Category: Current Events

Gene Hackman – A Film Career Retrospective

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I guess everyone has heard that Gene Hackman and his wife were found dead in their home under what the police are calling “suspicious” circumstances.  The 95-year-old retired actor and his 66-year-old wife were found in different parts of the house deceased and in reportedly advanced decomposition.  The news sources hint it may have been a multiple suicide or some other unfortunate situation.  Well, we’ll probably get the gruesome and sad details soon enough.

I guess I wish I had written a post on Hackman’s career under happier circumstances.  But better late than never.  I had a chance to review his career over at IMDB and made a list of the movies that I had seen and either liked or at least considered good.

1969 Marooned
1971 The French Connection
1974 The Conversation
1974 Young Frankenstein
1978 Superman
1886 Hoosiers
1992 Unforgiven
1994 Wyatt Earp
1995 Get Shorty
1998 Enemy of the State
2001 The Royal Tenenbaums

 

It’s a surprisingly broad cross-section of genres.  He was equally skilled as a comic actor, an action/adventure star and even a few dramatic roles.  What I would say about his talent as an actor was that he would use his considerable acting abilities to take whatever part he was given, no matter how threadbare and make it memorable.  You could see this in Young Frankenstein and Get Shorty where he’s playing minor parts and yet he owns the movie while he’s on the screen.

My favorite of his films was “The French Connection.”  I was a freshman in high school and my homeroom picked the movie as our class trip.  We went into Manhattan and saw it on a big screen on Broadway and riding there on the subway it was surreal just how close to reality the scenes on the subway resembled reality.  Graffiti and drunks passed out on the trains were the perfect intro for the movie.  And Hackman was the perfect Popeye Doyle.  Brutalizing his drug suspects, antagonizing his chain of command and chasing a runaway subway train in a muscle car down the wrong side of the street under the 86th St elevated subway line through my old neighborhood in Brooklyn.  It didn’t get better than that.  I used to walk past the housing project where Popeye supposedly lived.  If he had, he would’ve been the only white man living there at the time.  It was a very tough place.

I enjoyed Hackman’s Lex Luthor in the first Superman movie.  It might have been the only discernible acting talent in the series but he managed to make it fun.  He was good in Unforgiven.  He was pretty over the top in the techno-thriller Enemy of the State alongside Will Smith but he gave it his all.  I’ve been told by film aficionados that “The Royal Tenenbaums” is a very good movie.  Well, I saw it but didn’t really “get it.”  But I’m unsophisticated.  That was the last movie I saw with Hackman.

Based on his versatility and skill I would say Hackman is one of the best acting talents I ever watched.  Maybe Brando or Pacino played more dramatic parts.  Robin Williams was a funnier clown.  Maybe Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis blew up more stuff than Popeye Doyle.  But on balance Gene Hackman was the consummate professional.  He made the character real and he always stole the show for me.

Well done, Mr. Hackman.

The Trump Bump is Real

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So today was my scheduled zoom call with the guys.  It’s a group of eight former employees of the old firm who formerly used to take the (very) long walk every morning (and sometimes afternoon) down to the cafeteria and back to talk about “work.”  None of us was truly Left and most of was were decidedly Right but we tolerated a certain amount of centrism on some topics.  During the early years of the millennium, we were mostly hawkish and after Obama got in, we became increasingly angry over social issues like race and sexuality.

But one thing always seemed true.  We were disgruntled.  Now back in 2016 I famously championed Donald Trump and took a lot of grief because of this.  I made a small bet with one of my fellow coffee-walkers and when he had to pay up, he magnanimously framed the bill and hanged it on my wall for all to see.  Out of fear of the cleaning staff stealing the cash I replaced it with a Donald Trump million-dollar bill.  But the victory was very sweet.

Over the four years of Trump’s first presidency the tenor of our discussions varied but until 2020 they were generally on the optimistic side.  But once George Floyd and then COVID laid waste to the country we slid into disgust and the November fake election was the last straw.  Now whenever we got together (and after COVID it had to be remote) we uniformly despaired for the future of the country.  I guess you could say the Biden presidency was the term of our “resistance.”  Personally, we had our good and bad days.  And also, we one by one left the old firm.  But we valued the Wednesday zoom call and the solidarity it provided.  Interestingly the most left-winged of our number had a quasi-conversion and in 2024 voted for Trump!  Which we all considered a minor miracle.

But over the course of 2024 it was easy to see that our optimism for the political future was increasing drastically.  After the debate it was almost comical how excited everyone had become.  And after the election it was something like the scene in the “Wizard of Oz” when all the munchkins are dancing around singing about how “the wicked old witch at last is dead.”  And so as with everyone else on the Right we’re almost ecstatic with the activity and results we’re seeing in Washington as Trump and his merry band rip up all the floor boards in the deep state’s hideout and dig up the pots of gold they’ve stolen from the American people.

And now it’s gotten to the point where we’re so jaded that even revolutionary change is not enough and instead, we’re talking about ludicrous phantasmagorical things like eliminating the IRS and making the income tax a middle school math calculation like everyone pays 8% of their income or making it just a sales tax.  Next, we’ll be expecting Trump to announce that dunk tank with Democrats like Pelosi, Schumer and AOC in it that we can all get a chance at dunking.

So, yeah, it’s getting out of hand and that means we’re about to hit a wall and will have to come back down to Earth.  And that’s fine.  Life is mostly a serious matter and we shouldn’t be walking around laughing like idiots for more than a few weeks anyway.

But even if we calm down, let’s look at what we’ve gotten.  We’ve gotten back our hopes.  We’re looking at actual good news.  There is a way to course-correct and shrink down the federal bureaucracy and eliminate the deficit and defang the security state.  These are all wonderful things and way beyond what we expected from Trump just a scant few weeks ago.  Trump has gotten the upper hand on the establishment uni-party.  McConnell is a ghost of his former self and the Democrats have become a laughing stock without a path forward or a strategy for dealing with Trump other than hoping for some disaster to strike.  They’re probably praying to Gaia for COVID25 or something equally injurious.

So, at the call today we all acknowledged that the morale boost from all this winning is an enormous positive result above and beyond any and all of the actual policy changes that we enjoy.  Joy has a value.  Emotionally, psychologically and maybe even spiritually it enhances our lives and makes every part of our lives better.  I go to sleep easier.  I wake up more rested and I look at the world as a much better place.  Even the bad things are better because I feel more in control of the world and more confident that I can repair whatever needs fixing.

The Trump bump is real.

The Old Man and the Afternoon

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So, the tax accountant got back to me today and told me I owed Uncle Sam a couple of thousand dollars and because of that I had to pay some kind of penalty.  Well that really sucked and I had to go adjust my deductions on my paycheck and blah, blah blah … it ate up half my morning.  So, I was out of sorts today.

Because of all that, I needed to do something fun this afternoon.  Camera Girl and I decided to watch a movie we both like and haven’t seen in a long while; Ernest Hemingway’s, “The Old Man and the Sea.”  It’s the one with Spencer Tracy as an old Cuban fisherman who catches swordfish.  He’s recently become “unlucky.”  He hasn’t caught a swordfish in 85 days and the boy who used to help him has been told by his father to find a luckier boat.  So, the old man is all alone and he goes out to try his luck one more time.  And the story is a folk tale about a three-day odyssey to land and bring home a giant swordfish, bigger than his little sailboat.

In a way it’s a meditation on life and old age and fate.  It’s a simple story and mostly takes place between the old man and his mythic prey.  Most of the dialogue (or soliloquy) is the old man talking to the fish (or himself).  Occasionally he remembers (or dreams about) his past, when he was a valiant man of great strength and skill.  And often as the strain of fighting the fish becomes unbearable, he exclaims, “I wish the boy was here.”

And slowly and painfully the story unfolds and the old man finally plays the fish in and kills it with his harpoon.  But because of the size of the fish, he must lash it to the outside of his boat and eventually sharks are drawn to the smell of blood.  The old man fights them off the fish with his harpoon until it is lost, then a makeshift spear, then the gaffe hook and finally a club.  But as his weapons become cruder and less effective the sharks increasingly mutilate his prize until finally all that is left is the head, tail and a naked backbone.  When he reaches home on the morning of the fourth day, he is utterly exhausted and defeated and barely crawls back to his hut to sleep.

That morning the other fishermen are astounded at the colossal size of the carcass and remark to the boy how amazing the fish must have been.  The boy brings coffee to the old man and tells him that despite his father’s order not to fish with the old man he will defy him and bring his luck to the old man’s boat.  So, the story ends with the continuity of life as the torch is passed from the old to the young.  But in this case youth partners with the heroic efforts of the past instead of pushing it out of the way to replace it.

It’s a very strange story and plays out as something of a fairy tale.  Mercifully, the fish never speaks but the old man treats it as if he wouldn’t be surprised if it did.  The old man taught the boy to fish and so they have a mentor/pupil relationship but it appears more like a grandfather/grandson bond between them.  And that is the only major character dynamic going on in the story.

There really isn’t that much to this story.  Most of it takes place in a boat on the water with only one person present.  I really don’t think I could justify why I like this movie that much.  Maybe because I like watching it with Camera Girl.  Her father was an avid salt water fisherman.  And I think the movie is evocative of that connection.  Well, anyway it brightened up our day.

We All Better Hope He Can

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“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.”

This to me seems to be a wise policy.  Based on the fairly frequent bubbles and panics occurring in our economic environment I’m fairly convinced that the people in charge don’t know what they’re doing.  So, I’ll assume that’s what the problem is.  The people running the economy just don’t know what they’re doing.  And maybe, all things considered, they’re doing as good a job as is possible.  After all, human society is a dynamic system with an enormous number of factors contributing to the output of goods and services and a big random universe throwing everything from hurricanes and droughts to wars and plagues at us in an almost completely random manner.  Alright, I’ll grant that too.  It’s a maelstrom of causes and effects.  So then, what’s a leader of the United States to do?

I believe there is some guidance that can be used.  All the way back to Aristotle and all the way up to our own nation it has been observed that the most successful, stable and the most pleasant nations to live in are the ones with the largest middle class.  Not the one with the most billionaires and certainly not the one with the most poor people, but the one with the largest number of people who work for a living and live well enough to keep their families well-fed, well-clothed and with enough money to do something for fun every now and then.  When the majority of the country can be described in that way you are living in as close as life on Earth can come to a paradise.

And up until about the 1970’s that was a reasonable description of post-WWII America.  People thought they were well off and that their children would be even more prosperous in the future.  But since the 1970’s the proportion of Americans who felt this way has been steadily shrinking until now only the elites feel this is true.  The working class has slipped out of the middle class and the white-collar jobs that were the hallmark of the upper middle class are disappearing from the United States through automation and through off-shoring of the manufacturing industries that used to provide both blue-collar and white-collar jobs for the majority of the nation.

Well, all of this is old news.  We all know all about it.  Now we see Donald Trump trying to use tariffs to get American (and foreign) corporations to manufacture their products here and thereby provide Americans with relatively high value employment.  I applaud Trump for doing this.  He needs to do as much of this as possible.  In fact, this will need to be the policy of the United States government for the foreseeable future.

But this is just a band-aid.  Forcing these companies to bring some part of their manufacturing capacity back here is a small part of what’s needed.  America needs a “Marshall Plan” to identify the industries and infrastructure that will produce a re-invigorated middle class.  All the super-geniuses who have created artificial intelligence and advanced automated systems need to put their supposedly infallible business acumen to the problem of how to engineer an economic order where the maximum percentage of Americans are prosperous and usefully employed.  Call it a Marshall Plan or a Manhattan Project or just a survival plan.

The free-traders or the globalists or whatever you want to call the people who deindustrialized America from the 1970’s on have demonstrated how to destroy the middle class.  Now it’s the federal government’s job to undo that process using the levers of power they control; taxation, tariffs and the anti-trust laws.  But as I said it’s not enough to just bring back the old industries.  Innovation will always drive prosperity.  Silicon Valley currently represents that innovation.  What must be done though is to force the innovators to reckon with the dislocation that their innovation can cause to the lives of regular people and come up with a way to make change work for all of us.

A hopeful sign is that Donald Trump has enlisted Elon Musk into his administration.  Granted, right now Musk is entirely a disruptor of the established order.  But he is also capable of building up new constructs.  The challenge is to see if Trump and Musk can produce a vision that includes the restoration of the American middle class.  I hope he can.  We all better hope he can.

Super Power Relations

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Glenn W sent an email with a link to a podcast where Jeff Nyquist and Alex Benesch discuss how Donald Trump’s election impacts the global power struggle between the United States, Russia and China (link below).

https://youtu.be/OOiVNxt9I0M?si=bUOHY_mfan-wEOGu

It’s an analysis of the Chinese strategy to undermine Trump’s domestic political coalition.  There is also discussion of how Trump’s handling of the Ukraine war will impact Chinese/Russian relations.

Thank you, Glenn for passing this along.  It’s interesting to know how much the Chinese think about and plan to undermine the American domestic political situation.  And if the CIA were any good at their job, they’d have all of this intel available for Trump in a useful and convenient form as soon as it is available.  But, of course, they’re so busy trying to undermine him themselves that they can’t get around to something like that.

Watching the video made me think about how American domestic politics is viewed in such different places as Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China.

But it didn’t change my belief that almost all the problem in our country and most of the problems in the world are a result of the dysfunctional and even destructive system and culture that has taken hold of our country and by extension is being imposed on the rest of the world.  The adoption of a culture that celebrates above all else aberrant sexual identities and practices, but also emphasizes the vilification of European peoples and cultures and the need to eliminate their identity from their own countries, is singlehandedly bringing about the destruction of Western civilization.

I believe that most of the problems in this country stem from these two cultural projects of the Left.  And I think if these programs are eliminated it will cure most of the social dysfunction, we see around us today.

And that is why I believe that if Trump continues on with his program to eliminate things like the recognition of multiple “genders” and DEI and other affirmative action programs from the US federal government he will single-handedly solve the majority of societal ills that we find ourselves engulfed by.

Now as far as foreign policy goes, I see a clear linkage between the war in Ukraine and these same cultural dysfunctions.  Russia is a pariah for the Left because it eschews the LGBTQ movement absolutely and refuses to accept the “white shame” culture within its borders.  Whereas Ukraine was willing to accept the rainbow flag as the price it paid to get CIA and State Department funding for its color revolution.  And you can see a similar dynamic in Hungary where Orban refused to bend the knee to the homosexual mandate and so he also became an enemy of the left.  They tried to overthrow him in a recent election, pouring in all kinds of USAID money into the effort.  But he won and now he’ll benefit from Trump’s reform of the State Department and foreign relations in general.

It was heartening to see JD Vance meet with the AfD candidates for parliament in Germany and confront the government there with their refusal to stem immigration and their anti-free speech polices and attitudes.  It’s this kind of confidence in the advantages of a free and populist society that will advance our point of view in many places.

And that brings me to the question of what I think American policy should be toward the powerful countries like China and Russia.  We should be neither fearful of nor bellicose toward them.  The United States has ample enough stockpiles of nuclear tipped ICBMs to ensure that neither Russia nor China will attack us or our allies.  But by the same token, what business have we rattling sabers at Putin or Xi?  Our neocons in the State Department initiated the color revolution in Ukraine and then provided massive military aid and convinced the Ukrainians that the Russians would just capitulate to Ukraine joining NATO.  Up until Obama’s administration it was understood that attempting to bring Ukraine into NATO would be crossing a glowing red line that Putin would retaliate against.  So, they did it anyway and he invaded.  Now he’s been bloodied by our Ukrainian proxies using our most sophisticated weapons systems and so we’ve turned this into a war of attrition where Russia will lose a million men and Ukraine will lose two million men and a third of their country and we’ve possibly made the Russians our bitterest enemies for generations to come.  And they’ve embraced China because of it.

If Trump can figure out a way to blunt some of this damage, he should get a Nobel Peace Prize for sure.  But in general, I hope Trump’s foreign policy is guided by the precept that our foreign policy should be primarily concerned with improving the security and prosperity of the American people.  That’s it.  We’re not out to spread democracy and we’re not trying to save the world.  Climate Change and Ending World Hunger are not our priorities.  Evicting the illegal aliens and bringing the price of a dozen eggs down are.  So that explains my myopic vision of foreign policy.  If the Chinese try to get involved in undermining the Trump voter coalition, I’m guessing they’ll be a lot less effective than the Democrats are.  The Left knows the American lingo better and they’re much better liars than the Chinese are.

So, Donald Trump, just keep pummeling the Left and everything else will follow along like a master plan.

Joy Reid Relegated to Ash Heap of Journalistic History

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Oh no!  What can we do now when we need a race hustler with a bad wig?  Who can we go to when we need something stupider than even the Reverend Al Sharpton can express?  How will Rachel Maddow know what new anti-white talking point is in vogue.  Oh Joy, we hardly knew ye!

Let the Joyous word be spread.  The wicked dumb witch now is dead.

 

NY Post Headline: MSNBC cancels Joy Reid’s lefty show as network makes major shakeup

Tom’s World – 23FEB2025 – Gold Bricks Off the Titanic

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TomD

Remember 4 and a fraction years ago during the BLM riots when there were entire city blocks filled with parked charter busses just around the corner from the riot site?

Also, there were Craig’s List recruiting ads for paid “rioters”. Somehow, nobody bird dogged the lead back to the source, not publically anyway. I’ll bet you that the ultimate money source was US.gov very possibly through USAID and a couple of cutout NGO’s.

…

The analogy used by a senior EPA employee recently was, “throwing gold bricks off the stern on the Titanic”.

Even now, I suspect that if we ever learn the true scale of the corruption, we will be stunned, at least initially. After the initial shock, I think there would then be some public hangings.

So Joe Biden sold his office of the Vice Presidency for somewhere in the $30 million range?

What a small time piker.

…

($4.7 trillion)

“That’s supervillain scale theft.” I don’t think there is even a word for corruption on that scale because the word has never been needed before.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 23FEB2025 – Theft on a Cosmic Scale

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war pig

 

Excuse me. It was $4.7 TRILLION untraceable.

$4,700,000,000,000

That’s a whole lot of decimal places.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14407689/Elon-Musks-DOGE-Treasury-payments-untraceable.html

There are also other sources, this was at the top of the list and I’m lazy.

$4.7 TRILLION unaccountable. Incredible fraud and graft at that scale. That’s about 5 times the defense budget. That’s supervillain scale theft. Every Democrat in congress during the last 4 years, and likely a sizeable numbers of Republicans as well, should be flogged on the Capitol steps, then stoned by the taxpaying public.

That’s enough one dollar bills laid to end to reach to the sun and back 4.78 times. Theft on a cosmic scale.

No Signs of Winning Fatigue Yet

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So, as I was describing it recently, I needed a crisis in my novel to provide some excitement.  I have a faction of the “good guys” go rogue and decide to take over Cheyenne and declare Wyoming a sovereign nation.  Some National Guard troops are called in to defend the State Capitol building.  The rebels surround them and then National Guard reinforcements with heavier weapons encircle the rebels.  Now, I want my protagonist to intercede and defuse the situation.  But how does he get in and how does he convince them?  Getting in is easy.  The siege circles are rudimentary positions within a city so a speeding bullet-proof vehicle is enough to make it plausible and an RPG or two chasing him will make it colorful.

But what can he possibly say to heavily armed mutineers who have lost friends and family and want to lash out at the federal government?  Now that’s the hard part.  I’ve been working something up.  Part of it will play on the fact that many of the rebels were soldiers who served in Iraq like the protagonist.  But that only gets me so far.  The hero is a plain-spoken man so I have to be careful that the words don’t come off too polished and that the persuasion fits the mindset of his audience.  Well, to be continued.

So now Kash Patel is not only the FBI Director but also the temporary head of ATF.  Temporary sounds interesting.  I wonder if Trump’s thinking of abolishing the ATF and passing along whatever functions he deems useful to another department, maybe the DOJ.  And I was amused to hear that Trump wants to visit Fort Knox to see if the gold is really there.  I wonder if he’ll try scraping it with a knife to make sure it’s not just lead covered in gold paint.  We’re definitely getting our money’s worth with Trump.

Now one thing I have been thinking about the last few days is exactly what happens to the economy if Trump does manage to cancel a trillion or more dollars from the federal budget.  That is a lot of money.  First of all, the unemployment rate will increase somewhat by the number of fired bureaucrats.  And a trillion dollars removed from the federal budget will decrease to some extent business activity.  Could it cause a mild recession?  Maybe.  But the truth is that might be exactly what’s needed to tamp down inflation.  And if we are to have recession then the earlier in Trump’s term it happens the better.  And if it is short and mild then the drop in inflation will more than counterbalance the bad news with good.  After all, these unemployed are not factory or corporate employees.  They’re bureaucrats that don’t really add to the GDP in a meaningful way.  They’re more like parasites.  Well, we’re sure to hear from the press how bad it is for the economy to lay off bureaucrats.  It’s almost as bad as laying off reporters and talking heads.

And speaking of the media, I’ve noticed that some of the left media shills are starting to wake up again.  They’re trumpeting that all the DOGE activity has angered the American people and like a sleeping giant they are awakening and demanding that USAID be allowed to waste the billions of dollars that Joe Biden earmarked for them.  Oh, well played.  Yes, the American people are incredibly strong advocates for voluntary medical male circumcision in Mozambique or mental health support for Venezuelan LGBTQ+ youth or “Safe Mobility Offices” for migrants in Latin America.  People are crying out to protect these critically important programs and the bureaucrats employed to spend these funds.

But the top news in the last few days are the various environmental slush funds that Joe Biden squirreled away just as he left office.  Ten billion dollars deposited in a commercial bank account for theft at a later date and two billion dollars in a PAC overseen by that legendary champion of environmental stewardship Stacey Abrams.  Now that’s world class robbery.

So, the hits keep coming and most conservatives say they’re not tired of winning yet.  Good.