Month: May 2025

Escape from New York 2025

photog Current Events, OCF, Reclaiming the Family , ,

Three down, four to go.

So, yesterday I went to Brooklyn for a family reunion.  Driving through the Bronx and Queens I could see the Manhattan skyline and as much as the city has become a cesspool, that skyline is beautiful and impressive.  It’s a bittersweet sight.  My family has lived in New York City for a hundred and forty years.  We loved it and were proud of its grandeur and dynamism.  And now?  Well, pride is impossible.  Just within the time we were travelling down the streets of Brooklyn I could see thuggery and depravity on display.  A city of eight million people that used to be a showcase of culture, business and the Arts reduced to third world barbarity.

Now it’s a dysfunctional space where crime, poverty, homelessness and drug-use dominate the landscape.  It infects everyone who lives there.  It degrades all the magnificent monuments of the past and makes a mockery of their former achievements.  And it makes travelling into its bowels dangerous, frightening and infinitely difficult.  Where can and can’t you drive?  Where can you park your car and find it in one piece when you return?  Where can you walk in the day but not at night?  All the fun questions of NYC urban life.

But ultimately it was worth it all.  For the second time in a few months, I saw members of my extended family that I haven’t otherwise seen in decades.  I met the second and third generations on these branches of the family tree and saw the family resemblances and the new additions to the stock.  Charming.

Ultimately America is convulsing under the forces that the elites can bring to bear.  How we react and compensate for these disturbances is all we have any power over.  My family, for the most part, has abandoned the cities and looked for opportunities and safer surroundings where we could find them.  And that process continues.  Those that stay in these dangerous areas tend to pay a heavy price.  There are physical and mental health consequences to trying to raise children in a hellscape.  Premature death is not unheard of.  And it’s sad to see this reality.  But it’s inspiring when you see someone who has struggled with the traps of that world overcoming the problems and succeeding.

And when it’s over we always have the epic, “Escape from New York!”  I was riding shotgun and the death-defying feats of my driver were truly inspiring.  You haven’t experienced real terror until you’ve cut across five lanes of traffic to make an exit on the BQE.  But we got out and then my drive home from the suburbs was uneventful.

When I reached home Camera Girl was entertaining grandsons Tertius and Quartus with a hockey game on television.  Apparently, this New England sport has caught on with this generation of my descendants.  And I have no objections although I myself have never been able to see the puck on television.  I have to go by the noise of the crowd to know when the puck has actually ended up in the net.  Mostly I just watch the players assaulting each other around the periphery of the rink.  Which is entertaining in its own right.  By the time the boys left it was after midnight and I crashed into the blessed oblivion of sleep.

Well, this was late for obvious reasons.  And the next few days will be equally sketchy because of my slightly punchy condition and the length of my workdays tomorrow and Tuesday but I will attempt to produce some kind of content.  Adios.

Tom’s World – 17MAY2025 – Pain

photog Current Events, Guest Contributors, TomD , ,

Tom | Flickr

TomD

I had something similar about 12 years ago, on a weekend. It was days before I could get to a dentist who then kicked me to a dental surgeon. But he did take pity on me and wrote a few days supply of some opioid for me. Talk about relief! Before, the incessant throbbing precluded all life functions except misery.

There are so many drug addicted people out there that opioids are being withheld from non-addicted people who really have a short term need.

Other than post surgical on two occasions, the only other time I need opioids was from what I think was whooping cough decades ago. Once I started coughing, I would go into a painful fit of it that would last minutes and reoccur several times an hour. My throat was so raw that I could barely talk. A codeine cough syrup was an immediate and blessed relief.

On occasion, you need opioids and you really need them. It’s a shame that events have made Dr’s and DD’s so reluctant to proscribe them that even people like yourself can’t get them when needed.

In the meantime, the true abusers have an immense, cheap and potent supply of much stronger drugs. As a testament to the Law of Unintended Consequences, it looks like the hard restriction of opioid from the abusers had the result driving them and creating the flood of cheap fentanyl. So now, it looks like the only people who can’t get pain killers are the legitimate users.

Photog Agonistes

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner ,

About a year ago I bit into a pumpernickel bagel and there must have been a small rock in it.  Don’t ask me how.  Anyway, the molar I bit down with (I’ve since learned it’s called #31) was killing me so I went to my trusty dentist and told him I must have busted it.  He x-rayed it and poked and prodded it (Oh joy!)  And declared it okay.  Slowly it seemed to get better and I took a watch and wait approach.  Two weeks ago, I was chewing on oatmeal.  Oatmeal!  There’s nothing more innocuous than oatmeal.  Right?

Good old #31 made a cracking noise and provided me with a whole new definition of pain.  So, I knew I had a bunch of things that had to get done this week and next week so I decided that if I didn’t chew food on my right side, I could make it through and then go see the Doc.  Well two days ago that strategy failed catastrophically.  The tooth was throbbing and aching really awfully.  So yesterday I went to the dentist hoping he’d fix it before Saturday when I was starting a trip.  Instead, he punted to an outside endodontic practice.  Well, I wasn’t going to get an appointment yesterday.  It’ll be next Thursday!  In desperation I told him I needed something for the infection and pain and he gave me the generic amoxicillin prescription and a friendly pat on the shoulder.

Well, the amoxicillin has been in my system for a little over a day and it has brought the pain down from blinding stabbing pain to grinding ache.  But for some reason I’m incredibly tired and kind of feverish.  So, here’s the thing.  I have a super long travelling day tomorrow and a social occasion.  If I get home Saturday night, I’ll have Sunday to rest.  If I don’t then I’ll go from that directly to a two-day event at work with each day running about fifteen hours.  Then Wednesday I have to drive a friend to a doctor’s appointment about an hour away.  And then Thursday I get to go to the endodontist to be vivisected and dumped bleeding and groaning on the sidewalk before driving home.

This is a warning that output and quality on the site for the next six days will be very questionable.  If I start sounding loopier than usual it’s the gangrene talking and not me.  Well, anyway I’ll do my best.  The quotes and photos are already in queue and I will endeavor to get the stuff on the site but there may be some late posts.  Mea culpa, mea culpa.

Camera Girl tells me I’ve been like a pathetic loser and a baby who needs pity; pieta (although in the dialect of her family’s Italian it’s pronounced as if it’s spelled “peacod.”  Well, she’s probably right.  I would give a thousand dollars to stay home for the next week.  But promises were made and responsibilities are non-negotiable.  So, raise the curtain on my Greek Tragedy, “Photog Agonistes.”  Count no man fortunate until he is safely dead.

End of whine.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 16MAY2025 – Why Trump?

photog ArthurinCali, Current Events, Guest Contributors, Trump

“Why is Trump popular? Can’t people see that a lot of it is all an act and showmanship?”
-Progressives, Democrats, Liberals, RINOs, Legacy Media
This line of attack and argument has been used for a decade now to no avail against supporters of Trump. Calling him fascist, calling his supporters fascist (and Nazis, ofc), insinuating that everyone is stupid (low-information is the code phrase) to believe that he is anything but the Devil incarnate is the only approach the Left continues to take. They keep missing the one element to the enduring popularity of Trump: Many believe that he actually loves America. That’s it.
Look at the full transcript of his initial speech in 2015 when he came down the escalator to announce he was running for president. Read it in its entirety and notice something missed from the media coverage that a lot of Americans picked up on. While MSM focused in on the comments about illegal immigration on the southern border and how much of a meanie Trump was for saying out loud not everyone coming to the country will be flag-waving, apple-pie eating Americans, the important meat of the speech centered on the plight of large swathes of America where the financialization of the economy had left them in the dust. This spoke to those who remembered the mockery of phrases like, “Learn to Code” and “Bitter clingers to religion and guns.” Long memories of promises not kept by past “conservatives” extolling the false benefits of NAFTA or free trade agreements. How no one in political blinked an eye as their towns and cities were hollowed out from these policies. The GOP ‘Grifted off Patriotism” for decades, showing hardly the slightest concern for their political base.
He isn’t perfect and we all know that. Yet, just by a figure like him occupying the American political landscape he has pulled back a curtain and revealed to many how vacuous the platitudes are from Progressives and their sycophant media truly are. For this, identifying the powerful forces working against the American people, he has done the entire country a tremendous service.

Fascism, Populism, Nationalism, MAGA, Trump

photog Current Events, Trump , , , ,

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”  What’s in a name?  Well, it’s the start of trying to define what we are talking about.  And what we are talking about is the movement that Donald Trump has conjured out of thin air.  He has breathed life into the Right after the establishment Republicans had managed to beat it and its proponents into the ground over the course of the last sixty-five years.

Why he did it?  I wonder how many people actually have the answer to that question.  Maybe even Trump doesn’t really know why.  How he did it is clearer.  Trump is a salesman or more accurately he’s a huckster, a flim-flam man.  He sells snake oil.  And because of that training he could see that the Republicans and the Democrats were conning us.  And because they weren’t conning us out of our pocket money but out of our freedoms and our descendants’ well-being, he decided to expose them.  And the results were tremendous.  He has pole-axed every fake conservative that has faced him.  Think of Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney if you need examples of his victims.  These men were the most respected conservative leaders of their time.  Now they’re laughing stocks and walking/talking memes for what a fake conservative looks like.

So, does Trump have a political philosophy?  If he does, it’s very pragmatic.  I think he looks at himself as our business agent.  He’s trying to cut the best deal for the American people that he can.  And I don’t think he cares whether he treats the rest of the world fairly.  He’s a cutthroat dealer and screwing over the other guy is just part of that trade.  But he’s also experienced.  He knows that China has some very strong cards and that he has to be realistic when bargaining with powerful and savvy adversaries.  He may be pro-Israel but he realizes that making a good deal with Iran is in America’s interest.  He has no desire to fight anymore middle eastern wars.  The same with Ukraine.  Tying himself to that slaughterhouse is a mistake.  Enabling some kind of deal is the smart play.

But there is some part of me that hopes he’s also doing all this because in some sense, no matter how vague the link is, he thinks of himself as one of us.  Maybe not a regular guy.  Maybe a prince to our paupers but still a fellow American.  Someone who could sit down at a table with one of us and eat a McDonald’s Big Mac and talk about what it was like to be a New Yorker growing up in the sixties and seventies when the city was a train wreck but the working class people living there still had a popular culture that was quintessentially American; the melting pot and egalitarianism and neighborhoods where the people actually knew who their neighbors were.  These were the people who built his hotels and skyscrapers and casinos.  Mob-connected construction bosses, ironworkers, masons and laborers.  Actual people who also happen to be Americans.

So is Trump a populist, a nationalist or a fascist?  No, he’s just Trump.  But he is an American and he’s doing something that no one else would.  He’s giving us a last chance to get our country back.  I hope he succeeds.