Author: photog

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.

Well, on with the Show

photog Current Events

I was watching a video of Jake Tapper talking about his hard-hitting investigative journalism about why no one knew that Joe Biden’s brain had turned into mush.  Apparently, it’s the fault of Democratic politicians and operatives in the White House and the Congress!  Astonishing.

So, when Morning Joe Scarborough said that the present Joe Biden was the best, sharpest Biden based on his long conversations with “the guy” how was the Democratic coverup responsible?  When all these reporters including Jake Tapper covered Biden as he mumbled and bumbled and stumbled his way through his term how could it be someone else covering up what we all could see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears in the few instances where they allowed him out in public.  Surely, they saw a thousand times as much mumbling, bumbling and stumbling in their daily contact with the president of the United States.

Obviously, it’s laughably ridiculous to even try to pretend that they weren’t the primary agents of the coverup of Joe Biden’s precipitous mental and physical decline.  It was their job to report on what commons sense would declare a problem with Joe Biden.  And it was their job to then ferret out what exactly was going on with the Biden administration’s cabinet and why they weren’t deciding on applying the twenty-fifth amendment.

Tapper is writing this book as if he’s some great truth teller but he did nothing to prevent this country from being governed by the lower-level bureaucrats and cabinet secretaries who should have been accountable to the president of the United States but instead did whatever they wanted to.  So, the mainstream media is going through this charade; “Oh how could we have been taken in by these awful Democratic operatives?  How did they fool us when all we wanted was the TRUTH?

Well, all this shows, undeniably that the mainstream media is totally and unchangeably in the tank for the Democrats; yesterday, today and forever.  And no amount of play-acting can any longer fool anyone except the stupidest of Americans.  Oh, sure, the idiots on PBS can still go through their routine on television about how they’re non-partisan, right down the middle.  But the jig is most definitely up.

I’m sure someone will buy Jake Tapper’s book.  And he will identify some of Joe Biden’s goofier henchmen as the real villains in the case of Joe Biden’s missing brain.  But let’s be clear.  Except for Fox all the large news organizations are a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat party and never write or speak a word that isn’t completely reviewed and approved by the people who run the Democrat party.

And you can confirm this by how all of these independently owned and operated corporations use the exact same wording whenever they have a response to a situation where the Democrats are in trouble.  Someone provides an approved statement that all of the puppets on the various channels parrot back word for word.

Well, on with the show!