Month: June 2025

Ramping Up the Trump

photog Current Events, Trump , , ,

Looking around it appears that the Trump administration intends to make an example of Los Angeles.  If we really were living in an analog of the Roman Empire then we could expect all kinds of fun.  All the men would be put to the sword; the women and children would be led away into slavery to the sound of their lamentations and the ground would be sown with salt.  Today the best we could hope for would be a perp walk for the Mayor of LA and the Governor of California.  But that would be a start.  But it appears that Trump is serious about confronting the sanctuary state on its home turf.

What that looks like is ICE lurking around Home Depot and scooping up the illegals looking for work.  As expected, the NGO’s have deployed their permanent college students with bull horns and whistles and assigned street actors to riot.  And we see all the usual theater.  Masked weirdos throwing water bottles, Molotov cocktails, bricks or whatever comes to hand.  But there has been a surprise.  The feds are arresting the guys throwing bricks.  Yesterday I read that the guy throwing fire bombs has been charged with attempted murder.  Now that’s progress!

Following this the Mayor of LA decided to order a curfew.  That’s huge.  In a sense she’s declaring defeat.  She blinked.  Basically, she’s telling the shock troops to go home and wait for a better opportunity.  That’s huge.  Because Trump isn’t going home.  ICE and the FBI are ferreting out the people who organized the violence.  And they are still rounding up illegals.  Now, without a doubt what has been done so far is a drop in the bucket.  Half of LA is made up of illegal aliens and their children and grandchildren.  But unless all of this is public relations it looks very much like Trump is going to make deporting illegal aliens his dominant play.

And he should because it’s extremely popular and it allows him to show his opponents as complicit with illegal immigration and on the side of the foreigners in the street burning cars and throwing firebombs at law enforcement doing their jobs.

As far as the scope of deportation, I’m not worried about how slow it currently is.  Trump learns by doing and as he learns he will get better and more efficient.  By the end of his four years, he’ll probably have it down to a science and there will probably be a bullet train shooting fifty thousand illegals down to Mexico City every day (and he’ll get the Mexicans to pay for it too).

So, looking at Trump’s current strategy, I think he’s making gains on multiple fronts.  He hasn’t ended the Ukraine or the Gaza wars or gotten his “big beautiful bill” signed or annexed Greenland yet but he has gotten the military and the ICE personnel to begin the signature policy of the Trump administration; deporting the millions of illegals that Joe Biden inflicted on us.  And energy prices are coming down and that drives down inflation.

Keep up the good work Mr. Trump.

The Blue States are Hurting

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

Trump seems to have turned off the faucet that Biden was using to keep the blue states solvent.  A sense of panic is setting in and lots of towns are finding their voters are revolting against the budget increases that followed the end of the COVID gravy train (CARES Act).  All of the unfunded mandates that were paid for with that money now have to be paid for by the state and local governments.  And the local governments are squealing like stuck pigs because the state is hanging them out to dry.

 

In Dunwich it’s reaching a crisis.  There are grumblings against Cthulhu because he took credit for the CARES Act spending.  Now he’s being blamed for the higher taxes and another Great Old One; Azathoth is taking advantage of the outrage to challenge Cthulhu in the coming First Selectman race.  Azathoth’s campaign literature is branding his plan as MAGA (Make Azathoth Govern Again).

He’s handing out red hats and recently he’s started to take on a familiar orange tint.  His boldest campaign promise is that under his administration he would pledge not to eat anyone at public meetings or official town functions.  When asked for public comment by the local radio channel Cthulhu ate the reporter and walked out of the studio vowing to put a stop to all this “fake news” and misinformation.  He was quoted (from a distance) as saying, “This is madness.  If I can’t eat my constituency when they cross the line, then Dunwich would descend into anarchy and no one wants anarchy, except anarchists and I hate anarchists, even thought they taste really good.”

 

Outside of the Dunwich enclave the human (or somewhat human) local governments are probably going to have to tighten their belts a good deal.  Lots of services that everyone has come to think of as critical will be on the chopping block.  One of these is winter road treatment.  Salt, sand and other materials have surged in price this year and depleted supplies will likely bust the budgets of towns and cities if we have another normal winter like we had in 2024/25.  Likewise with neglected infrastructure and school costs.  The state has mandated very expensive special education requirements.  Providing these mandated services may mean that the rest of the students will lose out on curriculum and services like library and arts classes.

It’s believed by the local governments that if these services are curtailed that voters will agree to add them back into the budget.  But from what I’ve heard and seen this isn’t the case.  A revolt is going on and the angry voters in New England may finally have become fed up with the feckless spending that their politicians routinely legislate.  The next few weeks are going to be instructive as these towns and cities struggle to resolve the impasse that has developed.  The budgets are overdue and without a budget they can’t begin signing contracts and paying salaries.

I think I’ll go to Azathoth’s July rally.  I hear he dances a mean YMCA.

Can We Move on from the Zombie Apocalypse?

photog Literature, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy , ,

Since Night of the Living Dead premiered in 1968 there has been a steady stream of zombies.  Now that stream has become a raging torrent in the last ten years.  It’s been relentless.  TV shows, spinoffs, movies, sequels, commercials, comedies, romance novels, you name it.

But hasn’t it become an enormous bore?  First off, how ridiculous is the whole concept?  The rotting corpses of the dead are walking around attacking and devouring the living.  It’s really incredibly stupid as science fiction.  And as horror it’s so played out it’s hard to imagine there are still people willing to pay money to watch any more of this fare.

Isn’t it about time we came up with a more interesting apocalypse?  Even the Mad Max dystopia is better than zombies.  For instance, the Lord Humungus looks like he might have an interesting back story.  Maybe he was bullied as Schoolboy Humungus and would have preferred to rule the Wasteland with a more humane and progressive regime but you know how those dogs of war are once they’ve been unleashed.

After all, this is a big world full of all kinds of interesting people and customs and problems.  And with the Global American Empire seemingly winding down, writers and storytellers could concoct any number of fascinating local plot lines involving wars and criminal enterprises and local disasters that would require heroes and villains to give the audience their best efforts.

And of course, with the advent of AI and drones and all the other aspects of high technology leaving the precinct of science fiction and entering reality there really is no end to the possibilities available to a writer looking to thrill his audience with wholesale mayhem.  I hesitate to play up the bio-weapon genre because that comes too close to the “realistic” school of zombie apocalypse (ala the “I Am Legend” virus plotline).  But whatever the angle, the world is full of marvelous dangerous stuff where the most marvelous and dangerous stuff is human beings; live human beings not walking cadavers.

I am drawn to the idea of a future world where technology breaks down over the majority of the planet and has to be reignited by some local renaissance.  Maybe we reach peak oil and we get pushed back to steam locomotives and coal fired industry.  There could be some havens of modernity with old nuclear power plants limping along using fissile material scavenged from ICBMs.

And then some genius comes up with a new power source.  Or maybe it’s an old power source that he improves.  But whatever it is it would cause a ripple of change in this stalled out world.  And anyone with a little imagination can spin that into an epic of a bunch of novels.  In fact, it’s not that different from the Foundation books.  And of course, it’s a variation on the history of Western Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire.

Of course, there is probably someone reading this who looks at this the other way around and says, “Wait a minute!  Why not write a zombie apocalypse in Roman Britain?”  To which my only answer would be, “Damn you, George Romero!  Damn you to hell!!!!!!!!!!”