All's Well That Ends Well

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Remember when it was impossible to misplace the TV remote? Because you were the TV remote? Remember when music sounded like this?
Remember when social media was truly social?

**Doug Pike** (0:17)
Hey John, how's it going today? Good, man.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:19)
Well, this show is all about you.
This is 50 Plus with Doug Pike. Helpful information on your finances, good health, and what to do for fun.
50 Plus, brought to you by the UT Health Houston Institute on Aging. Informed decisions for a healthier, happier life. And by New Promise Neuropathy. Lose the pain and numbness. Get your life back. newpromiseneuropathy.com. And now, Fifty Plus with Doug Pike.

**Doug Pike** (0:52)
Welcome one and all to this Tuesday edition of Fifty Plus, and thank you all for listening.
If you're wondering about the forecast, it's pretty much the same as it's been for a week, at least, I would say, and maybe even more.
There's still a good chance of some thunderstorms today, here, there, and almost everywhere, or nowhere, depending on where you are.
These things pop up in the afternoons, the way the atmosphere churns and chugs and goes from one extreme to the other. But we never really know what we're going to get until we get it. Sometimes it looks like it's going to rain, it threatens rain, there's thunder, there's lightning, dark clouds, and then they just part and the sun pops back out.
Other times, the sky looks really good, so you try to go do a little fishing or maybe hit a few golf balls. And as soon as you get there and walk onto the range or step up to the lakeside, it pours. That's more of a personal observation than a general one, but you get my drift. The bottom line this time of year really is that you just go ahead and make your plans, and unless you actually see rain falling on your driveway, and can confirm that it's also raining at the place you want to go to do something outside, then just go ahead and go.
The good news now though, nowadays, we've got the Weather Channel, we've got all these different radar apps that we can check with to find out exactly what's happening wherever it is we want to be, and that really has kept me from getting my head doused many times, or on the flip side of that, it's kept me from canceling plans. It might be raining cats and dogs at my house, but I'll look at the weather app and see that where I want to go looks pretty doggone clear, and the trend is for it to stay clear for at least another two hours, three hours, six hours, whatever it is depending on where I'm going. I've lived in this area a very long time, decades, and I've come to learn that if you don't like the weather right here, right now in Houston, all you got to do is wait 15, 20 minutes, and it's going to change. It'll still be hot and humid. Don't worry about that changing, but at least it might stop raining or it might start raining, depending on what the current conditions are. I don't know of a whole lot of places on the planet where you can have an absolutely clear sky and walk out your back door to go to the car on the driveway and see water on the ground, on the concrete patio. I'm thinking of my own house. There's water on the patio from all of the condensation, from the humidity in the air that has gathered on the roof and gotten so heavy that it tumbles as little droplets down the roof and over the side and onto the patio. Not a cloud in the sky.
But it's wet all over the patio. And that's enough about the weather. So stepping into what's going on in Iran still, is it's driving me crazy, and I know it's driving most everybody in this country crazy, up to and including the President of the United States, that Iran, big, big surprise, Iran keeps backing off of all the things it's promised it was going to do, and then doing just the opposite. The ceasefire that we had in place for a relatively, well, relatively short time, really, has fallen apart completely now, and all because of the aggressive military actions that Iran's taking in the Persian Gulf. They pinky swore that they were going to reopen that Strait of Hormuz and not charge any tolls to go through there, and then all of a sudden you blink once, and they're firing missiles at ships going through the strait. We retaliated, of course, and knocked out 80-something targets when they did that. All military targets, too. We're still not doing anything to their civilian infrastructure, and I'm glad for that. I really am. I don't think the people over there, when you see the video from over there, all these people in the streets and chanting, Death to America and whatnot, I look at that as not necessarily the majority of Iranians, and I hope I'm right, because I believe that most of them would love for this war to be over and for that entire regime to be toppled and replaced. Iran hasn't been run by a bunch of maniacs for a very long time, but the problem is that they have instilled so much fear in the Iranian people, and I would be scared too if I looked up and saw people who have done relatively minor things against their rules, and they wind up being beheaded or otherwise executed or put in prison for the rest of their lives. It's just barbaric what these people do. And I just can't help but believe that the majority of Iranians, the majority of them would rather return to a very peaceful coexistence with the rest of the world, a very enlightened viewpoint on what women can and cannot do in public. It never ceases to stagger me that some of the women here in our country are rooting for the bad guys essentially over there, and totally ignoring, even when they're told, what's being done to women in that country, for the least little infractions, they get beat, they get executed, and it's just, it's horrific. But women over here, lots of them, still think that we should back out and leave them alone somehow. And that is, that's just not a good idea. You just can't trust those people. You can't trust the leaders anyway. They're already said to be rebuilding our nuclear enhancement capability. And that, I think, will be the end of our playing nice with them. The truce is over, and our president has taken a very firm stance and let the world know that he is going to protect American forces and protect global trade routes with very decisive action. And that action is coming up pretty fast on those Iranians, whether they realize it or not. And I think this, honestly, is a very, very necessary shift away from past policies of appeasement that just never held Iran accountable to anything. I'll take a deep breath now. Let me just relax a little bit, and I want to tell you about New Promise Neuropathy.