Month: July 2026

19JUL2026 – Quote of the Day

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The universe is a thought of God. After this ideal thought-fabric passed out into reality, and the new-born world fulfilled the plan of its Creator—permit me to use this human simile—the first duty of all thinking beings has been to retrace the original design in this great reality; to find the principle in the mechanism, the unity in the compound, the law in the phenomenon, and to pass back from the structure to its primitive foundation. Accordingly to me there is only one appearance in nature—the thinking being. The great compound called the world is only remarkable to me because it is present to shadow forth symbolically the manifold expressions of that being. All in me and out of me is only the hieroglyph of a power which is like to me. The laws of nature are the cyphers which the thinking mind adds on to make itself understandable to intelligence—the alphabet by means of which all spirits communicate with the most perfect Spirit and with one another. Harmony, truth, order, beauty, excellence, give me joy, because they transport me into the active state of their author, of their possessor, because they betray the presence of a rational and feeling Being, and let me perceive my relationship with that Being.

Friedrich Schiller

Bring on the Razzle-Dazzle

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So last night Trump gave the speech and revealed that hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens are on the voter rolls and the Chi-Coms were in charge of the data link for automated voting machines for millions of votes.  And that’s great.

But when does someone go to prison for it?

If it’s just a matter of saying it, what does that do?  I mean, I already know all this.  And the Democrats who ran all this stuff certainly know about it.  But if it’s just talk what does that do?  I guess he was trying to put pressure on the Republican Senate Leader to pass the Save America Act.  Okay, good!  But will it work?  Will Thune play ball?

Maybe I’ve just become a curmudgeon.  I don’t seem to have the enthusiasm I used to have for the Trump shuffle.  Sure, all of the razzle-dazzle probably gets some points with the general public and maybe it upsets the Left when their chicanery is showcased on the six o’clock news.  But I’m hoping for something a little more substantial.  For instance, I heard that the feds have something on Gavin Newsom’s wife’s business that’s making a lot of money off of the State of California.  Well, why not arrest the Newsoms and indict them for mopery and dopery?  Now that would be worthwhile and fun at the same time.  And in the same vein, what about the fraud going on in Minnesota?  Shouldn’t the FBI have Tim Walz about ready for indictment too?

Well, anyway, you can see where I’m going with all this.  This is Trump’s second term and he’s already fired all the hacks that were slowing him down in his first term and has his own people in place so I guess I expected him to get some revenge for the various railroading prosecutions they put him through over the last few years.

But maybe Trump knows best.  His 2024 election win must be in the top ten political miracles of the last hundred years.  So, I’m not going to jump on the “Trump is doomed” bandwagon.  It seems to me that he has already achieved an enormous amount just by opening the eyes of millions of conservative voters to the sad truth about the Republican establishment and its lack of interest in actually conserving anything.  Maybe he won’t have the chance to “make America great again” before 2029 but he at least started the fight and gave a lot of people hope for the future.  So, when he gives us the razzle-dazzle, I roll my eyes up and walk away from the tv.  But I’ll leave the gloom and doom to the pundits getting paid for it.

So, if the Democrats take the House and even the Senate, Trump will still be able to do his work by executive order and existing law.  Will he transform the United States into a conservative wonderland?  Absolutely not.  Will he be a positive force for good?  Absolutely.  Bring on the razzle-dazzle.

18JUL2026 – Quote of the Day

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There are three lessons I would write, —

Three words — as with a burning pen,

In tracings of eternal light

Upon the hearts of men.

Have Hope. Though clouds environ now,

And gladness hides her face in scorn,

Put thou the shadow from thy brow, —

No night but hath its morn.

Have Faith. Where’er thy bark is driven, —

The calm’s disport, the tempest’s mirth, —

Know this: God rules the hosts of heaven,

The habitants of earth.

Have Love. Not love alone for one,

But men, as man, thy brothers call;

And scatter, like the circling sun,

Thy charities on all.

Thus grave these lessons on thy soul, —

Hope, Faith, and Love, — and thou shalt find

Strength when life’s surges rudest roll,

Light when thou else wert blind.

Friedrich Schiller

Loan Them Smokey the Bear

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So, we’re heading into day three of the yellowish/brownish/greyish-sky world.  Apparently, Canada is burning to the ground and we’ll be buried in a five-hundred-foot pile of ash by sometime around Labor Day.  Well, it’s for a good cause after all.  Once all of the Canadians have been incinerated, we can proceed to frack all the hydrocarbons out of the ground and turn the Great White North into a theme park of some sort.  Of course, the only Canadian I knew well was actually a great guy.  He was a French Canadian and he had a fantastic sense of humor and was a great fan of American pop culture.  And he was amazingly honest.  He was a great believer that Quebec should secede from Canada and was bitterly disappointed that his countrymen voted No on the referendum.  But his pride in his French identity remained strong.  Until, that is, his company transferred him to the Paris office.  It was like a dream come true.  But when he got there and tried to embrace his long-lost French brethren, they told him quite insultingly that he wasn’t French, he was “North American!”  His heart was broken.  But he rebounded and from then on, he recognized himself to be a North American.

Well, I hope he’s still living here in the States because based on the weight of ash weighing down my roof, I have to assume the only thing left uncarbonized up there is Hudson Bay.  Now I know that Canada has embraced physician assisted suicide so hopefully one of the prescribed methods is roasting because that would be relatively economical at this juncture.  I mean all you have to do is head northwest and eventually you’ll find the flame wall and after that it should be fairly simple to achieve unalive.

But I mustn’t sell Canada short.  It did give us John Candy and the SC TV troupe.  Interestingly, they always portrayed Americans in their most popular movies so I don’t know if it was their Canadian-ness that made them so funny.  And I guess we also got Mike Myers from them too.  And they have oil, coal, gas, gold, uranium and lumber so Canada used to have a lot of potential before it burned to the ground.  I’m sure Trump will figure out a way to monetize what’s left of it.  Whatever that idea will be, it will include branding the enterprise with the name “Trump” somehow.  Although maybe instead he’ll rename it West Greenland because he really liked the whole Greenland acquisition idea.

From my own point of view, if I was looking for a way to renovate a carbonized Canada, I think I’d give the whole thing back to the Indians.  Why not.  It’s enormous and loaded with valuable resources and the people living there are annoying, so give it to the people who they’re always saying they stole it from.  If they feel so bad about their theft then let them assuage their guilt and finally shut up about it.  But the deal will be that they’ll have to do a much better job of putting out forest fires.  We can loan them Smokey the Bear.  Seems fair.

Fingers Crossed Again

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Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Bernie Sanders, even Donald Trump.  Look at all these old decrepit people who supposedly run our country.  Shouldn’t we institute some age limits?  And we can grandfather anyone who was already in government before the law passed.  But come on!  This is ridiculous.  I mean, even if Mitch McConnell is technically alive, he’s as pathetic as Feinstein when her “handlers” had to push the voting button for her on the floor of the Senate.  Everyone has seen the video clips of when he “froze up” during an impromptu interview inside the Capitol.  He looked like an animatronic figure in Disneyland glitching on its program.  It was absurd.

Now I know it’s hard to get good people to run for Congress.  Competent people would rather work for a living but something has to be done to raise the level of these people.  Even a lot of the young ones are morons.  I mean, I know I’m just venting here.  To fix all of this will take the concerted effort of a lot of smart people who prefer to work in the private sector because it pays better and is much more interesting but if our republic is going to survive as something more than just the plaything of oligarchs and demagogues something will have to be done to bring competence and accountability to Washington.

I think the first thing that we’ll have to demand is that anyone who serves in Congress will have to forego trading in the stocks of companies whose business is affected by government policy.  That’s a minimum.  Pelosi has already made a mockery out of legal insider trading to such a degree that the law forbidding it should have her name attached to it.

But I will confess I have no idea how we’re going to fix all this.  The lobbyists run Washington and trying to remove their influence would probably get a bunch of people killed trying to do it.  But it has to be done if things are ever going to improve.  The last time large scale reform was tried was during FDR’s administration.  Now a lot of what he did was awful.  He was practically a communist himself.  But he was trying to help poor people during a terrible business collapse.  So, we don’t need a communist.  We need someone with a mandate and a supermajority in Congress to start fixing a lot of dysfunctional policies.

Unfortunately, there is just as much chance that the next populist president will be more in the shape of a Mamdani as a Trump.  So, things may get a lot worse instead of better.  But even though I’m starting to get ancient, somehow, I have the feeling that within my lifetime things may come to a head.  We’ve been vacillating back and forth between Left and Right.  For better or worse I think something happens and the country will break one way or the other.  Fingers crossed it breaks our way.