Missive #655

125. Why People Yawn

Nasruddin was staying at the house of relatives in a distant town. He had arrived in time for dinner, but so far they hadn’t served him any food at all.

The evening was dragging on as his host regaled Nasruddin with stories in which Nasruddin had no interest.

Finally, Nasruddin could not help himself: he yawned.

This prompted his host to change the topic. “You are a learned man, Nasruddin,” he said. “Why is it that people yawn?”

“It’s either from lack of sleep or lack of food,” declared Nasruddin. “And I got a very good night’s sleep last night!”

This Tale is from “Tiny Tales of Nasruddin” by Laura Gibbs. The book is licensed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. © 2019-202The2 Laura Gibbs

Last Friday I posted that I needed to make an estimated payment to the IRS because of the long term gain on the stock that I sold. I went to H&R Block in Sierra Vista and talked to a preparer that recommended that I just sending them a payment based on the ‘quick and dirty’ tax prep that they offer online. That I had done just to see if I would owe anything so that is what I was going to try and do.
The first step was to get an account with the IRS where I could make the payment online. I thought that id.me would let me do that. They say “Find and access top government services and benefits you need with a single login.” What they do not say is you have go through the ‘verification’ for each governmental department that you wish to access. The fact that I went through that for the VA did not mean anything I had to do it again for the IRS. So I get connected to an id.me representative via a visual call and tell her that I can not understand what she is saying. We have a one way conversation where I have no idea what she is saying and I’m responding with a tirade about how this whole two-step verification process is a ‘sham’ and a waste of time. Finally I’m connected to the IRS and see that I have an account.
I then go to the H&R Block web page and enter my data in the ‘quick and dirty’ tax estimate form and get a different amount due than what I saw the first time. I select two other tax estimate computers online and get two more different amounts due. Made an appoint with H&R Block for next Thursday!
Since then I have done some more estimates and some research and have ended up with what I think is the right amount that I need to pay but will not do that until I verify the amount with H&R Block next week. Two of the additional estimates were done by Claude and ChatGPT, both free online AI, they gave me two more estimates that were different from any others that I had generated before – both were higher and I think both were wrong.

It is the United States of America that threatens Greenland and humiliates NATO and the European Union — now through Trump. Dear federalists, dear Atlanticists, review the wars, coups and massacres carried out across four continents since Korea, long before Trump wielded any power. At the time, he merely embodied the American Dream: a mega-businessman who built an immeasurable real-estate and financial empire thanks solely to talent and the serene mechanisms of “free opportunity”.

The President of the United States, as Eisenhower warned, serves the military-industrial complex according to the needs of imperial capitalism. Trump is not an aberration. He is simply another president in service of a system that the West, without amendment, embraces as globalist.

Forgive the repetition, esteemed federalists and Atlanticists, but you only awoke to this reality — of which you are accomplices — when it knocked at your door in Greenland. You saw nothing troubling when Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria or Palestine bled. Nothing when coups were staged in Latin America, when dictators were cherished, when repression was sponsored. This, too, is America — much of it before Trump was born. — Dear Federalist So Where Exactly Will Invasion Come From by José Goulão