Category: Current Events

Trump, You Magnificent Bastard, You Did It!!!

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H.R.4 – Rescissions Act of 2025 signed into law July 24th 2025.

 

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4

It’s over, it’s over.  Books and Capon will have to panhandle outside the deserted Dept. of Education office building and turn tricks for the homeless.

What a wonderful time to be alive.  All of the dreams of my youth are coming true.  Who knows?  Maybe they’ll put Tricky Dick Nixon on the thousand dollar bill.

So remember kids, dreams really can come true.  All you need is an ornery enough bastard like Donald Trump and enough people who are sick and tired of being lied to and gaslighted by their elected officials.

And Now a Word from Our Sponsor

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Today was the dreaded ladder day.  I have been promising to clean out the gutters on the house and adjoining buildings for quite a while.  And because there are levels and other levels and other, other levels it took hours.   And somehow that damn ladder has gotten heavier over the years.  I mean it can’t be me.  I’m as strong, skillful, handsome and intelligent as ever.  I think it may be that the Earth’s gravitational field has increased over time.  If I’m ballparking it, I’d say it’s doubled.  For that reason, I found it necessary to use “maximum effort.”  But it didn’t help that it was in the high eighties today and high humidity.  And if I’ve learned one lesson it’s that badminton birds are very effective at plugging downspouts.  From now on badminton is a forbidden sport.  Let’s see them get a basketball stuck up there!  Well, that’s enough whining.  I didn’t manage to break my neck or go into vapor lock so let’s move on.

I saw that the same company that wasn’t willing to pay $46 million dollars in losses a year for the Late Show was willing to pay $1.5 billion dollars for five more years of South Park.  That’s got to make you pause.  I remember back in the 1990s when the pilot for that show came out on-line.  It had Jesus fighting with Santa Claus.  It looked like it had been drawn by a twelve-year-old and it seemed to have about the same emotional maturity.  And now the two doofuses who created it are going to be billionaires.  Well, only in America, I guess.  And that at least makes sense.  People want to watch their product.  It makes money.  It has value.  Stephen Colbert and NPR and PBS can’t get enough people to watch their stuff to pay for making it.

I guess the lesson here is that if you’re an equal opportunity offender (and the makers of South Park are most definitely that) then that doubles your audience and adds a level of authenticity to your story.  South Park and its creators; Trey Parker and Matt Stone have insulted and mocked every single powerful figure in one or more episodes over the course of almost thirty years.  That’s all presidents, dictators, religious leaders, billionaires, geniuses, generals, movie stars, corporate bigwigs, movie studios, nations, religions, even supernatural beings from Jesus to Satan to Mohammed.  They’ve made fun of the woke and MAGA.  They offend everyone.  And they do it disgustingly.  But people will pay to watch their stuff because it’s funny.  Disgusting, but funny.

I think that tells me everything I need to know about why the current media landscape is crumbling.  The product on display is really bad and almost no one is willing to cough up the ducats to pay for it.  And I believe that is a hopeful situation.  A lot of really crappy content will go away.  And a lot of it is stuff that annoys me; MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC.  What’s left afterward will at least be profitable.  Stay tuned.

Company on the Unemployment Line

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So today was the weekly zoom call with the boys.  Coincidentally, I received my “Del Boca Vista” tee shirt.  One of the guys had them made up It says,

“Del Boca Vista

They don’t want us there

so we’re going.”

It captures the petty spiteful spirit of the Costanzas and honestly, I’ve always felt a kindred mean spirited impulse toward almost everything out there.

I wore it to the zoom and immediately sensed a greater respect from my fellow Deplorables.

I read off the Costanza rant verbatim,

“This is Frank Costanza. You think you can keep us out of Florida? We’re moving in lock, stock, and barrel. We’re gonna be in the pool. We’re gonna be in the clubhouse. We’re gonna be all over that shuffleboard court! And I dare you to keep me out!”

It was a proud moment.  But we must move on.

So, everyone has been whining about Colbert getting the boot.  The Democrats in Congress want to have Senate investigations to make sure Trump didn’t order the firing.  Gee, if they could prove he was responsible I bet he’d hand out lists with almost every name in Hollywood and the networks including Tom Hanks, George Clooney and Alec Baldwin to start.

But finding out that the Late Show costs $100 million a year to produce and loses $46 million a year was hilarious.  If ABC and NBC are losing anything close to those numbers, I’m guessing that Kimmel and Fallon will both be given the boot sometime soon.  And that would leave Greg Gutfeld not only the highest rated show on late night but the only one.

And how about the View?  Is that turkey actually making money for ABC.  It’s kind of hard to believe.  But then again maybe they don’t pay those demented hags much of any salary.  I mean, why would you?  They’re not actually celebrities.  The closest they have to a star is Whoopi Goldberg who was in a couple of popular movies about a thousand years ago while she was still alive.  Now she’s just one of the undead subsisting on the leftovers from the craft services table and sleeping upside down in an equipment storage closet on the set.  I couldn’t imagine they pay people like Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin or Ana Navarro at all.  I figure they just wandered on the set one at a time and became domesticated by the crew.  I’m sure they’ve been taught a few stupid pet tricks over the years like a parrot learning to mimic human speech somewhat.  It can be a fun trick but one soon tires of the irritating repetition of some catch phrase like “systemic racism” or “mansplaining.”

Well anyway, we’ll have to wait and see whether the other shoe drops and Jon Stewart is also given his walking papers by Paramount.  Now granted, he doesn’t make $20 million a year like Colbert and his show doesn’t cost a $100 million dollars a year to make but maybe just so Colbert doesn’t feel picked on they should also heave Stewart overboard too.  After all they’re old friends.  They could keep each other company on the unemployment line.

Tom’s World – 23JUL2025 – The Next Generation

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

There is an INTENSE need for people who can think and have experience + a work ethic, goal driven. I’m a subset of one out of 300 million+ so I can’t exactly extrapolate but—

Like photog, I’m an engineer but at 76.8 years old, a supposedly retired one. To keep myself in touch and engaged, I have a part time consulting business out of my house. I do design and in addition, construction contract and managing, budgeting and walk dogs on occasion.

I have people coming out of the woodwork begging me to work for them. They tell me that the current system isn’t generating people like me at the needed replacement rate.

I have all the clients I want (2), I work all the hours a week that I want (15) and I have no intention of getting back in harness. I like the commute from my bedroom to my home office but I have problems keeping the cats off my plan table.

Before retirement, we spent a couple of years trying to hire and train my replacement. A number of recent grads but there seemed to be at least something wrong with every one. No motivation, no work ethic, can’t get out of bed, not interested, HUGE holes in their knowledge base, scatter brained. One of them could not generate a simple logical excel based budget to save his life.

I can’t do the typical retired thing, traveling, visiting grandkids, etc. My wife is well into Alzheimer’s but not quite yet a nursing home candidate. So I’m tied here. But if I’m not working on something interesting, I’m pretty sure I would rapidly dry up and blow away.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

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In a very real sense, the world that anyone of us who’s over fifty grew up in no longer exists except as a memory and a reference point by which to reckon the current acceleration of change.  Things like newspapers, television advertising, most brick-and-mortar stores and even paper money effectively don’t exist anymore.  The whole of life in the most prosperous nation on the planet has been upended in such a way that it has disrupted every facet of life.  Young people aren’t getting well-paying jobs in the numbers needed to sustain institutions like marriage, parenthood and homeownership.

The truth is the tech revolution threatens to destroy the way of life in this country by eliminating the need for a good chunk of the jobs formerly filled by the American middle-class.  This is a crisis that is orders of magnitude greater than when the industrial revolution introduced mechanical power to replace horses, typewriters replaced scribes and oil displaced wood and coal as fuels.  There are millions of people who grew up in middle-class families who live in their parents’ basements, and can’t make enough money to move out, and have no prospects of having families of their own.  Think about that.

Donald Trump wants to make America great again.  The only way that can happen is to figure out how to provide gainful employment for the majority of Americans.  This country only became powerful because the majority of its citizens existed above the poverty line.  If that ceases to be the case we will see a revolution here.

Trump’s solution is to reshore manufacturing jobs that had been sent to Asia.  There are a lot of questions associated with that idea.  How quickly can it be done?  How many jobs will there be.  How well will they pay?  Of course I don’t claim to have all the answers.  In fact, no one does.  But I have the sense that he’s on the right track.  Manufacturing has been an enormous engine for bringing places like China, Vietnam and India out of the depths of poverty and into at least the “second world.”  All that is really necessary is for U.S. industrial policy to include sufficient positive and negative incentives for American companies (and German and Japanese and Taiwanese and Korean) to move their manufacturing operations back here.

In a real sense this is an inflection point for this country.  We won’t stay where we currently are.  The old economy and those who worked in it are going away.  Either we replace what’s here with a restored industrial landscape or we allow the future to be stolen from our children and grandchildren and watch America turn into a feudal state with haves and have-nots sharply separated into a small aristocracy and a large but shrinking underclass of underemployed surplus human beings.

I’m betting Trump can do it.  He’s broken the hold on things that the Deep State previously had and he’s getting things done.  If he can avoid being assassinated in the next three and a half years, he has the potential to save this wonderful place.

Why the Delay?

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Congress passed the 2025 Rescission Bill last Friday.  And that was on the final day allowed under the special rules for a rescission bill.  What isn’t as well publicized is that President Trump has not yet signed the bill into law

The Apocalypse of Legacy Media

“All government funding for PBS and NPR, including their local affiliates, has been eliminated by recent Congressional votes. Trump has not yet signed the rescissions package into law, but it has been sent to his desk for signature after final passage by Congress. This will lead to a significant reduction in local programming; however, it is believed that national programming will survive due to other revenue streams.”

Now I find this very annoying.  I’ve been waiting on this sign-off for the better part of four days.  Maybe Trump plans a special signing ceremony and some kind of celebratory gesture; possibly slaughtering an ostrich made up to look like Big Bird and then roasting it on a spit over a coal fired stove.

Well, let’s hope this delay is over soon.

Echoes of a Summer Night

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Only a single week of July left.  One last draught of fiery perfection.  Drink deep the heat and light and dark of real summer.  The lightning bugs flash from the grass and trees and trigger memories of a young boy collecting those living phosphors and watching them far into the night.  Where do those memories reside in my old brain?  What other memories do they trigger?  People who have been gone from this world for decades.  But I can still hear their voices and see their expressions.  Kind and cruel, smart and slow, funny and humorless, warm and cold, sane and mad.  And all these traits mixed in many combinations and proportions.  All those summer nights, all those years ago.

All those parties and occasions where we talked about the future and all the things we wanted to do and all we hoped to achieve.  And some of it we did.  And some of it worked out as we hoped.  But so many things fell by the wayside and some spectacularly so.  But those of us left must keep moving forward because there is no other way.  We just keep time to the beat of the days and seasons ticking by cycle after cycle trying to keep up with the pace and maintain a relevance with the waves of younger and livelier participants in the dance.

I was talking to my young granddaughter about her vacation in Maine.  I asked her what she liked best and she said she loved it all; the sand, the water, the sun, the amusement park rides, the carnival foods, the ice cream shop.  So, I told her the story of how we came to pick that beach; how an old friend, an old engineering friend who was more than thirty years older than me answered a question.  I asked him where I could find a nice long beach with white sand that wasn’t horribly crowded, expensive and pretentious like all the New England beaches I had tried.  And once we gave his recommendation a try, our kids went there for years while they were growing up and now her mom was doing the same for her.

As I was telling her I could see she didn’t think it was that amazing a story.  But I wondered if in twenty or thirty years she might be reminded of this story while she was talking to one of her descendants.  Maybe she’d tell her kids about their crazy old great grandfather who told stories about even more ancient people and events and always made sure there was some extra rich ice cream available for dessert and always had time to push a kid on a swing, pick berries or provide a butterfly net for catching lightning bugs.

Yep, summer is reaching its crescendo.  A few more parties and outings and then fall and the great seasonal ritual of death.  The fall equinox and Halloween and battening down the hatches.  I see that Guillermo del Toro has a Frankenstein movie coming out in November.  Maybe I’ll give that a try.

Civic Nationalism 2025

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In the second quarter of the twenty first century in America, nationalism is the dominant ideology that we hear about.  Sometimes it’s equated with populism.  Sometimes it’s broken down into identity nationalism (white nationalism, black nationalism, La Raza, etc.), there’s even religious nationalism out there.

But where does that leave us civic nationalists?  And is it just one thing?  Or are there multiple definitions and multiple groups using the term differently?  Well, there probably are.  And I’ve never done a deep dive of exactly what I believe the definition of an American is.  And that’s probably because other than finding it by accident and naming it after one of us, Italians aren’t really the primary architects of Americanism.

The Brits started this show.  They came over at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock and they fought the Indians and fought the French and finally fought the British to make it America.  And they fought some more Brits and the Spanish and the Mexicans and even the Canadians(!) to make this a world power.

Eventually they brought in the Irish and the Germans and the Scandinavians to work in the steel works and the coal mines and build the railroads.  And to fight the Civil War.  And since they look closely enough like Brits no one cared after a couple of generations.

But when the Italians and the other Southern and Eastern Europeans showed up, they were different enough that everyone could spot them and grumble about “those durn foreigners.”  So, it took them four generations to be accepted in the club.  Well, what can you do?  People are suspicious of what they don’t recognize as their own.

Well, okay, so now I guess, I’m kind of, part of, the club (sorta kinda).  Maybe not to everybody’s liking but at this late state in the American Empire most of the people who have been here for only a couple of generations would think I’m as American as the Fourth of July.  And I am.  The descendants of the Brits in New England don’t believe in this thing called nationalism.  They’re globalists.  They think loading up America with people who don’t speak English and don’t want to be American is okay.  In fact, better than okay.  They want to eliminate the idea of America because they’re ashamed of their history and want to destroy the country they live in.  So here I am a fifth generation Italian American stuck with trying to wave the flag for the people who still believe in this project.

Of course, I’m also hemmed in on the other side by the real descendants of the Brits who haven’t turned globalist.  The good old boys consider anyone whose people haven’t been here for three hundred plus years to be Johnny-come-latelies.  And maybe they’re right.  But honestly, I don’t imagine it makes any difference.  Unsorting the ethnic grab bag that this country has become doesn’t seem to be a realistic project.

But what then is civic nationalism to me?  Well, part of it is having an identity tied to the American project as it has emerged over the long history of this country.  That means embracing Jamestown and Plymouth Rock.  It also means embracing the expansion westward with all the cruelty and pain that meant for the settlers and the Indians.  It means embracing all those people who built the country and fought its wars and allowing for their descendants to have a claim to being called Americans as long as they agree to become Americans.  They have to stand up during the Star-Spangled Banner at baseball games and put their hands over their hearts and sing the song.  They have to have cookouts on the Fourth of July and watch the fireworks.  And they can’t ally themselves with the globalists who bad-mouth George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (and especially not Christopher Columbus!) and say that America is a racist country and all that other jazz that the leftists are always spouting.  And it means respecting the laws and especially the laws we have for coming here.  Specifically, we have to abolish the notion that just being a human being gives anyone the automatic right to come to America and be an American.  We get to invite or not invite who we want or don’t want.  It’s an exclusive club and it should be thought of as a great honor to be allowed in.

So that’s my idea of civic nationalism.  Americans respect their heritage and respect the laws and customs of this land and don’t trample on the rights of other Americans.  And we give our allegiance to this country and not the places that our ancestors came from.  That’s it.

19JUL2025 – Footloose and Fancy Free

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Okay, a break from the political stuff today.  Camera Girl and I took a day off (sort of).  There was an antique car show to go to and used that as an excuse to gallivant around and eat some bad food and visit some of our old stomping grounds.

When we got to the car show there were only two cars there; an ancient VW micro-bus and a not-so exciting 1980’s Chrysler of some sort.  We asked someone at a nearby business and they explained that the show builds up over time and if we came back in a couple of hours it would be much more substantial.

Okay.

There’s an old-fashioned food stand that’s only open in the summer.  It serves burgers, foot-long dogs, fries, fried onions and fried fish.  Many years ago, some of our kids worked there in the summers.  Well, suffice it to say, this isn’t exactly health food.  But, so what?  We were out and about and foot-long hot dogs with mustard and relish was exactly what I wanted.  The batter fried onions were questionable from my perspective but I followed Camera Girl’s lead on that front.  Well, no major gastroenterological damage was noted after this meal so we proceeded back to ground zero.

And, voila!  Classic cars from the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond.  And as a background for this automotive time machine was a loudspeaker blasting out the doowop hits of 1960 – 1963.  Of course, I was in kindergarten at that point but I of course recognize and enjoy these golden oldies.  If only I had my leather jacket and enough hair to sport a DA and if Camera Girl had been wearing her pink sweater and poodle skirt we could have danced the afternoon away.  Well, that is if I could dance.  But no, I settled for a few off-key falsetto notes to “Why Do Fool Fall in Love?” and left it at that.

 

Well, I put my 10mm Voigtlander super-duper wide-angle lens on my Sony A7IV and clicked away for an hour or so.  But then I was reminded that this show comes back every week so we left and headed home for a few more photos around the yard.  So far this year there haven’t been many prime butterflies.  Mostly only the medium sized ones, Fritillaries and Painted Ladies and such.

But as I walked around, I ran into a Monarch and I chased it around in circles for a quarter of an hour.  It was incredibly skittish and I was aggravated by its evasiveness.  Finally, I had enough and put my camera away and sure enough as soon as I did, that darned thing calmed down and almost seemed to be following me around, hanging at my elbow.  This ticked me off so I waved my arms and ran after it and chased it away.  Anyone watching would have assumed I was a hopeless idiot.  And come to think of it there may be something in that.

But all in all, a very enjoyable day out with the missus.  July in New England really is a pretty great time of the year.  Too bad it ends so quickly.  But all good things must.

Push That Tote Bag; Always Be Closing

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Pompous News Anchor: And to round out the PBS News Hour once again we go to the peerless analysis of Books and Capon.  Good evening gentlemen.  David what effect will this recission bill have on our operation here at PBS?

David Books: Well, I think I know.  Today I received an email from upper management that stated, “Due to cutbacks in the federal funding we will have to let go half of Books and Capon.

Jonathan Capon: What?  I didn’t receive that e-mail.

David Books: Yes, they said because my name starts with a “B” and yours starts with a “C” I get preference and could decide who gets the boot.

Jonathan Capon: What?  Why that’s obvious racism and homophobia too.

David Books: Well, that’s not necessarily true.  I act pretty gay too!

Jonathan Capon: Yeah, well that’s just because you’re Canadian.  Everybody knows you have a wife and kids.

David Books: That’s a deeply anti-trans stereotype.  Why couldn’t Jenny be a trans-man?  Which would make me gay!

Jonathan Capon: Oh, give it a rest.  Look, we can’t let management cave to the Trump defunding.  We must convince them that the nation is crying out for more Books and Capon.  How can the network serve Books without Capon?  It’s unheard of.  People want their Capon.

Pompous News Anchor: Gentlemen, please show more decorum.  The bigger picture here is that we serve the American public and if some sacrifices must be made then we need to show America that we serve them selflessly.

David Books: Oh yeah?  Well, I happened to hear that your slot is being given to the blonde from Fox News that’s sleeping with the station manager.  So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Haircut!

Pompous News Anchor: Why that lying sack of ****!  I covered for him at the office party so his wife wouldn’t find out he was in the penthouse “doing inventory” with blondie!  That’s it.  I’ll be sending a couple of videos to his home as soon as I get off this stage.  I think I’ll deliver them in a PBS tote bag that won’t cost him a cent in donations!

Jonathan Capon: Oh, this is awful.  How could America do this to us?  We’ve spent the last fifty years providing Americans with all the feedback they needed to change into the kind of people that we don’t hate.  We told them that they were racists.  Then we told them that they were misogynists.  Then we told them that they were homophobes and now we’ve told them that they’re transphobes.  Without our help they wouldn’t have known all the reasons why we hate them so much.  What else did they want from us?

David Books: Well, as it turns out they wanted us to shut up.  They didn’t like any of those opinions and apparently the establishment Republicans have been lying to us all these years when they said we were making friends and influencing people with our “helpful comments.”  In fact, the pollsters have been lying to us too.  It turns out this really is a center-right country and the Left doesn’t have enough viewers to pay for public television.  So, Capon you’re gonna have to hit the road.

Jonathan Capon: But how will I earn a living?

David Brooks: Drag Queen Story Hour?

Jonathan Capon: Well, it does have the word hour in it.