Author: photog

Goodbye Summer 2025

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So, Saturday (09AUG2025) is a big family party at the Compound.  Another grandson graduates from high school and begins college.  The next, next generation become adults and have all the same decisions and experiences in front of them.  And Camera Girl and I continue our campaign to get to play with progressively more distant descendants.  The hunt for great grandchildren is now the thing.

But the main thing is that I’m just providing the infrastructure; the indoor and outdoor venue and the grill.  The graduate’s parents will bring and cook the food and organize the kids’ activities and lifeguard the pool.  I’ll just be one of the kids tomorrow.  I intend to spend a portion of the event with my brothers talking about how passing the torch to the next generation feels for them.  There has been a threat of putting on a Shatner-Khan adjacent event.  Maybe put on one of his greatest hits.  If it happens, I hope it’ll be “Terror at 20,000 Feet.”  There can be nothing more definitively Shatner than that.

But I hope to spend most of the day eating burgers and dogs and potato salad and peppers and sausage.  And then playing pool with the grandkids and shooting the breeze with family that I don’t see very often.  This will be the last get together for the summer.  And everyone is getting older and travelling even the modest distances between us becomes more challenging every year.  So, these parties become more important.

I guess most of us are on the Trump train so there will be some Trump gloating going on.  We’ll keep it sotto voce because even among my close relatives there are a few folks of the other persuasion.  And I don’t see any need to start a fight.  Family solidarity is more important than scoring political points at a party.  That’s for sure.

A couple of days ago the goofy looking weather man on the Spectrum channel (my cable provider) told us that it looks like a very nice week with temperatures in the 80’s, low humidity and plenty of sun.  But then, just to prove he’s a jerk he went into a little spiel where he defined just how much daylight we lose over the course of August.  And just to show that he was intentionally spreading misery he finished off by saying, “But most people don’t like to be reminded of this sad fact.”  What a creep.

But he’s right.  The sun is lower in the sky.  It’s cooler than a few weeks ago and the sun is down earlier than it should be.  The leaves are starting to fall from the cherry trees.  The vegetable garden is definitely looking worse for wear and the flowers are starting to exhaust.  Last week the daylilies in the sheltered corner ran out of flowers.  There are still some smaller ones (Stella de Oros and orange ones) but they’re not the same.  The cone flowers will last a good long time but there aren’t anymore new flowers growing.  The only flowers still to come are the Montauk daisies and the wolfbane in October.

So summer is wrapping up.  The kids go back to school in two weeks and pretty soon the end of season Dunwich Fair with its First Selectman dunk tank (win at your own risk) and free werewolf neutering clinic will be upon us.  Well, it’s time for the party and goodbye Summer 2025.

Guest Contributor – Glenn W – 08AUG2025 – What Counts

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I’m very interested to see how this plays out. I worked for the Census Bureau for six years and who got counted in the decennial census was always very contentious. After every census the Bureau would be sued by several states who believed their population were undercounted (states always want to maximize their population to get the maximum number of congressional seats). The Census’ position always was that the Constitution states that they are to count the number of “persons” in each state without any other qualifiers. There is a historical basis for this since slaves were not citizens and they were to be counted (the 3/5 rule would be mute otherwise). Of course slaves were here legally. I suspect the legal folks at the Census Bureau are scrambling right now and I don’t know how they are going to officially react. We live in interesting times for sure.

Re-Counting the Census

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Wow.  Can he do that?  I guess he can.  This may turn out to be a really big deal.  How much might California’s population decrease if illegal aliens are discounted.  A million?  Three million?  Maybe more?  What if all of a sudden there are more people in Texas and Florida than New York and California?  Not to mention all the illegals in Illinois, Virginia and New Jersey.

So, this is Trump swinging for the fences.  I can’t imagine that the same federal judges that have challenged him on every executive order and every action he takes won’t write injunctions against this.  They may slow him down but I think the Supreme Court may back him on this if he can make the case that illegal aliens are being counted in defiance of the intent of the census to count how many Americans need representation in each state.

I listened to a little bit of a podcast where James Carville was freaking out over this and he said that if the Democrats can get the White House and both houses of Congress in 2028, they should immediately declare DC and Puerto Rico states and add six seats to the Supreme Court in order to claw back control of the federal government.  I took that to mean that he’s in a panic.  Trump is fighting gerrymandered fire with fire.  Massachusetts has been 100% Democrat for ages.  The Supreme Court has said that gerrymandering is not within their purview.  Since racial gerrymandering is no longer allowed, it’s only natural for the red states to copy states like Massachusetts and maximize the number of Republican house seats they can manufacture.

Trump is playing hardball and he’s doing it while he has the maximum clout he’ll ever have.  Could it backfire?  Not really.  It could fail to get all he’s looking to get but it’s not like the Democrats could ever get any angrier than the already are.  And this is the moment when the Democrats are as unpopular as they’ve ever been or maybe ever could be.  So, this is the time to strike.

We are living in very turbulent times.  We have elected Trump because the other Republicans were useless and dishonest.  We’ve hired a pragmatist who doesn’t like losing.  It certainly behooves us to back his play.  Any Republican wringing his hands or whining about alienating the Democrats is not to be listened to.  In fact, these are the people we must replace.  Trump has a vision of how to defeat the leftist political movement.  It entails restoring prosperity to the American middle-class and eliminating as much of the bureaucracy and the NGO’s that leech money and power from the federal government at the expense of the tax payers.  He is dead right.  Defunding USAID and other slush funds that feed the Left is brilliant.  Recounting the census is also brilliant.  He is doing everything he can to allow the real majority to get the government they want.  If he keeps up like this, it won’t be enough to add him to Mt Rushmore.  We’ll have to put him on the million-dollar bill (which will have to be added to circulation to allow for buying Starbucks coffee in a few years).

Mamdani and the Midterms

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It looks like the next wave of Democrat politicians, the ones that will displace Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden and even Kamala Harris are much more openly radical.  The more mainstream edge of this new wave are people like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.  They are communists but they are too stupid to actually figure out a strategy to put their absurd theories into practice.

The new wave is like Zohran Mamdani.  They unapologetically want to set up soviet style demand economies by expropriating money and property and giving it to the people who don’t work but will vote for him.  This is a major change.  And there are more of these people out there.  Omar Fateh is the Minneapolis version of Mamdani.  He’s challenging the already incredibly left-wing mayor Jacob Frey.  Both of these men plan to turn large cities (well Minneapolis is large, New York is gargantuan) into socialist experiments complete with real property seizure and redistribution, municipal grocery stores (that we assume would allow you to pay according to your means and take according to your needs) and mental health agents replacing police to move away from that whole crime and jail thing.

You have to ask yourself, “How can any of this possibly go wrong?”  Alright, stop laughing.

I think the timing of this is almost perfect.  It’ll be about a year after Mamdani’s election that the Congressional midterms will occur.  I’m guessing a year should be enough for total chaos to envelope Gotham City.  I won’t guess at how Minneapolis will fare.  It’s a very odd place and I don’t think the mayor is actually in charge the way he is in New York.  But New York’s fate should be enough to clue in the rest of the country about how well the Stalinists are able to handle large scale American government.

What I’m guessing is that the break down in law and order will be instructive.  I assume Trump won’t make anything easy for Mamdani.  He’s already threatening to cut off social funding for things like Medicaid and Medicare where he can show that illegal aliens are receiving benefits from the local and state governments.  Letting Mamdani’s administration sink under the weight of its own excess welfare benefits would prove the point that quixotic socialist boondoggles are a recipe for disaster in a megalopolis like New York with an enormous poor population that can’t be fed through taxing the rich and middle class.

Now maybe I’ll be proven wrong.  Maybe Mamdani is the future.  Possibly all along we’ve missed out on how giving away free stuff to anyone who doesn’t want to work is really the optimal strategy for running a society.  And in addition, getting rid of the police and the courts and the prisons will seamlessly transition us from a human society with crime suppressed by these listed means, into a utopia where everyone is good and just and crime doesn’t exist.  Well, I’m willing to take a bet on it.  If Mamdani is elected and doesn’t back out of his current positions I’d bet a hundred bucks that things will explode into chaos in less than a year.  And by chaos, I mean the Democratic party in New York will be screaming to impeach Mamdani and crime will become completely unmanageable.  Only time will tell but I’m feeling confident.