Category: Current Events

Tom’s World – 22AUG2026 – Money Matters

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TomD

Though I hate to admit it, I seen nothing in Trump’s temperament or previous governance to indicate that he is the man to do it. In his 1st term, there was nothing accomplished or even proposed that would indicate debt reduction was an even a low level priority. Remember the early covid days and the multi-trillion dollar public buyoffs sent as $2000 checks per family?

Reality is that the issue won’t be dealt with until reality shows that it ultimately WILL be dealt with. At some point, a tripwire will occur and hyperinflation will start. If you have a good memory and track retail prices, you will have to conclude that inflation has been significantly larger than officially stated. Especially since the covid era.

There is nothing on the political horizon from any political entity that indicates a willingness to take on budget and reduction.

Debt reduction will occur via inflation, whether severe or hyper remains to be seen.

The average US house is climbing toward $500,000, average car $50,000, hamburger over $7/lb, good ribeye $18+/lb, etc, etc, ad nauseam. “Tom’s Official Inflation Monitor Based On the Price of Cat Food” tells us that a 5.5 oz can of Friskies cat food which sold for $.38/can in 2020 now costs $.87/can. Everything else is on the same slope.

Solve for X ( 1+X%)^5= 2.3 Hint, around 18% per year.

And this curve will not prove to be linear.

What do you think is behind the historically meteoric increase in the price of gold and silver? I bought gold 20 years ago for $600/oz and silver for around $7-$8, an increase by a factor of around 8-10. A lot of the increase has happened since covid. Do I sense a commality here?

I suspect that most of the sorta recent increase has been as people and institutions see something coming and are looking for something more stable than the US dollar.

Australian-group

Picture by TomD BTW, part of a series I was commissioned to do for an Australian coin dealer.

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?

18AUG2026 – This’N’That

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Tomorrow, I bring some of the grandsons to see the latest Spiderman movie.  What is this, the ten millionth Spiderman movie?  Well, the oldest grandson is boycotting the film because he’s reached Marvel saturation.  And I can’t blame him.  I feel that no matter how many multiverse iterations they manage to shoehorn into the plot, I’ve already seen before what will be flashing across the screen.  But, regardless, I can’t pass up the chance to hang out with my younger descendants in their own element.  I can buy popcorn and their carbonated sugar water of choice and be one of the kids at least one more time.  What’s better than that?

And afterward, Camera Girl has promised them their favorite meal; spaghetti and meatballs.  We will gather around the dining room table and I’ll see what they have to say about Summer 2026 which ends for them next week.  And I’ll tread carefully because mentioning school would be highly insensitive.  I remember only too well how critical it is to forego the s-word this close to Labor Day.  But I am interested in hearing what they enjoyed most this year.  But I also want to just hear what’s on their minds.  They’re growing by leaps and bounds and I almost don’t recognize the little kids they were in the teenagers that they’ve become.  So, it’s important I keep some continuity in the relations so I don’t feel too disoriented by their rapid metamorphoses.

So, I’ve sold over four hundred copies of my book.  Hmmm.  Not exactly a national best seller by any stretch of the imagination.  And in the last ninety days I sold a little more than ten thousand pages on Kindle Unlimited (KU) which equals about fifty full books.  And based on the royalty data that means a book equals about a dollar of royalties to me.  Well, all I need is nine hundred, ninety-nine thousand six hundred more sales and I’ll be a millionaire.  In your face Elon Musk!  Seriously, it apparently takes a lot more than what I did in order to market a book successfully.  It’s a little humbling but I still want to pursue finding a larger audience for the book so since the ninety-day window of Kindle Unlimited ends today, I’m going to suspend KU so that I can include “The Sniper” on the next Based Book Sale.  Getting the book in front of right-leaning sf fans seems like the right way to grow its audience.  We’ll see how that works out.  But regardless of my lack of millionaire author status. I think I’ll start the sequel after the summer.  I have had some complaints that I need to provide closure on a number of plot and character situations.  I think the biggest complaint is that Mel needs to be explored to find out how this AI came about and where she leads to in the story and in Cutter’s life.  Personally, I’m more intrigued (and befuddled) about how Connors is going to stabilize his organization after the events of the nuke attack on his underground facilities.  I think I’m going to devote considerable thought to how he decides to influence the future shape of social/commercial/political life in the radically altered American landscape.

Well, that’s enough.  Enjoy Tuesday.

And … I’m Back

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“O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”  Huzzah! I’m back.  Like a Phoenix rising over Arizona.  Like Prometheus released from his cruel shackles I am back again!

Now what to discuss?  Of course, Jason Arday!

I mean this story is practically unbelievable.  Arday was the poster boy for DEI overreach.  Someone who was illiterate until he was eighteen was given a doctorate and then made the youngest black professor at Cambridge University with a dissertation that was plagiarized from the work of another black doctoral candidate.  And then there are the outrageous lies on his resume and about his private life including the statement that he ran 30 marathon races in 35 days with six of them on a broken leg.  He claimed to be a college instructor in Ohio at a college that had no knowledge of him at all.  He even claims to have had brain cancer without anyone else having ever heard of it.  And after being exposed as a fraud he has now, apparently committed suicide.

Presently, the Left is attempting to frame the people that uncovered his various frauds as his murderers.  A few have started describing his death as a “lynching.”  Well, I have an alternative opinion.  My underlying thesis is that DEI as it is currently perpetrated in academia is responsible for Arday getting into the terrible mess he suicided over.  If his thesis advisor had checked his work against the other published works in his field they would have discovered that he was a plagiarist.  In fact if they had bothered to check his references they would have known that several of them were fake.  And based on the comments by several of his students who have come forward, Arday was absurdly unqualified to teach in his discipline and should have been close to being discharged by the university already.  The fact that the department that gave him his doctorate degree didn’t acknowledge how woefully unqualified he was to teach at Cambridge proves that he was being hired as a DEI figurehead to show Cambridge’s commitment to social justice even at the cost of depriving his students of a decent education in that subject matter.  So DEI at Cambridge is responsible for Arday’s mess and is therefore the root cause for his death.

Now, Arday is only one of several black academicians recently exposed for plagiarism and other fraudulent practices.  This recent trend seems to have as its source a willingness of honest academicians to admit that “the emperor has no clothes.”  Colleagues who have watched as universities rewarded black academicians for substandard work now see that it is safe to speak up.  And now that they have, the truth has penetrated into the open and more and more cases will surface.

Jason Arday had a wife and two children.  His death is a catastrophe for them.  I take no pleasure in it.  But if his wife is looking to start a lawsuit then Cambridge University is the logical defendant to sue.  They should be punished for allowing plagiarism and fraud to be their public policy.

 

Mid-Summer Mumblings

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Here we are in the last week of July.  Wow.  The days fly by when you’re too busy with annoying drudgery.  So that’s a strange way of looking at it.  While engaged in the drudgery it’s crawling along.  But when I finally escape, the day is already wasted away.  And what’s left flies down the gravity drain into the past in the blink of an eye.  So, I’m just annoyed at the present situation.  And it’s only gonna get worse in August and so I’m terribly disgruntled.  But until I figure a way out of the trap I’m in, it’s gonna be status quo.  Enough.  Well, at least I have the weekend off so I’m going to enjoy the next two days as much as is humanly possible.  So, stop complaining!

We’re five episodes into the first season of “Landman” and it’s a very odd experience.  The main story of Billy Bob Thornton’s character trying to manage a chaotic mix of oil field accidental mayhem, narcotraficante related mayhem and roughneck related mayhem is interesting but the subplot involving his terminally self-absorbed ex-wife is extremely annoying.  The other themes associated with his son and daughter are pretty good and his son’s story is expanding into a larger role.  Camera Girl and I are enjoying the experience of having a show that we can both watch with at least some degree of interest.  There was one scene that I found particularly funny.  Tommy Norris’s ex-wife is trying to stage a “family” dinner with herself, Tommy, their two kids and the two oil company guys who are staying at the company “house.”  She insists that they all join hands around the table for a prayer and after it’s over the two outsiders are talking about it and one guy says, “Well, that was the first dinner prayer I can remember that was explicitly blasphemous.”

Friday, Saturday and Sunday’s weather is supposed to be beautiful.  The kids came over to use the pool today and they said the temperature was perfect.  And the butterfly bush is finally in full flower and monarchs and swallowtails (tiger and pipevine) are increasingly present as photographic subjects.  And the raspberry canes are starting to produce a bumper crop of berries.  So, this is peak mid-summer experience and if I wasn’t committed to an annoying task I would be in seventh heaven.  Well, I guess it’s not that bad if I can take the time to complain this much about it.

One of our neighbors put out a bit of video from her bird feeder.  It was of a black bear’s nose stuck up against the camera.  The bear’s claws were fairly impressive and a good reminder that even a black bear is not a Disney character that you can approach with impunity.  We have a bunch of blueberry bushes that are just about ripe so we may be getting a visit from Yogi and company at any time.  I have a game camera mounted but I didn’t return the memory stick last time I downloaded the files.  I probably should.

Well, that’s enough for now.  Just regular stuff going on.  Enjoy July.

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.

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.