Author: photog

21AUG2026 – A Good Read

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Here’s a relatively even-handed article about the ongoing clean-up going on at “60 Minutes” by Bari Weiss.

Tick, Tick … Boom Bari Weiss blew up 60 Minutes. What if her version of the show is better?

It’s hilarious how the quotes by CBS veterans paint Weiss as some sort of MAGA puppet of the Trump administration when in reality she’s a New York Times veteran who’s also a liberal lesbian leftist.  But she is at least trying to imitate impartiality in the newsroom and that’s better than nothing.  Worth a read if you’re interested in how the dinosaur media is being dragged into the twenty first century kicking and screaming.

Trump’s Last Two Years

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Regardless of how little or how much the Democrats gain in the midterm elections Donald Trump will not have a congress that can legislate what he wants done in the country going forward.  So, what’s a great disrupter to do?

I think Donald should declare a state of emergency and fix some stuff.  I think he should use this state of emergency to balance the budget.  Unilaterally.  Unashamedly.  I guess it would be a revolutionary move.  But it’s needed.  The country has been bled dry by the titanic waste of the federal budget and waiting anymore time would be dangerous.  Now it’s not possible to eliminate a seventy trillion-dollar debt overnight.  It will take decades to do that.  But it seems necessary to at least make a start.  It’s shocking to think that the last balanced budget was under, of all people, Bill Clinton.  Of course, the “War on Terror” put an end to that but for the last quarter century American politicians have pretended that printing money endlessly was their God-given right.  Well, it’s not.  And acting like it is has brought us to the brink of hyperinflation.  So, calling it a state of emergency is, in my opinion, completely accurate.

Now, this would be a very large undertaking.  Slicing the budget down to size without undermining the stability of the economy or causing undue pain to the taxpayers requires the wisdom of a Solomon.  DOGE had the right idea about eliminating boondoggles, leftist set asides and waste but it was just the tip of the iceberg.  There are over a hundred years of malfeasance and stupidity in that seventy trillion-dollar debt and it will be necessary to close down whole governmental departments and cancel thousands of projects that either we don’t need or we can’t afford.  So, there will be many, many oxen gored during this effort.

Luckily, the most important asset for an operation of this nature is a very skilled salesman; someone who can sell the idea based on the belief that the ones benefitting from all this waste is anyone else than the long-suffering American taxpayer.  There’s nothing a taxpayer likes more to hear than that all those “leeches” out there are about to be removed from the federal budget and forced to do honest work or starve.  So, Trump can sell this based on the idea that trimming the waste will drive inflation down to a very tolerable minimum and eventually taxes can also begin to drop.  Not immediately of course.  The accountants have to figure out how long it takes to reduce seventy trillion dollars to zero.

Now I’ve been told that not having a debt is actually bad for the country and the world.  Well, I kinda don’t believe it.  Sure, government bonds and bills are a very attractive way to spread the costs of expensive programs and systems over the course of several years but making believe that a balanced budget is a bad thing doesn’t add up for me.  It’s one thing to buy a dishwasher on time.  It’s an entirely different thing to be in hock to loan sharks for amounts you can never pay back.  Donald put the United States on a permanent diet.  It’s an emergency.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 20AUG2026 – A Primer on New England Politics

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One thing to remember is a historical perspective. In the 40’s and 50’s New England was Republican, somewhere in the late 50’s to early 60’s a swing happened. Part of it I think was due to a shift in economy; much of manufacturing got up and left mostly for the South. Also, colleges shifted from very conservative to very liberal as the 60’s and 70’s went on. The Universities are a source of much of our growth through the 60’s as tech started to replace manufacturing.
The general character of the Old Line New Englander was fiscally conservative and relatively socially liberal (old meaning). In the cities, a far more liberal (modern meaning) variant (with a hint of that puritanism blended in) runs strong. And the populations of the cities and their near suburbs overwhelm the votes in the more old line/townie parts of the states.

Can we dig out of this? I’m not sanguine about that. MA, CT and RI and so overwhelmingly super liberal democrat in their legislatures that no reason reigns. On top of that RI and MA (and likely CT but I am less connected to that anymore) are rife with corrupt deals which feed back into the various Democrat politicians. VT and ME are overrun with hippy types that moved in and keep folks like Bernie and the other VT “Independent” senator in office. NH gets whipsawed back and forth as the balance swings, it is the most purple of the New England states, but it has voting laws (same day registration in particular) that let havoc happen at the towns containing UNH and Dartmouth. Maine is oddly split: the interior North is clearly Old Line New England and is actually one of its remaining bastions. But the coast (Portland and south) is VERY much indistinguishable from Boston suburbs in political bent. Just taking statewide offices from time to time is NOT sufficient. The state houses MUST be changed as that is where the power really lies. Without that, the feedback loop of Graft-> seats-> graft (repeat) can not easily be broken. If I had a guess, NH has the best chance to break the cycle. Its oddly large house means power doesn’t focus quite like it does in the other 5 states, so graft is less profitable. That combined with volatility in the seats weakens the loop. Unfortunately, when NH succeeds in starting to break away, it gets an influx of MA, VT, and ME folks who want the advantages but don’t buy into the politics, and we see that familiar seesaw effect as NH swings back to the Blue. I fear things will have to get MUCH worse for the head in their lower colon liberals to actually pop out and view the real world. Boston is Bad, but Not yet Detroit. Chicago or San Francisco bad, although Mayor Wu is trying REAL hard.

Muddling Through in Dunwich

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Being a Republican in New England is an awful fate.  Well, no, a Republican in New England is typically just a Democrat who doesn’t like high taxes.  He doesn’t have a problem with the social justice or the anti-white racism, just the loss of savings.  But for someone like me who is genuinely conservative, it’s horrific.  In every law and policy, you see misery and stupidity and what seems like the absolute worst governance imaginable.

Now, some of my fellow New England conservatives (of various stripes) are always hoping against hope that their neighbors will come to their senses and vote in a Mitt Romney or some other squishy “conservative” and fix the taxes, stop wasting money on welfare and get crime under control.  They say things like, “If we can just boost turnout of Republicans and Independents, we can fix these problems and show the Democrat voters that we’re the sensible choice for fair governance.

But these are just pipe dreams.  Sure, if the state after a decade or two of Democrat control has managed to empty the treasury and destroyed the credit rating of their specific New England state government, then surely, they will elect a Republican governor to restore fiscal sanity and prevent complete exsanguination.  But if the Republicans could read even the smallest lesson from history, they would see that this is just an emergency tactic.  Sort of like a rupture disk that prevents a catastrophic failure but is never meant to permanently regulate the system.  As soon as the emergency is over the powers that be will set to work pushing the system to the breaking point again.

Now, my opinion about these things doesn’t make me a very popular figure around Republican party circles.  What they want to hear is that things can be fixed and we’ll all live happily ever after.  Which reads like a fairy tale to me.  But the thing that gives me any hope at all is actually Michigan.  There is a blue state that seems to be slowly slipping back into purple and maybe red status before our eyes.  And maybe this is an evolution that worked its way through the death of one of the greatest American cities; Detroit.  Detroit and by extension Michigan was a union heavy population.  All the heavy industry, especially the auto industry played into the blue state model.  But over the course of decades these industries have been victimized by the rust belt decline in middle America and with Detroit’s shrinking population we seem to have reached the point where Republicans (at least MAGA Republicans) have a chance to get elected even to the US Senate.

And maybe that’s the only way blue states can be flipped.  They have to rot away to such an extent that the progressives leave out of desperation and all that remains are poor people who can’t escape.  Something equivalent may be happening in California.  But I think it will be decades before New England will reach anything like what California is experiencing.  More promising in the Northeast is New York City and State.  Here we see a case so extreme that even short-term changes may be enough to catastrophically destabilize the whole system.

But here in New England we’ll muddle along with just regular old progressive absurdity.  We’ll leave true insanity to the experts in Gotham and Los Angeles.

Spidey Gets It Done, Mission Accomplished

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I went with my three youngest grandsons to see the new Spiderman movie; “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.”  And shockingly, I actually enjoyed it.  We got there early enough to pick out good seats and let the kids buy mass quantities of popcorn and sugary drinks.  So reinforced by these provisions we took our seats and watched the half hour of advertisements and coming attractions for all kinds of useless products and awful movies.  Now it’s been a few years since we went to this theater and in the meantime, it went out of business and been refurbished by its new owners.  And they installed luxury pleather powered recliners instead of the usual crappy movie seats of yesteryear.  So far, so good!

So, I missed the previous Spiderman installment but I was told that in it another MCU character (Doctor Strange) performed some kind of magic-adjacent activity which eliminated knowledge of Peter Parker’s existence completely from the human race including all his friends and the girl (MJ) that he loves.  Now this seems particularly stupid but that is the situation.  So, one of the plots of this movie is Parker getting up the courage to tell MJ that she has forgotten that they were once in love.  Okay, that’s an even stupider plot element but let’s give the writers some slack to try and make that work.  Then there’s a plot element where Peter is having major problems with his spider powers.  His ability to shoot webs and other skills seems to come and go.  Okay, this is more of a standard superhero plot element so full speed ahead.

And finally, some telepath is able to take control of human minds and force them to attack a shadowy government agency called the Department of Damage Control (DODC) for some unknown reason.  I won’t give away any spoilers by saying that DODC isn’t a benign organization and the telepath controlling minds isn’t completely unjustified in these actions.

Well, before the end we have a whole sequence where Bruce Banner is telepathically controlled and forced to turn into the Hulk with predictable cataclysmic results and we find out that Spiderman has a quasi-working relationship with the comic book character “The Punisher” an Italian American New Yorker whose real name is Frank Castle.  Castle is a vigilante who doesn’t have as many scruples as Spiderman when it comes to using firearms to thwart criminals.  As an Italian American native New Yorker myself, I especially relished Castle’s extremely accurate Bensonhurst accent and vocabulary.  It felt like coming home.

Well, anyway, the plot moves along in a reasonably superhero-ish manner and naturally our hero comes out the other side with some progress in his personal problems but no permanent solutions so he can be just as conflicted in the next Spiderman movie sometime in 2028.  And that is all that can ever be said for a Spiderman movie.  Also, the special effects were especially deft and fun to watch.  So, the movie was quite entertaining and the boys enjoyed it thoroughly.  Or maybe it was the snacks.

Anyway, mission accomplished.  We returned home and Camera Girl loaded down a table with spaghetti and meatballs along with some biscuits that these grandsons especially love to dunk in a meat sauce.  What more could I ask for?