07JUN2019 – Photo of the Day
Month: June 2019
Can Pence Succeed Trump?
No one can replace Donald Trump. He is unique. Of the seven billion plus humans inhabiting planet Earth there couldn’t be another even close to his experiences, personality and skills. His quirks and his abilities are completely idiosyncratic. But he will also someday be term limited from serving as President of the United States. So, it is necessary to consider who could succeed Donald J. Trump as president.
Mike Pence would be the conventional choice. The Vice President of a successful President should have a leg up. But Al Gore and Richard Nixon could disagree. Assuming President Trump continues to preside over a healthy economy chances are Mike Pence would have at least an even chance at winning. But is Mike Pence the man for the job?
In terms of personality and background it would be hard to imagine a starker contrast than Trump and Pence.
| Name | Donald Trump | Mike Pence |
| Birthplace | New York City, NY | Columbus, IN |
| family business | real estate tycoon | gas station owner |
| net worth | north of 1 billion dollars | $700,000 (mostly future pension benefits) |
| liquid net worth | in the tens of millions | $15,000 |
| religious convictions | doubtful and conflicted | devout |
| total number of wives | 3 | 1 |
| total lifetime number of porn star sex liaisons | impossible to know but upper limit in triple figures | zero |
| Ability to withstand cross-examination by George Stephanopoulos | infinite | zero |
If you read Mike’s bio, he checks all the boxes for a social conservative. He’s pro-life, religious, family values, defense of marriage. He signed a bill as governor of Indiana to protect religious business owners from anti-discrimination law suits by homosexuals. But he immediately signed an amended version that gutted it when the Media, some big businesses and progressive advocacy groups coordinated their public attacks and threatened to boycott Indiana. And this latter incident is the troubling sticking point. Does Pence have the guts to stick to his guns and defy the progressive coalition?
Now, there are some mitigating circumstances that are in his favor. Being the Governor of Indiana during the Obama presidency doesn’t have the privileges that being President of the United States has. You can imagine the pressure being brought to bear by business leaders as negative publicity swirled around Indiana during the blitzkrieg that the Media created. And I’m sure the US Attorney General’s office was probably on the phone threatening him too. But however, you slice it, the optics were hardly Trumpian.
It is fair to ask if Mike Pence may have learned something in the last three years of working with Donald Trump that improves his case. I would have to say yes. It seems highly unlikely that working in close proximity to President Trump hasn’t provided very valuable object lessons in how to triage the almost unending series of crises, both actual and media-fabricated that have confronted the White House since January of 2017. By the end of President Trump’s second term, I would imagine even Mike Pence will have added a certain understated swagger to his manner when dealing with the media and other pests. Undoubtedly, he’ll never be able to launch a vindictive tweet at Chuck Schumer or bark out a fake news sound bite the way The Donald can but I don’t doubt he’ll manage to make his points without collapsing into spineless acquiescence to the likes of Stephanopoulos.
Now this doesn’t answer the other important question. Is Mike Pence the best choice for Trump’s successor? Frankly, I doubt that. I think the best man for the job will be another independent businessman or possibly an extraordinary military leader (of course my favorite choice is always me but we’ll leave that for another day). But for this essay let’s restrict ourselves to whether Mike Pence could carry on the good work being done by President Trump. I will give Pence grudging approval and say that based on his strengths, weaknesses and opportunities to grow as Trump’s right-hand man he probably could do it.
One last safeguard for Pence is that if President Trump doesn’t honestly think Pence is the right man to succeed him, he has two chances to correct the problem. He can choose a different running mate for 2020 and in 2024 if he suddenly objects to Pence, he can recommend someone else for the job.
So, let’s say I give Mike Pence a wavering one thumb up. Here’s hoping he comes into his own in the second term.
06JUN2019 – Photo of the Day
The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 37 – The Changing of the Guard
Donald Pleasence plays Professor Ellis Fowler, an elderly literature teacher who has served over fifty years at the same prep school in Vermont. We meet up with him at the last class before the Christmas vacation. He chides his students for their lack of scholarly interest in his curriculum but he finishes by wishing them warm good wishes for their vacation.
But when the headmaster calls him into his office he finds out that he has been forced into retirement. Going home Fowler reflects on the generations of boys he has taught but to his mind, he hasn’t accomplished anything. He believes that the lessons he taught were of no value to the boys in his classes. Reflecting on the end of his career to his housekeeper, Fowler considers himself a failure. Afterward he decides to commit suicide with a revolver he takes from his desk.
He walks over to a statue on campus of Horace Mann that has the motto, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” He says to the statue that he has won no victory and is ashamed but he will die. But suddenly the class bell inexplicably starts tolling and Fowler follows the bell to his classroom.
As he stands in front of the empty classroom suddenly spectral forms solidify into young men at the desks. One by one they walk up to Fowler and he recognizes them as the grown forms of some of his students. Each of them tells the heroic circumstances of his death (in war or in the interests of humanity) and tells Fowler what lesson he learned from his Literature teacher that inspired him to the courageous actions he took.
Finally Mr. Fowler returns home and his students serenade him with Christmas carols outside his window. Now Mr. Fowler tells his housekeeper that he is very satisfied to retire, the changing of the guard of the title.
This is a sort of a Twilight Zone version of Goodbye Mr. Chips. Donald Pleasance does a good job and projects the emotions needed for the transition from despair to happiness. This is another sentimental story drawing on the traditional values of the old pre-war world surviving into the present. It’s slightly derivative but I’ll be a little generous and give it a B.
05JUN2019 – Photo of the Day
The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 36 – Cavender Is Coming
This is a minor effort. In fact, it’s kind of a reprise of another guardian angel episode called Mr. Bevis that featured Orson Bean as a daydreaming goofball that all the kids on the block palled around with.
Harmon Cavender (played by the immediately recognizable character actor Jesse White) is an angel who hasn’t earned his wings. In fact, if he botches his next assignment he will probably be demoted (whatever that means). He is assigned to help Agnes Grep (played Carol Burnett). Grep is the clumsy kind young woman that all the kids in the rooming house come to for cookies and other treats. Everyone likes her and she likes them. But she can’t hold onto a job and so is always broke. We meet her as she is losing a job as a ticket taker at a fancy movie theater.
Cavender’s job is to make her happy. He shows up on the bus she is riding and tries to convince her of his angelic identity by means of small miracles. He turns the bus into a horse drawn carriage and then a convertible. He decides to make Agnes rich and famous. He fills her bank account with cash moves her into Sutton Place on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and throws her a party filled up with the crème de la crème of posh New York Society. Agnes is confused and ultimately bored and exhausted. But when she tries to return to her rooming house apartment no one knows her and her apartment is occupied by someone else. Cavender has cancelled out her old identity. Now Agnes is sad and she begs Cavender to let her go back to her old life. Reluctantly he agrees. Now Agnes is deliriously happy but Cavender is in despair. He has failed to change Agnes’ life and is sure to be demoted.
And sure enough, his heavenly superior officer is sadly disappointed in Cavender’s failure and is about to demote him when he looks down and sees how happy Agnes is. And since Cavender’s job was to make her happy, then by definition he had succeeded. Cavender’s boss praises him and says that Cavender will get more cases like Agnes. As Cavender heads off he clandestinely smokes a forbidden cigar in Heaven.
This is one of those overly sentimental episodes that tugs on the heart strings. But it’s also a comedy and it also has a good cast and the location is old New York of which I am a native and for the demise of which I mourn. I’ll say I’m a sap for liking this episode but I do. B.
04JUN2019 – Photo of the Day
03JUN2019 – Photo of the Day
Farage and Trump
President Trump is scheduled to spend four days (June Third through Sixth) in Britain to commemorate the seventy fifth anniversary of D-Day. Queen Elizabeth will throw a state banquet at which all the parliamentary leaders will attend. But the real meeting that everyone is interested in is not supposed to happen. Prime Minister May has uninvited conservative gadfly Nigel Farage to Buckingham Palace and so the only way that the meeting will happen is through Trump’s and Farage’s own organizations setting it up. How ironic is that? The two leaders who demonstrably represent the will of the common people of their respective nations have to constantly battle against the elitists in their own parties to achieve any part of the agenda the people have mandated they accomplish.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the refusal of the Tory leadership to honor the Brexit vote. The people of the United Kingdom voted unequivocally to leave the European Union. But here we are three years later and nothing has been accomplished. The Tories under Theresa May’s inept leadership have botched the Brexit effort and at this point the Remainers in their ranks are poised to prevent Brexit, even though it will doom the Tories’ majority in Parliament, leaving the Left to run the country.
But jumping into the fray is Nigel Farage. He was the moving spirit behind the original Brexit movement but after its passage he dropped out of the public eye. But three years of dithering by the Tories was too much for him. Only six weeks before the British EU parliamentary elections he formed a new party called (of course) the Brexit Party and won more seats than the Tories and Labor combined. Using this victory as a second Brexit vote he is now warning the Tories that if they don’t accomplish Brexit by Halloween, he’ll be waiting for them in the next general election and sweep them and the Labor party out of power.
Theresa May has declared her resignation and there should be a new Tory prime minister by the middle of July. If it’s Boris Johnson or another Brexiteer it’s possible that Brexit can be accomplished. Perhaps Farage’s threat will be enough to convince the Remainers that their intransigence will energize the country’s majority to sweep them out of Parliament and give the government over to the Brexit Party. It’s hard to say.
Either way we see Nigel Farage as an outsider from the business world jumping into the political arena to wrest control of the levers of power away from a supposedly conservative elite that has decided to thwart the will of its constituents in order to cozy up to the very globalist establishment bureaucracy from which Britons voted to escape. Well, if that’s not essentially Donald Trump with a British accent I don’t know what is.
I think it would be useful to have a meeting between Trump, Farage and Boris Johnson. Farage and Johnson, if they coordinate their activities can make the Brexit a reality. Trump can be the facilitator to help convince the British people that the Hard Brexit horror story that the elites have told them is only a fiction. By highlighting the booming American economy, he can prove to them that managed decline doesn’t have to be the fate of the middle class.
Of course, it’s risky for politicians to be seen getting too cozy with foreign leaders (unless they’re Leftists of course) even if it’s the President of the United States. But in this particular case I think meeting with Farage will be very good for both Trump and Farage. Seeing Farage’s stock increase will tend to focus Johnson’s mind on how important it is to get Brexit done. And indeed, accomplishing Brexit is virtually the only way the Tories have of staying in power.
But personally, what I’d love to hear is what these two men will say to each other when the video cameras and microphones aren’t on. Both of them have demonstrated that they understand how to reach the middle-class people directly. And because of that both have been attacked mercilessly by their opponents in the Media and the governing elites of both parties. I have to imagine they would enjoy just comparing notes and telling war stories. It would be like two magicians comparing experiences and trading secrets. Maybe Trump and Farage can reach out to other populist leaders within the anglosphere and beyond (e.g., Italy) and coordinate strategy against the globalists. They could form a sort of anti-globalist UN. They could call it the DN, the Disunited Nations.
So let’s hope that Trump’s trip to Britain provides some positive energy for both the American and British Right. And let’s hope that the new Tory prime minister works with Farage to convince the Remainers to support Brexit (or else).
Trump and Farage point to the peril that threatens our world. The elites have gamed democracy. And the only thing that stands in the way of some kind of repressive, decadent, roman empire-like world is a small group of independent businessmen who are defying their own class and providing the middle class with a voice and a champion. It can’t be reassuring to know that everything we believe in is hanging on the thread of a handful of men. But let’s pray that our luck holds out long enough to battle back from the edge of the cliff. And let’s make sure Trump appoints a worthy successor. After all, unlike Britain where a prime minister can stay in power for decades, an American president only gets eight years at most.
Blade Runner 2049 – A Science Fiction Movie Review
I saw Blade Runner in 1982. It was a dystopic sci-fi story based on a Philip K Dick story, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Harrison Ford is a cop named Rick Deckard whose job is to terminate runaway androids (replicants), he’s called a blade runner. The movie was constructed as a film noir with Deckard in love with a woman that he knows to be a replicant. The movie is full of dark violent imagery. And the story has at its core the concept of the inherent dignity of all human life and the injustice of denying anyone freedom. And Rutger Hauer was a lot of fun running amok as a brilliant homicidal replicant named Roy Batty.
Since this is Orion’s Cold Fire, I feel it is necessary to record here Roy’s final speech before dying:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears…in…rain. Time to die.” It’s effective, both dramatically and emotionally. In point of fact it’s the best thing in the movie.
Blade Runner 2049 is the sequel to this movie. It’s about thirty years after the first movie and K (played by Ryan Gosling) is a replicant who works for the Los Angeles police department as a blade runner. While terminating a rogue replicant he detects a body buried under a tree on the replicant’s farm. Forensic evidence points to the body belonging to the replicant that Deckard ran away with at the end of the first movie. And the forensics shows that she gave birth to a child. This is supposed to be impossible and so frightens the law enforcement establishment that they order K to find the child and terminate it and destroy all evidence of its existence.
But based on evidence associated with the child in K’s search he begins to believe that he is that child. Because of the usefulness and efficiency of having replicants fertile, Niander Wallace, the wealthy, brilliant and evil CEO of the replicant manufacturing corporation wants to find the child in order to learn the secret of its ability.
This scenario sparks all manner of fights and chases and clues are found and people are hunted down. Eventually K finds the woman who delivers the child and learns he is not the child. He finds Deckard (reprised by Ford) and reunites him with his daughter.
I thought it was an awful movie. It was full of off-putting action, boring and confusing dialog and unsympathetic characters. Even as science fiction it didn’t make any sense. We can currently read the entire genome of any human being. How could it be possible for a future world that could produce synthetic humans not be able to make them fertile. Also, since as we learned in the first movie, these replicants were born adult and only lived a few short years, how could having them gestate other replicants make any sense? They would be born infants and take twenty years to mature. Or even if in the meantime replicants now lived longer why were humanoid slaves needed at all? The advances in artificial intelligence showcased in the movie made the need for android slaves nonsensical.
But honestly, all that is beside the point. The movie was terrible.