John Burkholder

 The last few weeks have been terrible. I have seen one of the horrible things I unfortunately predicted 4 years ago. I saw an uprising but instead of it being socialist liberals attacking the Capitol, it was right wing conservatives. Meanwhile, the United States sits at over 400,000 deaths due to the coronavirus because an inept President didn’t think it was serious enough to actually inconvenience his followers. Instead he lied, denied science, and elevated conspiracies even more after his first impeachment.  The attack against the Capitol was expected. Everyone on social media saw it coming and people warned the right people it was coming and some did not act on the warning.  So what comes out of this? Not much. Trump has been impeached again. But republicans will all fall back in line with the party and it will again be a split vote. He will finally be found guilty though. There is too much data to support it. Trump organization will file for bankruptcy again... and they will come

Avery made Yansu Ji tonight. The side dish was rice. So if you don’t feel like eating, changing up the food a little can make a difference. So she made blue rice.  One thing about getting older is you can get bored easier. So whenever something happens or you see something totally out of the ordinary like purple or green ketchup, green beer, or blue rice, it makes that moment much more interesting and memorable. It tastes the same and the Yansu Ji was great!  However, for people like Andi, it makes her brain think blue raspberry! Every time she took a bite she had an internal struggle between her brain and tongue. Her tongue was like “yeah! Jolly rancher!” And her brain is like “no, rice.” Tongue eats the blue rice and is like “bleh bleh... this isn’t a Jolly Rancher!” Brain is like “I told you that already!” Needless to say, making a little change to mix things up, can be fun. Waiting for the by-product of blue food coloring will be just as interesting I am sure.

My wife and I have a lot of conversations about her darker, morbid side of her personality. She often tries to engage me in going down these rabbit holes in her mind to identify which parts are truly needing fixes, and which parts are all talk and no action. For example, not so many years ago, we were discussing climate change and how she felt the world needed to have a large chunk of the population removed. She explained the Black Plague and Spanish Flu and how they both helped not only the economic separation between the wealthy and the poor, but they reset the human population to a manageable count.  I cannot say I agree with her. She has gone down these rabbit holes before and each time I am required to be the opposite viewpoint to bring back the civility and humanity of the conversation. I discuss the amount of innovation lost due to these disruptions in human activity. I show how hope (the one thing that pushes people forward) is hugely impacted by long term depression or post tr