make Daylight Saving Time (DST) permanent across the entire country starting in 2023. One of the talking points is crime will be reduced by giving Americans “more light at night,” however what evidence do we have that the amount of sunlight affects criminal activity? Nonetheless, Rubio thinks this is a pressing matter and “everybody agrees.” Not so fast.

Let’s start with this. Parts of Texas, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan and Florida are situated in areas where the time zone line indicates their clocks should differ from the rest of their state. So, a state can elect to have a single time zone even if, scientifically speaking, they should have more than one. In 2018, Florida passed a bill calling for permanent Eastern Daylight Saving Time across the entire state, but federal law first needed to change. This is the main reason Rubio’s brought his bill to the US Senate. Marco knew his state was up for the plan and on the surface it appeared to be a no-lose situation for him politically.

Now the House of Representatives will have their say in this matter and I’m thinking they will debate it and then throw it away. Why? A headline in the New York Times says it all, A Groggy Senate Approves Making Daylight Saving Time Permanent. The story points out there has been, “…longstanding and vibrant disagreements over how to set the nation’s clocks.” Some legislators may later say, well, “it seemed like a great idea when I voted for it.”

You see, we’ve tried this before. It happened in 1974, and once people experienced the true difference, they asked for it to be changed back. More recently, Russia tried it but ended the policy when public support plummeted. Even Putin wouldn’t vote for it.

It’s clear that the time debate is not partisan. Democrat Senator Patty Murray from Washington is a leading proponent of doing away with the time changes, and her full-throated endorsement blames the biannual clock shifting for disrupting children’s sleep cycles. We all hate changing our clocks, but what is the best time system to make permanent? Under Rubio’s plan, sunrise would occur around 8:25 a.m. about ninety days a year. Our kids and grandchildren would go to school in darkness for a quarter of the year. Is that what we want?

According to the New York Times, “In one 2017 study from Denmark, scientists analyzed a psychiatric database of more than 185,000 people from 1995 to 2012. They found that the fall transition to standard time was associated with an 11 percent increase in depressive episodes, an effect that took 10 weeks to dissipate. The spring switch, by contrast, had no similar effect.” Would there truly be fewer highway accidents and less crime with permanent DST, or is all that just wishful thinking?

Florida, North and South Carolina have tons of golf courses and they would benefit from more daylight because it would increase revenue. Did the golf lobby motivate Rubio? Maybe, but it could also be a way for this doesn’t-do-much Florida senator to get on the radar.

Maybe it’s all legislative masturbation. Yes, Congress sometimes does things that look good on paper but are truly bad ideas. Science shows we need a certain amount of darkness to make us sleepy. You see, our bodies make this stuff called melatonin and it’s released by the pineal gland to help control our sleep patterns. Melatonin flows when our eyes detect the lower light levels at night, and that serum makes us feel sleepy. Should we put this DST plan in place, parents might discover their kids will want to stay up later, be harder to put to bed and difficult to rouse for school in the morning. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Of course, I have a radical idea. Let’s make Standard Time permanent but push the clock half an hour forward. India does this and that’s why they are thirty minutes off compared to the rest of the world. My plan would provide thirty to forty minutes of additional morning light during the darker months. However, I am fairly sure no one would like my idea.

I don’t think the Sunshine Protection Act will pass the House and, even if it did, I question whether Joe Biden would sign it into law. It’s a nice fifteen minutes of fame for Marco, but his plan will never be universally loved. Perhaps it’s better to disrupt our sleep for a week or so, than to have long early morning darkness. Some might say it doesn’t matter how dark it is with so many people working from home, but what about schoolkids making their way to classes in the dark? If this plan becomes law, what should we do if the majority of Americans hate it? Switch back to what we had before? Why can’t we learn from 1974 and simply move past this? We’re wasting time talking about it.

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WHAT IF ADOLF HITLER WERE REBORN?

History Repeats Itself, History Repeats Itself

So, we seem to have a madman trying to convince millions the only way their country will regain its place in the world is by allowing him to occupy it and kill those citizens he believes are the problem. We are seeing a demonic despot imposing brutality and cruelty on a country and its people, just because he wants to, just because he can. Will there be more countries to come?

Vladimir Putin is behaving exactly like Adolph Hitler. The activities of each tyrant are grievance based. Hitler was extremely embarrassed by his government’s loss in World War I. Remember, he was a soldier. Putin was a combatant stationed in East Berlin and he witnessed the fall of the wall dividing the city, which he was prepared to defend to his death. As has been written, Putin’s team was waiting for orders, but “Moscow was silent.” Putin considered this a defeat, and his whole career has been all about elevating himself to a position of power to bring back the U.S.S.R., minus the mistakes he believes were made by his predecessors.

Hitler was a Nazi and his takeover of much of Europe was driven by a need to pay back the terrible debt that came out of the Versailles Treaty. Indeed, the world handed Germany what they thought was a deterrent, but it actually planted a giant seed of resentment. Hitler merely watered and fertilized that seed with lies, bullshit and propaganda. The idea that Russians had to fight and die to stop Hitler is being used today by Putin.

Putin insists on calling the government leaders in Ukraine neo-Nazis, when that couldn’t be further from the truth. The President of Ukraine is a Russian-Jew whose family moved to Ukraine to be free. Putin’s idea that Ukraine is a threat to Russia is a joke the former comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy would have gladly told. And this writer believes that deep down in Putin’s souless body, he too, hates Jews.

Putin is the new Hitler and it’s about time the world sees what is truly happening. I quipped that Putin would have as much credibility trying to take Alaska from the United States as he does “liberating” Ukraine. Alaska was originally Russian land, but Ukraine existed long before Moscow and the Soviet Union. The world must defend this democracy.

Putin has threatened the use of atomic weapons and we should take him seriously. Russia certainly has weapons of mass destruction, and we don’t want Putin to take Hawaii off the face of the earth just to prove a point. Something must be done, now.

We joked about how many lies Donald Trump told for four years, but now many liberals and some Republicans are repulsed by the ex-president’s comments on this new crisis. Trump and his minions are playing out an unamerican and treacherous scheme by siding with Putin. The man is and always has been a miscreant with an illicit KGB mentality, which includes the presumption of a license to kill.

One point five million people are now being displaced and moved to safer countries, but such safety may be only temporary. Putin has stated that anyone helping Ukraine is his enemy and declared that sanctions on his country are acts of war against Russia. He is talking just like Hitler did in 1939, and if you understand his black and white plan and do nothing, you will have red blood on your hands.

I’ve watched movies and read books about what would have happened if the plans to assassinate Adolf Hitler were successful. They are all could-have, would-have, should-have stories that don’t give much comfort to the more than six million Jews who were murdered by that maniac. Sadly, no one had the proper plan or blunt bravery of an Islamic zealot with a pipe bomb strapped to his chest. The world would have been much different had someone succeeded in cutting off the head of that snake.

Probably within the next month, the Russian Army, under the sole leadership of Vladimir Putin, will take Ukraine and occupy that fine place. For now, we should freeze every possible Russian financial and business transaction, and I really don’t care if it hurts the Russian people. They think they elected him, so why not make them revolt against this godless, blood-thirsty animal?

A few journalists, world leaders and poets warned us about Adolph Hitler, but hardly anyone listened. Some in Great Britain’s Royal Family wanted to sign a treaty with Germany to stop the war. In the 1930s, American Charles Lindbergh was more than positive about Hitler, and he toured the country preaching we should stay out of events in Europe.

I laugh when the talking heads on Fox News claim Joe Biden is the reason all this is happening. They are the Lindbergh’s of our age, and their failure to see a new world terrorist before their very eyes is a wicked waste of mass media. They don’t need to be censored, they need to be asked, “Whose side are you on?”

Millions of people are going to be killed. I hate to say it, but we must enter this war and defeat Putin. No one wants to say it, no one wants to hear it, but we are thirty days from World War III. Mark your calendar.

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DESANTISIZED & DUMB

Why Support Florida’s Bully Governor?

Some people appreciate the ultra-conservative leader in the state of Florida, Ron DeSantis, but almost half the state loathes him. To understand his high polarity persona, you might want to consider Florida’s roots and swamps. Surely, DeSantis surfaced out of a gooey bog of racism and radical right-wing dogma. He’s used hate and disinformation to propel himself to the top job in the state. This tick has been sucking the blood from the body politic by negating all other viewpoints in the Sunshine State. The Republican party of Florida has been desantisized, eliminating logic, reason and common good. Ronnie and his followers are worse than trumped up bigots, they are simply too dumb to understand what is bad for them. I no longer care whose feelings I hurt. It’s time to stop pandering to this overstuffed roadkill.

Two things happened this week to demonstrate my point. DeSantis appeared at a gathering of Hillsborough High School kids for a photo opportunity promoting the state’s funding of cybersecurity education, our esteemed Governor pointed at the kids and said, “You do not have to wear those masks. I mean, please take them off. Honestly, it’s not doing anything and we’ve gotta stop with this Covid theater. So, if you want to wear it, fine, but this is ridiculous.” Swayed by the power dynamic of the moment, some kids were obedient and removed their masks. The governor didn’t want to be seen standing in front of them wearing masks because he calculated it was bad for his image.

The locals were not pleased by this move. News Channel 8, the NBC affiliate in Tampa, posted this on their website, “I would tell (the governor) to stop bullying kids,” Kevin Brown Sr. said his son is one of the seven students from Middleton High School at the press conference. And Dawn Marshall said she is very upset about how the governor spoke to her son and the other students, adding she had told him to wear a mask in school.”

So, while DeSantis was running around the state urging parents to decide what to do in a pandemic rather than school officials, with one pointed finger he snatched away those very rights. He showed just how ruthless a politician he is by bossing around a bunch of kids to improve his image. I’d like to pose a deeply personal question to Governor Ronnie. Why do you keep saying masks don’t do anything?

As a two-time cancer survivor, I know how careful doctors are during exams and treatments. DeSantis’ wife Casey has breast cancer, and I wonder how he would feel about her being treated by doctors who refused to wear masks.

Then there’s this. A bill DeSantis is expected to sign will ban abortions in Florida after fifteen weeks of pregnancy. What might be good for the governor’s reelection campaign with the highly religious, anti-abortion zealots in the state, will give power to incestuous activity in homes and will also bestow power on rapists. If you don’t believe me, read the damn bill. Once signed into law it will hurt women, not help them. It’s just another little push moving Florida closer to a Handmaiden reality.

DeSantis doesn’t care about anyone who disagrees with him. When a data analysist leaked the fact that Tallahassee cooked the books to make Florida look better during the early days of the Covid outbreak, DeSantis sent his police force to arrest the lady. With little follow-up word on this matter, we can only assume Governor Ron got his wish to quell the criticism. He’s as bad as Donald Trump, maybe worse. I have a few more tidbits.

Ron DeSantis brazenly withheld funds for those Florida school districts that bucked his ban on masks. It was a purely vindictive, dickhead move which will hurt the kids in those districts.

DeSantis wants to desantisize the schools by eliminating discussion about Florida’s historical racial and racism realities. He thinks he’s helping people by taking books off the shelves, but he is actually creating an underground railroad of “forbidden books” to be circulated among young readers.

Ron has urged the state to adopt rules that would prohibit teachers from acknowledging gay relationships or even saying the word “gay” in a classroom. You can’t censor away human rights, human conditions or sexual orientation. Wouldn’t it be ironic if, after using his power to paint shadows on this natural concept, one of his kids came out of the closet? That would be an ultimate karmic shift.

So, Ron DeSantis wants to be President of our country. What kind of a leader would he be? A terrible one with his whining, complaining finger pointing and paranoia. He’s an unscrupulous governor and a dangerously prejudicial human being. On top of that, he seems to be getting fat, but every corrupt Florida governor has gotten rich on land deals, letting farmers pollute the water and looking the other way when some companies here don’t pay taxes.

I’ll close by saying our governor never once admitted that Covid-19 was bad. May I remind my readers that almost 71,000 Floridians died from coronavirus? The man brags about how great a job he’s done, but he’s done nothing to comfort the families of all those Covid victims. He’s just broomed them under the rug, with not a single mention of them during any of his braggadocios speeches. Ron DeSantis a loser.