Category: Current Events

Waiting for Friday

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Five down, two to go.  And tomorrow is the killer.  Well, here goes nothing.

I was gonna review, “The Fifth Element.”  I hadn’t seen it in a long time so I couldn’t remember my overall impression.  Well, I rewatched and remembered.  It’s a movie that has a few “elements” that are interesting or fun but there are enough factors that are awful to make the sum negative.  Gary Oldman has a small but pivotal part as a villain and as always, he is great fun.  Bruce Willis plays Bruce Willis as he always does and he has a few fun moments but it’s a very silly movie so he can only succeed at moments.  The movie itself is a live action fairy tale/cartoon with very broad humor and very wooden characters.  Chris Tucker’s character was among the most bizarre.  But in fairness he was also one of the funnier aspects of this comedy(?).

I’m sure some folks will enjoy this exercise in science fiction fairy tale but I have to give it a thumbs down.  There were just too many annoying factors to allow me to wholeheartedly embrace it.

So, President Trump is really playing up the international agenda this month.  Even his enemies are intrigued by his efforts to talk to the Iranians and normalize our situation with the Arabs.  Of course, the pundits on the Left were horrified by Trump’s speech where he said he is backing away from nation-building and demanding the Middle East adhere to Western mores and customs.  But from my way of looking at it, that’s exactly the message we should be putting forward.  “You live your way in your country and we’ll live ours over here.”  Seems reasonable to me.  But Capon and Books got the vapors hearing it.

As for his efforts to get a ceasefire in Ukraine, I tend to doubt it will come to anything.  The Russians don’t want to give the Ukrainians a breather.  Apparently, they’ve calculated that they will finish off enough Ukrainians before the Ukrainians finish off enough Russians so that Kiev’s defense will collapse this year.  The question is whether Trump has the sense to just walk away from the whole thing and let it end sooner than later.  But looking at the tiny geographic gains that account for thousands of deaths a week on both sides is gut-churning.  Well, I don’t see any change before the fall.

As for the fact that Joe Biden has some kind of cancer; well, he’s eighty-two.  Is it surprising at that age that cancer has come on the scene?  I think as we get older that possibility becomes more real every day.  The only question I have is when did he actually get the diagnosis?  Three, four years ago?  Well, I don’t celebrate his ill-health but I consider him an evil man and maybe this is a good time for him to think about his finish and maybe consider making amends.

I saw that James Comey was trying to get his name back in the news by acting like a moron.  In my youth in Brooklyn, we would have described someone like that as a lousy scumbag.  And that would be playing it down.  I think having the IRS audit him a few times just for fun would be very appropriate.  Just a thought.

Well, that’s enough for today.  Waiting for Friday.

In Pursuit of the Pursuit of Happiness

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People say that one of the unique components of the American experiment was the explicit enumeration of “the pursuit of happiness” in the founding document of the country.  And that’s true but I think the more important situation is that to a much greater degree than elsewhere it actually was captured.  I’d say that the capture of happiness is the much discussed “American Dream.”

And I’ll go further; I’ll say that without the happiness there isn’t anything worth discussing about America.  The essence of this country is that it delivered on the dream.  People who came here and put in the effort found actual happiness.  And what was that happiness?  In the last hundred and fifty years it was middle class status which means the wherewithal to raise a family above the poverty line.  The definition of poverty has shifted over the centuries.  Of late it means being able to afford shelter, food, clothes, education, communication, entertainment and transportation costs for a family of four.  And nowadays that’s quite a bit.

But the general idea is that you make enough money to bring up your kids to be able to walk among equals in the town you live in.  And that is the definition of happiness for normal human beings.  And except for economic catastrophes like the Great Depression that expectation was within reach of even penniless immigrants who arrived here without even a command of the English language.  But that situation is no longer the case.  The younger generation are of the opinion that a middle-class lifestyle for them is an impossibility.  And I contend that is why Donald Trump has twice been elected president.

It’s not as if Gen Z likes his looks or rhetoric.  He’s the ultimate example of the man to whom they’d say, “Okay boomer.”  His views on women and foreigners are considered uncouth by the young.  But he’s promised to fix the economy so that they can afford to be grown-ups and move out of their parents’ basements.  So, the real question is; can he do it?

Boy, I wish I knew the answer to this one.  Sure, I want the answer to be yes.  But it’s a lot easier to move an industrial base to a new country when labor costs are effectively zero than it is to rebuild it in a place where labor costs and environmental regulations are huge negatives.  It may be that he won’t get enough time to rebuild it.  But that is the bet.  Donald Trump says he can restore the American Dream; restore the chance for a middle-class lifestyle for the majority of Americans.

I find it an amazing thing.  A man that everyone claims is just a flim-flam man and an opportunist has recognized that our present disastrous state is the result of the failure of the most fundamental characteristic of America; happiness.  And diagnosed its remedy as restoring the means of a middle-class lifestyle to the common man.  I think a case could be made that he’s the only one in politics who isn’t an opportunist.

Escape from New York 2025

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Three down, four to go.

So, yesterday I went to Brooklyn for a family reunion.  Driving through the Bronx and Queens I could see the Manhattan skyline and as much as the city has become a cesspool, that skyline is beautiful and impressive.  It’s a bittersweet sight.  My family has lived in New York City for a hundred and forty years.  We loved it and were proud of its grandeur and dynamism.  And now?  Well, pride is impossible.  Just within the time we were travelling down the streets of Brooklyn I could see thuggery and depravity on display.  A city of eight million people that used to be a showcase of culture, business and the Arts reduced to third world barbarity.

Now it’s a dysfunctional space where crime, poverty, homelessness and drug-use dominate the landscape.  It infects everyone who lives there.  It degrades all the magnificent monuments of the past and makes a mockery of their former achievements.  And it makes travelling into its bowels dangerous, frightening and infinitely difficult.  Where can and can’t you drive?  Where can you park your car and find it in one piece when you return?  Where can you walk in the day but not at night?  All the fun questions of NYC urban life.

But ultimately it was worth it all.  For the second time in a few months, I saw members of my extended family that I haven’t otherwise seen in decades.  I met the second and third generations on these branches of the family tree and saw the family resemblances and the new additions to the stock.  Charming.

Ultimately America is convulsing under the forces that the elites can bring to bear.  How we react and compensate for these disturbances is all we have any power over.  My family, for the most part, has abandoned the cities and looked for opportunities and safer surroundings where we could find them.  And that process continues.  Those that stay in these dangerous areas tend to pay a heavy price.  There are physical and mental health consequences to trying to raise children in a hellscape.  Premature death is not unheard of.  And it’s sad to see this reality.  But it’s inspiring when you see someone who has struggled with the traps of that world overcoming the problems and succeeding.

And when it’s over we always have the epic, “Escape from New York!”  I was riding shotgun and the death-defying feats of my driver were truly inspiring.  You haven’t experienced real terror until you’ve cut across five lanes of traffic to make an exit on the BQE.  But we got out and then my drive home from the suburbs was uneventful.

When I reached home Camera Girl was entertaining grandsons Tertius and Quartus with a hockey game on television.  Apparently, this New England sport has caught on with this generation of my descendants.  And I have no objections although I myself have never been able to see the puck on television.  I have to go by the noise of the crowd to know when the puck has actually ended up in the net.  Mostly I just watch the players assaulting each other around the periphery of the rink.  Which is entertaining in its own right.  By the time the boys left it was after midnight and I crashed into the blessed oblivion of sleep.

Well, this was late for obvious reasons.  And the next few days will be equally sketchy because of my slightly punchy condition and the length of my workdays tomorrow and Tuesday but I will attempt to produce some kind of content.  Adios.

Tom’s World – 17MAY2025 – Pain

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

I had something similar about 12 years ago, on a weekend. It was days before I could get to a dentist who then kicked me to a dental surgeon. But he did take pity on me and wrote a few days supply of some opioid for me. Talk about relief! Before, the incessant throbbing precluded all life functions except misery.

There are so many drug addicted people out there that opioids are being withheld from non-addicted people who really have a short term need.

Other than post surgical on two occasions, the only other time I need opioids was from what I think was whooping cough decades ago. Once I started coughing, I would go into a painful fit of it that would last minutes and reoccur several times an hour. My throat was so raw that I could barely talk. A codeine cough syrup was an immediate and blessed relief.

On occasion, you need opioids and you really need them. It’s a shame that events have made Dr’s and DD’s so reluctant to proscribe them that even people like yourself can’t get them when needed.

In the meantime, the true abusers have an immense, cheap and potent supply of much stronger drugs. As a testament to the Law of Unintended Consequences, it looks like the hard restriction of opioid from the abusers had the result driving them and creating the flood of cheap fentanyl. So now, it looks like the only people who can’t get pain killers are the legitimate users.

Photog Agonistes

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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?

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“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

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“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!

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 14MAY2025 – A Young Man and the Sea

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What’s so interesting about Oliver Widget?

Arthur tells us:

“Oliver Widget, a man from Oregon has captured the attention of millions for his decision to sail around the world with his cat Phoenix.”

“Receiving a medical diagnosis of a strong possibility of becoming paralyzed in the future would cause most to become more cautious in their decision-making.”

“The genuineness of Oliver’s videos is an aspect that cannot help but come across watching them. Oliver is not a trained media personality and himself admits that social interactions are not his forte. Yet, this lack of polish and veneer from his persona are what add a depth of authenticity to him. What you see is what you get: a guy on a sailboat with only his pet cat traversing the Pacific for the first time giving unscripted moments on the journey.”

 

I Think We’re in Deep Trouble

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I better enjoy the next two or three days.  Saturday I’ll be driving into NYC for a family occasion and then next Tuesday will be a long, long day at work.  So, what would be fun to talk about today?  Well, maybe not fun exactly.

Who is the smartest man in the world?  And what does that even mean?  Is he a physicist like Einstein who has the best understanding of how the universe works?  Or is he the guy who can profit most from how the human universe works and make the most money?  Is it a saint or a philosopher?  Or is he the guy who enjoys his life most?  I guess if I asked a million people I’d get a bunch of different answers.

But from a practical point of view, we need very soon to find a very smart man to run this country.  And by extension he will have to run the world.  The world is very, very broken.  With the Internet and AI, we seem to have run the next generation of people off the tracks and into a ditch.  We’ve rendered education useless and even unattainable.  The younger generation can no longer even contemplate reading an entire book.  They no longer have the attention span or the interest.  Just watching a five-minute YouTube video to get a thumbnail sketch of the plot of a book is more than too much for them.  They immediately get ChatGPT to write a book report for them and hand it in to their teacher and never even think about it again.

This cannot go on.

Other than shutting off the Internet I don’t know what can be done.  It seems like we need to re-invent real life for a generation of young people.  But I just don’t know how it will be done.  The first step would be to make schools completely opaque to the cell phone signals and to turn off all wi-fi.  Then for good measure make the students hand in their phones and either write their work with pen and paper or use some kind of proprietary software that only allows them to input text through the keyboard with their fingers.

I understand that the productivity that we’ve gained through automation is astonishing.  One person can now produce the work that a whole office formerly could.  But at the same time, the society we are creating is deeply dysfunctional and it is no longer producing happy, normal or even sane people.  You read about the levels of depression and mental illness, especially in young women and you have to think that this cannot go on.

But the thing that isn’t clear to me is how the break will occur.  Will the dysfunction just continue to increase until some critical system fails through incompetence?  Will a power grid completely collapse during winter and many thousands of people will freeze to death or something equally horrendous happen?  Maybe it won’t be a bang but instead a whimper.  Will more and mor of our infrastructure and functionality be handled by a smaller and smaller human work force until the useless majority simply die off entirely?

I tend to believe this is a “first world problem.”  Our peers in China and India will not be following us down the road to oblivion.  They need to keep up in order to eat.  Maybe this is just a matter of getting a little hungry to focus the mind on what is important.

Well, anyway, I think we’re deep trouble.