Author: photog

Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 03FEB2025 – The Dreaded White Stuff

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IMG_20250122_1139589052

Good luck with the snow. I grew up on the MA North Shore and then 40 years on the Northern Tier with the Air Force and Army. Heartily agree about freezing rain. We lost power for 27 days in Plattsburgh NY due to an ice storm back in ’98 (Thank Ghu for wood stoves and oil lamps), and saw a lot of VERY slick road and dead-stopped traffic due to iced pavement. Major reason for moving to South Carolina in 2014. And what happens in 2015? The first snow in 40 years, followed by more of the cussed stuff 10 years later! I tell ya I don’t get no respect!

Now That’s Showmanship

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Ah, Groundhog Day.  When northern America as one embraces a Bill Murray movie and tries to figure out a way to survive until winter gives up.  After a remarkably mild 2023/2024 winter, cold weather has reasserted itself and I have embraced the reality that I don’t live in a rational climate.  The pattern is one day of freezing rain and the next night, zero degrees Fahrenheit.  This is an extremely unhelpful arrangement.  Almost any depth of snow can be removed.  0-4 inches is handled with a snow shovel.  2-22 inches yields, for the most part to a snowblower or plow.  After that it get trickier, but it can still be done.  And the resulting cleared surface is generally very usable for walking and driving your car on.

A quarter to a half inch of ice is a disaster.  If the ground was very cold when the rain fell and then the air temperature dropped quickly and even worse if the wind really picked up, you end up with a layer that is almost impossible to remove unless you put road salt on it.  Unfortunately, I use well water so I don’t salt my driveway.  That’s very unfortunate.  Instead, I take a garden rake or a roofer’s shovel and I abrade the surface of the ice and then I sand it and then scrape it again to lodge the sand in the surface.  This works but it is extremely labor intensive.  So, I hate rain in the winter.  And lately it has become a very frequent occurrence.

Alright, enough whining.

So, what’s new?  Well, tariffs.  Trump has tariffs for Canada, Mexico, China and I assume a lot of other places.  And I hear he’s suspending all aid to South Africa while an investigation of anti-white land seizures and other worse actions is performed.  Wow.  Trump is going full steam ahead.  Every day I ask myself, “What’s left to do?  Nothing.”  But then he does three more things.  One of the things I’m very happy about is that Trump is cutting off the money supply to the NGO’s.  These organizations are funded by the US government but work directly against the interests and sometimes against the very laws of this country.  Here we are spending billions of dollars to eject illegal aliens while charities are spending billions of tax-payer dollars to feed, house and hide these very same illegal aliens.  Cutting off their funds is the most effective and fastest method of combatting the problem.  I’ll give him credit; Trump is proving to be a force to be reckoned with.  I don’t want to get my hopes up too high but it seems to me that there is a very good chance that he’s going to “fundamentally change the United States,” but for the better.  Sort of an anti-Obama.

Kennedy, Gabbard and Patel are up for votes in the Senate this week.  If I were to guess I’d say all three will need Vance as the tie-breaking vote.  And that’s actually me being optimistic.  There are some truly terrible Republicans in the Senate.  McConnel voted against Hegseth because he gets money from defense contractors and they’re worried Hegseth and Trump will end the gravy train.  I think it’s possible he’ll vote to confirm Patel because he doesn’t get paid by any lobby associated with the FBI.  Now there are plenty of Senators that get paid by the pharma lobby.  This might cause Kenedy to be rejected.

Update: Hat Tip to Tom D for the data

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top-medical-indust-receip

 

 

As for Gabbard, I think she’ll get through but I think Vance will break the tie.  So, I guess I’m cautiously optimistic.  Hopefully that’s more accurate than Democrats being nauseously optimistic on Kamala’s election prospects.

We’re getting 2-4 inches of snow tonight (they say).  I’ll be up very early to clear that before going to work tomorrow.  This will be a hectic week with some travel toward the end.  But I’ll be dutifully following the news coming from the Trump White House (the Greatest Show on Earth).  I keep waiting to hear that he’s declassified the Area 51 files and that he’s going to give a tour of the flying saucer and the pickled bodies of the space aliens.  Now that’s showmanship.

It’s Not Pretty

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The family gathering at the recent funeral down in New York City spawned another reunion up in New England.  A gaggle of my siblings gathered and we broke bread at a local diner that had a sign that touted their fried clams and ice cream.  Quite a combination.  But we had neither of these.  I had a Reuben and a cup of coffee and the rest of the crew went up and down the menu.  Somebody even got the pot roast and mashed potatoes.  And as we sat there and enjoyed our fare several of us remarked on the virtues of a good local diner and the fact that they seem to have disappeared from some locales where they were formerly ubiquitous.  Brooklyn used to have a ton of Greek diners and you could always get baklava at midnight after a movie or some other outing.  Now they’re all gone, or so it seems.

This being New England, baklava was not on the menu.  But this diner was one of a very few locations within a twenty mile radius that would be open much after 1 am.  And they had very courteous service which is also quite rare nowadays.  One very strange business practice, they’re a cash only establishment.

That’s another reason to hate the Biden administration and the Democrats.  The COVID lockdowns bankrupted so many small businesses including restaurants.  Sure, you can always go to Mickey D’s when you’re coming off a late shift or a date but the local diner was so much more welcoming a sight.  A place where you could order an actual burger and finish with some pie and ice cream.  That’s how I remembered the world back in the day before mega-corporations finished off all the mom-and-pop shops in America.  And sure, there are plenty of good chain restaurants that serve good food and do employ the local kids as wait staff.  But history has some bearing on it.  The place we went to eat has been around for seventy years.  The grandchildren of the original owner run the place.  We’ve been going to it for over thirty years.  Is the food four star?  No.  Is it good.  Plenty good.  Are the prices fair?  All things considered, yes.  The food is fresh.  The silverware is clean and the waitresses are good humored.  What else could you want?

I know that Donald Trump has an enormous to-do list on his plate.  He’s got a raft of executive orders a mile long and he’s battling everyone from the presidents of Denmark and Panama, to the deep state, to that dopey lesbian bishop in Washington.  But if he needs another item to add to his list, I’d say he should figure out a way to boost small businesses.  The billionaire class has beaten the snot out of small and even not so small businesses over the course of the last thirty years.  Amazon alone has killed off the downtown retail district of every city and town in the country.  And with it has gone any hope of ever meeting up with your neighbors.  Probably grocery shopping is the last gasp of that.  And even there Amazon is doing its darndest to conquer all.  I know I must sound like a Luddite but I think anti-monopoly laws are there for a reason.

And if there’s no way back then something fundamental has to be done to force people in the same locale; town or neighborhood, to spend some time together talking to each other about the details of their community; their kids’ schools, the trials and tribulations of their police force and their fire dept. and all the pot holes that the road department hasn’t fixed and all the other things that need attention.  The problem is we’re all too busy or too lazy or too anti-social.  But people are going to have to start solving these problems.  If we leave all of this to the “experts” they are going to tell us how to live and we really won’t like the rules they come up with.  In fact, we’re already there.  It’s time people woke up and looked around at the default setting of the New America.  It’s not pretty.

Zero

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This week we saw the last of Jim Acosta and Chuck Todd.  Now each of them made farewell statements on air promising that they would be back bigger and better in some self-branded sub-stack-like-blog avatar sometime soon.  Well, sure.  So, did Don Lemon but when was the last time anyone remembers seeing him since his exit from CNN?  Exactly.

So, this got me thinking.  NBC’s parent company is kicking MSNBC to the curb (technically spinning it off) and at the same time lightening the boat of such flotsam and jetsam as Chuck Todd that isn’t bringing in cash anymore.  And CNN is likewise giving the boot to someone as partisan and rancorous as Jim Acosta and plenty of other dead wood that is cluttering up their studio and tanking their ratings with the majority of American viewers.

Could this be the beginning of a new template for media companies?  Could they be thinking of telling the truth?  Well, not the whole truth of course.  But maybe something close to the truth, or truth adjacent, or a reasonable facsimile of the truth?  Well, probably not.  But maybe they are picking up on the fact that about 70% of the country know they’ve been lying about everything from Russia gate, to COVID, to how the war in Ukraine is going, to what puberty blockers do to children, to how many illegal aliens are in the country, to how much crime is happening around us, to how senile Joe Biden was, to how stupid Kamala Harris is, etc., etc., etc.

Has the loss of credibility gone so far that these companies can’t make enough money to keep dolts like Acosta and Todd on the payroll anymore?  I think the answer is a resounding yes.  After all these people make millions of dollars a year.  Think about that.  Not only does Rachel Maddow make 25 million dollars a year but even Joy Reid (Joy Reid!) makes millions of dollars a year.  If your company is losing money and you’re paying Joy Reid more than minimum wage you’re doing something terribly wrong.

It seems clear that in the new media landscape we are going to see things dry up for talentless hacks who think they’re actual reporters.  CNN realized that news is being made by Donald Trump and his cabinet.  The chances of Jim Acosta getting an interview with Donald Trump are precisely zero.  Therefore, his value to CNN is the same; zero.  And that goes for Chuck Todd.  During his tenure on Meet the Press he was one of the most partisan and mendacious talking heads on television.  None of the incoming administration will bother talking with him.  He’s just a short, balding guy with a beard who no one wants anything to do with.  So, he’s gone.

But who’s next?  Well, if I were guessing I’d say anyone who makes an eight-figure salary has a bullseye on his back for sure.  As seen recently with Maddow, taking a pay cut may be one of the ways to stick around for a while.  But honestly, I think most of the suits running the networks are going to be looking to remove a zero from the paychecks of the media darlings they’ve been paying all these years.  And even that isn’t going to be enough.  We’re used to ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN and MSNBC.  I think that’s a temporary situation.  I think in another year or two the number of those networks will be half.  Maybe ABC, Fox and pick one more.

And a similar thing may be going on with the print media.  The New York Times seems to have stabilized its revenue.  But the Washington Post is tanking.  So is the Los Angeles Times.  And so are many of the daily papers.  Let’s face it, most liberals can probably get along just reading the New York Times.  Maybe the right will adopt the Wall Street Journal (that is, if it stops leaning so far left as it has lately).  But for the most part people get their news from the internet; YouTube and X.  Small shops are able to make a living by providing factual coverage.  Sure, they still slant it for their niche customers.  But at least it still has some semblance of reality to it.  So where does that leave the Acostas and Todds of the world?  Unemployed.

You know this is a perfect time for Fox News to make a conscious effort to separate their opinion and news once and for all.  And also develop a policy on the news side to report it right down the middle with no slant at all.  I’d actually be willing to pay a small fee to get that kind of news coverage.  But let’s face it.  What’s the chance of something like that happening?  Zero.