Month: August 2023

There Are Limits

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So, after spending the last few days eating fried foods and being pummeled by my descendants in Monopoly and other blood sports, I am finally resurfacing to catch my breath, look around at the state of the world, such as it is, and make a few rude comments.

I notice that the “news” consists of various Republican candidates for president speaking out in outrage about, well, everything.  And all of it is pretty predictable.  The only one I found amusing was Chris Christie.  Currently standing at a whopping 2.7% in the Real Clear Politics average, Christie will tell anyone who’ll listen, which tends to be MSNBC or CNN, that Trump is frightened to death of him.

Now I could imagine that there are things that Donald Trump is frightened by.  Being railroaded by a DC jury in one of the kangaroo courts he’s being tried in could be one of them.  Seeing another election stolen from him by the crooks in Philadelphia and Atlanta is probably another.  But the only thing about Chris Christie that inspires fear is being stuck in an elevator with him and plummeting to your death because of weight capacity issues.  In what sense is Chris Christie considered a Republican?  At best, he’s a liberal Democrat.  Maybe fiscally he’s somewhat moderate, somewhat, but in no way a conservative.  And didn’t Trump pummel Christie along with the rest of the seven dwarfs back in 2016?

Then there’s the RNC threatening to keep Donald Trump out of the debates if he won’t take the pledge to support the winner of the Republican presidential primary.  I mean, who are they kidding?  The various polls have Trump with somewhere between fifty and sixty percent of the vote right now.  The only way Trump loses the primary is if the RNC rigs the rules to prevent him from appearing on the ballot.  And if they do that, I’ll bet thirty to forty percent of Republican voters stay home on election day.

Nah, they’ll let him in the debates and they’ll let him win the primaries and the nomination.  This thing has a life of its own at this point.  A big chunk of the population knows we’re being scammed and they want this thing to play out to the last drop of poison.  After all, it’s not everyday you get to watch the “shining city on a hill” become a bona fide banana republic with the honest to goodness flim-flam man installed as president and with his bagman in plain view.  And then they’ll jail the political opposition.  Even the Perons in Argentina would have blushed at that agenda.

Yes, I think at this point we’re all along for the ride and we want to see it through.  I guess what we’re expecting is that once the Republicans lose 2024 that the parts of the country where the Democrats are minorities will start taking direct action to make their states as independent of the federal government as possible.

At least that’s what I’m expecting.  I want someone like DeSantis or Abbott or both to go on Tucker Carlson’s show or some other platform and say officially that Republicans have been shut out of Washington DC permanently and it’s time to find another way to prevent us from being treated as serfs by the oligarchs.

Until then we’ll just be waiting around with Republican senators and congressmen and presidential candidates making silly statements about how they’re going to drain the swamp and fire the Deep State and get Washington back to doing the people’s work.

And I’m hopeful that it might happen.  After all, Biden has had three years to wreck this country and he’s done an amazing job of it.  The carnage is staggering.  Even Jimmy Carter didn’t do this thorough a job of crippling the United States.  So, if after all that, the election is declared in favor of that walking corpse then only a moron would still think that the election results reflect reality.

Well, anyway, that’s what reading the news stories today got me thinking about.  We all still have to do our best to keep the wheels from falling off the bus and we all still have to make the doughnuts but at least none of us has to believe that Donald Trump is afraid of Chris Christie.  There are limits.

Fugit Inreparabile Tempus

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The sands of the hour glass run out on Summer 2023.  The various grandchildren are back from their vacations and soon their world will be submerged into the confines of the classroom.  But for the next two weeks their parents will be scrambling to keep the kids busy while all of the various work schedules re-mesh after summer.

And at a time like this, grandparents can be really useful.  Camera Girl will be a veritable general.  She will wield a spatula like a baton, whipping up scrambled eggs, pancakes, grilled cheese sandwiches and spaghetti and meatballs as the moment requires.  I will be more like the NCO trying to maintain order among the troops and where necessary preventing mayhem.  I will be more or less on duty for the duration.

I will try to provide content as best I can but without a doubt there will be some gaps on the site as is probably already apparent.  Well, in these dog days we all have to make do.  But there will be plenty of fascinating developments in the fall.  Most likely the world will be exploding in all directions and in all senses of the word by the end of September.

I think the days of the Silicon Valley miracle are coming to an end.  I think the next bust is upon us and among the casualties, most of the companies that have been providing news and entertainment content are going to disappear.

The interesting thing to see is who will be the survivors.  And right in the center of this trend is Elon Musk and his bet on X.  Can he make that bet pay off?  Not being any kind of technology maven, as far as I know, his chances are precisely 50/50.  But even the Googles and the Facebooks don’t have much better than those odds to survive long term.

The basis for our information economy hasn’t reached any stable equilibrium and all of these companies are to a certain extent monopolies that the surveillance state allows to exist.  What will happen in the future is completely indeterminate.  But for some reason Elon Musk seemed to think he could run one of these companies without the blessing of the feds.  Now whether he’s changed his mind about that or not is a question.  Free speech is a bold claim in 2023.  Can it actually exist in America?  That’s what everyone wants to know.

But almost as difficult to know is whether even fake news can make a profit anymore.  Do serfs really need the news?  And would they actually pay to read it?  It seems unlikely in the extreme.  But it’s an important question.  We’re all forced to pay for our cable bill and out of that we pay CNN and MSNBC to shovel horse manure through the copper and fiber-optic wires that run down our streets.  And they shoot it up to cell towers and bounce it off satellites.  But eventually when only Guatemalan and Congolese Americans are left will they be willing or even able to pay for a cable bill?  And why would they care what Rachel Maddow or Anderson Cooper has to tell them about Joe Biden or Dylan Mulvaney?

It just seems to me that all of this we see, YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and all the rest is ephemeral nonsense to be swept away along with virtual reality headsets and transgender influencers.  It’s all just absurd nonsense like flag pole sitters and gold fish eating college kids.  Pretty soon the reality of our national debt is going to hit home and then we’ll find out what we’re willing to spend money on.  The answer is probably bread and not much else.

But here at the end of the silly season I’ll enjoy the warmish weather and ignore the periodic sprinklings of volcanic ash that filter down from the mouth of Vesuvius.  I mean what are the odds?