Does that make Barack Obama Hari Seldon? Or Jeb Bush? God forbid either!
Category: Current Events
Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 03FEB2025 – The Dreaded White Stuff
Good luck with the snow. I grew up on the MA North Shore and then 40 years on the Northern Tier with the Air Force and Army. Heartily agree about freezing rain. We lost power for 27 days in Plattsburgh NY due to an ice storm back in ’98 (Thank Ghu for wood stoves and oil lamps), and saw a lot of VERY slick road and dead-stopped traffic due to iced pavement. Major reason for moving to South Carolina in 2014. And what happens in 2015? The first snow in 40 years, followed by more of the cussed stuff 10 years later! I tell ya I don’t get no respect!
Now That’s Showmanship
Ah, Groundhog Day. When northern America as one embraces a Bill Murray movie and tries to figure out a way to survive until winter gives up. After a remarkably mild 2023/2024 winter, cold weather has reasserted itself and I have embraced the reality that I don’t live in a rational climate. The pattern is one day of freezing rain and the next night, zero degrees Fahrenheit. This is an extremely unhelpful arrangement. Almost any depth of snow can be removed. 0-4 inches is handled with a snow shovel. 2-22 inches yields, for the most part to a snowblower or plow. After that it get trickier, but it can still be done. And the resulting cleared surface is generally very usable for walking and driving your car on.
A quarter to a half inch of ice is a disaster. If the ground was very cold when the rain fell and then the air temperature dropped quickly and even worse if the wind really picked up, you end up with a layer that is almost impossible to remove unless you put road salt on it. Unfortunately, I use well water so I don’t salt my driveway. That’s very unfortunate. Instead, I take a garden rake or a roofer’s shovel and I abrade the surface of the ice and then I sand it and then scrape it again to lodge the sand in the surface. This works but it is extremely labor intensive. So, I hate rain in the winter. And lately it has become a very frequent occurrence.
Alright, enough whining.
So, what’s new? Well, tariffs. Trump has tariffs for Canada, Mexico, China and I assume a lot of other places. And I hear he’s suspending all aid to South Africa while an investigation of anti-white land seizures and other worse actions is performed. Wow. Trump is going full steam ahead. Every day I ask myself, “What’s left to do? Nothing.” But then he does three more things. One of the things I’m very happy about is that Trump is cutting off the money supply to the NGO’s. These organizations are funded by the US government but work directly against the interests and sometimes against the very laws of this country. Here we are spending billions of dollars to eject illegal aliens while charities are spending billions of tax-payer dollars to feed, house and hide these very same illegal aliens. Cutting off their funds is the most effective and fastest method of combatting the problem. I’ll give him credit; Trump is proving to be a force to be reckoned with. I don’t want to get my hopes up too high but it seems to me that there is a very good chance that he’s going to “fundamentally change the United States,” but for the better. Sort of an anti-Obama.
Kennedy, Gabbard and Patel are up for votes in the Senate this week. If I were to guess I’d say all three will need Vance as the tie-breaking vote. And that’s actually me being optimistic. There are some truly terrible Republicans in the Senate. McConnel voted against Hegseth because he gets money from defense contractors and they’re worried Hegseth and Trump will end the gravy train. I think it’s possible he’ll vote to confirm Patel because he doesn’t get paid by any lobby associated with the FBI. Now there are plenty of Senators that get paid by the pharma lobby. This might cause Kenedy to be rejected.
Update: Hat Tip to Tom D for the data
As for Gabbard, I think she’ll get through but I think Vance will break the tie. So, I guess I’m cautiously optimistic. Hopefully that’s more accurate than Democrats being nauseously optimistic on Kamala’s election prospects.
We’re getting 2-4 inches of snow tonight (they say). I’ll be up very early to clear that before going to work tomorrow. This will be a hectic week with some travel toward the end. But I’ll be dutifully following the news coming from the Trump White House (the Greatest Show on Earth). I keep waiting to hear that he’s declassified the Area 51 files and that he’s going to give a tour of the flying saucer and the pickled bodies of the space aliens. Now that’s showmanship.
It’s Not Pretty
The family gathering at the recent funeral down in New York City spawned another reunion up in New England. A gaggle of my siblings gathered and we broke bread at a local diner that had a sign that touted their fried clams and ice cream. Quite a combination. But we had neither of these. I had a Reuben and a cup of coffee and the rest of the crew went up and down the menu. Somebody even got the pot roast and mashed potatoes. And as we sat there and enjoyed our fare several of us remarked on the virtues of a good local diner and the fact that they seem to have disappeared from some locales where they were formerly ubiquitous. Brooklyn used to have a ton of Greek diners and you could always get baklava at midnight after a movie or some other outing. Now they’re all gone, or so it seems.
This being New England, baklava was not on the menu. But this diner was one of a very few locations within a twenty mile radius that would be open much after 1 am. And they had very courteous service which is also quite rare nowadays. One very strange business practice, they’re a cash only establishment.
That’s another reason to hate the Biden administration and the Democrats. The COVID lockdowns bankrupted so many small businesses including restaurants. Sure, you can always go to Mickey D’s when you’re coming off a late shift or a date but the local diner was so much more welcoming a sight. A place where you could order an actual burger and finish with some pie and ice cream. That’s how I remembered the world back in the day before mega-corporations finished off all the mom-and-pop shops in America. And sure, there are plenty of good chain restaurants that serve good food and do employ the local kids as wait staff. But history has some bearing on it. The place we went to eat has been around for seventy years. The grandchildren of the original owner run the place. We’ve been going to it for over thirty years. Is the food four star? No. Is it good. Plenty good. Are the prices fair? All things considered, yes. The food is fresh. The silverware is clean and the waitresses are good humored. What else could you want?
I know that Donald Trump has an enormous to-do list on his plate. He’s got a raft of executive orders a mile long and he’s battling everyone from the presidents of Denmark and Panama, to the deep state, to that dopey lesbian bishop in Washington. But if he needs another item to add to his list, I’d say he should figure out a way to boost small businesses. The billionaire class has beaten the snot out of small and even not so small businesses over the course of the last thirty years. Amazon alone has killed off the downtown retail district of every city and town in the country. And with it has gone any hope of ever meeting up with your neighbors. Probably grocery shopping is the last gasp of that. And even there Amazon is doing its darndest to conquer all. I know I must sound like a Luddite but I think anti-monopoly laws are there for a reason.
And if there’s no way back then something fundamental has to be done to force people in the same locale; town or neighborhood, to spend some time together talking to each other about the details of their community; their kids’ schools, the trials and tribulations of their police force and their fire dept. and all the pot holes that the road department hasn’t fixed and all the other things that need attention. The problem is we’re all too busy or too lazy or too anti-social. But people are going to have to start solving these problems. If we leave all of this to the “experts” they are going to tell us how to live and we really won’t like the rules they come up with. In fact, we’re already there. It’s time people woke up and looked around at the default setting of the New America. It’s not pretty.
Zero
This week we saw the last of Jim Acosta and Chuck Todd. Now each of them made farewell statements on air promising that they would be back bigger and better in some self-branded sub-stack-like-blog avatar sometime soon. Well, sure. So, did Don Lemon but when was the last time anyone remembers seeing him since his exit from CNN? Exactly.
So, this got me thinking. NBC’s parent company is kicking MSNBC to the curb (technically spinning it off) and at the same time lightening the boat of such flotsam and jetsam as Chuck Todd that isn’t bringing in cash anymore. And CNN is likewise giving the boot to someone as partisan and rancorous as Jim Acosta and plenty of other dead wood that is cluttering up their studio and tanking their ratings with the majority of American viewers.
Could this be the beginning of a new template for media companies? Could they be thinking of telling the truth? Well, not the whole truth of course. But maybe something close to the truth, or truth adjacent, or a reasonable facsimile of the truth? Well, probably not. But maybe they are picking up on the fact that about 70% of the country know they’ve been lying about everything from Russia gate, to COVID, to how the war in Ukraine is going, to what puberty blockers do to children, to how many illegal aliens are in the country, to how much crime is happening around us, to how senile Joe Biden was, to how stupid Kamala Harris is, etc., etc., etc.
Has the loss of credibility gone so far that these companies can’t make enough money to keep dolts like Acosta and Todd on the payroll anymore? I think the answer is a resounding yes. After all these people make millions of dollars a year. Think about that. Not only does Rachel Maddow make 25 million dollars a year but even Joy Reid (Joy Reid!) makes millions of dollars a year. If your company is losing money and you’re paying Joy Reid more than minimum wage you’re doing something terribly wrong.
It seems clear that in the new media landscape we are going to see things dry up for talentless hacks who think they’re actual reporters. CNN realized that news is being made by Donald Trump and his cabinet. The chances of Jim Acosta getting an interview with Donald Trump are precisely zero. Therefore, his value to CNN is the same; zero. And that goes for Chuck Todd. During his tenure on Meet the Press he was one of the most partisan and mendacious talking heads on television. None of the incoming administration will bother talking with him. He’s just a short, balding guy with a beard who no one wants anything to do with. So, he’s gone.
But who’s next? Well, if I were guessing I’d say anyone who makes an eight-figure salary has a bullseye on his back for sure. As seen recently with Maddow, taking a pay cut may be one of the ways to stick around for a while. But honestly, I think most of the suits running the networks are going to be looking to remove a zero from the paychecks of the media darlings they’ve been paying all these years. And even that isn’t going to be enough. We’re used to ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN and MSNBC. I think that’s a temporary situation. I think in another year or two the number of those networks will be half. Maybe ABC, Fox and pick one more.
And a similar thing may be going on with the print media. The New York Times seems to have stabilized its revenue. But the Washington Post is tanking. So is the Los Angeles Times. And so are many of the daily papers. Let’s face it, most liberals can probably get along just reading the New York Times. Maybe the right will adopt the Wall Street Journal (that is, if it stops leaning so far left as it has lately). But for the most part people get their news from the internet; YouTube and X. Small shops are able to make a living by providing factual coverage. Sure, they still slant it for their niche customers. But at least it still has some semblance of reality to it. So where does that leave the Acostas and Todds of the world? Unemployed.
You know this is a perfect time for Fox News to make a conscious effort to separate their opinion and news once and for all. And also develop a policy on the news side to report it right down the middle with no slant at all. I’d actually be willing to pay a small fee to get that kind of news coverage. But let’s face it. What’s the chance of something like that happening? Zero.
Back When Darren Stevens Was Still on Madison Avenue
Even the commercials were better back in the old days when we were allowed to be happy. The guys writing the commercials could write clever lyrics and even add a spritely tune for good measure. Now? Not so much.
Maybe President Trump can make MAGA also mean “Make Ads Great Again.”
I’m Still Working Out the Details
So, which is it? Rage against the dying of the light or serenity in the face of the inevitable and natural cycle of life and death? I was at a funeral and I looked at my cousins and saw what time was doing to them. All of us were proof of the inevitability of aging and death. Each one was a slightly different take on mortality. Some seemed to be aging gently and they exuded humor and calm. Others looked very tired and deeply saddened by how hard the way is. Well, that difference comes of a combination of internal and external factors. Luck plays a part and also wisdom and also temperament. If I’m going to guess I’d say luck and temperament play the largest parts. I mean I guess someone like Gautama could remain tranquil in the face of fate’s onslaught against our loved ones and our selves but most people are not so stoic. We need some luck to keep us going. Even Job finally had enough and wanted a word with the Big Guy Upstairs about all those boils.
So, is there a correct attitude toward the Big Sleep? I’ve always taken a somewhat legalistic attitude about what kind of deal we get from fate. When I was a bit younger, I used to say that fifty years was somewhat the break even point. What I meant by that was if fate gave you fifty good years you should think that you got a decent deal. Not great but decent. The first fifty years are the best part of a life and with any reasonable amount of effort you can get quite a bit done in a half century. You can raise a family. You can become an expert in your profession. You could even have served as President of the United States by then.
It’s not really a full lifetime but if you don’t lollygag around until forty you can cram a lot of living into fifty years. So, if you live comfortably to seventy, I think you can feel like you got a pretty sweet deal. I’m approaching the biblical “three score and ten” mark myself. And even though I’m not anxious to throw in the towel quite yet I can’t see myself going through the whole wailing, gnashing my teeth and shaking my fist at heaven act. I feel it would reflect a certain amount of ingratitude. After all, think of kids who die of cancer or some other terrible disease before they ever get their permanent teeth. That’s where I see someone lodging a legitimate grievance against the way the universe is run. I’ve always been repelled by the suffering of the innocents; “the problem of pain.”
So that’s my somewhat simplistic but easily explainable philosophy of life and death. God owes us fifty good years. And we owe it to ourselves (and Him) to use the time wisely and diligently. And this is coming from a profoundly lazy man. No male in my family has ever truly grown up before thirty. We have a talent for floating above the ground for an inordinate amount of time before being forced to finally settle down and get to work. For this reason, I feel like I have been blessed in having reached my age with all of the milestones accomplished. Of course, all of the credit for this goes to Camera Girl. She refused to let me stall her plans and so she had her kids while we were very young. Which means we were desperately poor for the first ten plus years of our married lives. Which means I was that much luckier to get the whole thing to work out.
So, seeing death and dying is a humbling experience. But it also makes me grateful for what I’ve already been allotted. And honestly, I’m not very excited about ending up a nonagenarian or even an octogenarian. I’m hoping for some very lazy death. I’ve toyed with the idea of starving myself. But I’m afraid I might keep putting it off every time I smell something good on the stove. I’m still working out the details.
Ten Days of Trump
It’s good to be home again. Also today I picked up my photography computer from the local cyber-surgeons. There was considerable sticker shock (yikes) for the new motherboard and processor and some adjustment for the new hardware (adapters, cables and such nonsense) but I’m back in business with my photos again. I haven’t really tested out it’s capabilities but the tech guy told me the new processor will be ridiculously faster than my old system. I can’t wait to try importing a thousand raw files and see how quickly it “renders” them. But enough geeking out.
I had my usual Wednesday virtual coffee break with the boys from the old firm. I have to say the giddiness is getting a bit ridiculous. Can unbridled enthusiasm be considered a form of backwards Trump Derangement Syndrome? There’s just too much laughing and optimism. It seems unnatural. Someone was claiming that Trump was talking of eliminating the Income Tax altogether. Now that just sounds nuts. But the angle was to switch over to a consumption tax. I have to confess that would suit me fine. But is everything going to be revolutionized? What’s next? Will all the currency be made over with pictures of The Donald? Will Trump’s signature hairstyle be added to George Washington on Mt. Rushmore to update the monument? Will the end of the Pledge of Allegiance be modified to “one nation under God with liberty and justice and so much winning for all?” Have Trump’s words from the 2016 election come true? Is it too much winning?
Well … no. I’ll put up with more winning.
There are still more things we need fixed. First of all, Kash Patel still hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate. That means there are hundreds of Stasi agents still working for the FBI. Once he’s had a chance to clean house, I’ll have a better idea how much more winning is needed. In fact, you know what I want to see? I want Trump to issue executive orders categorically forbidding Patriot Act or FISA Court actions against American citizens during his administration. Let’s have at least four years without our constitutional rights to due process being violated by tinpot Thought Police.
You see, that’s what happens when Trump starts issuing executive orders by the metric ton. We start assuming he can do anything. And then we become impatient if he hasn’t read our minds and already done the stuff we just thought of. Why hasn’t there been a special prosecutor empowered to go after Joy Reid for being an eyesore on television. Surely having her on cable tv is a form of cruel and unusual punishment for all of us. And what about the “ladies” of the View. Surely someone can turn the show into some kind of dunk tank / lie detector suspense show where Joy Behar or Whoopie Goldberg or one of the other crones is hooked up to a lie detector and asked a question about Donald Trump or some other conservative she hates and if she lies about something, like whether he’s been convicted or rape, she falls into a water tank filled with sharks or piranha fish and has to swim for her life to a distant ladder. I bet the ratings would be through the roof. So that’s kind of where I am right now. For the most part I’m happy with Trump 2.0. But a few little tweaks couldn’t hurt.
Well, that’s enough ranting for now. I’ll be waiting to see how Patel, Kennedy and Gabbard do in the Senate next week. If all three get through, Trump will have most of his core team in place and he can really get started with draining the swamp and taming the Leviathan.
So far so good.
It Just Seems Too Easy
Regardless of whether you watch left-leaning or right-leaning news outlets you can’t miss the fact that Trump is bulldozing the Washington establishment into the ground and increasing his popularity from day to day. And both sides (when they’re being honest) agree that they’ve never seen anything like this transition. Trump is getting his people confirmed by the Senate and he’s removing people from the federal bureaucracy that he sees as impediments; prosecutors, inspectors general, generals, you name it. He’s even going after birthright citizenship. His deportation initiative is going full speed ahead and has found allies in some blue cities. Nothing seems off the table. He’s a juggernaut. So why does this make me think there’s a George Floyd or a COVID pandemic about to be unleashed on us?
I guess I’m surprised at how smoothly it’s all going. Could the Left have been so completely flummoxed by Trump’s victory and his organization that they can’t fight back at all? I have read that a network of antifa and LGBTQ freaks are communicating on TikTok about attacking ICE agents doing their jobs. I’ve also read that they’re discussing assassinating Trump. And if I’ve heard these things then obviously everyone on the Left knows about it already. This jibes with what’s already going on. Apparently the two assassins who killed the Border agent in Vermont were transgender freaks of one sort or the other. So, there is some stuff going on. But all of this seems pretty tame compared to what I imagine the Left could put out on the street if they unleashed all of the psychopaths they command. So that is what I’m wondering about. Is this the calm before the storm?
Now maybe it’s the case that without the FBI and Justice Department running interference for them, that antifa and the other leftist goons aren’t a very effective force. I’m assuming the FBI is right now in panic mode wondering when their jobs are going to be pulled out from under them. That might be the simple answer. Or maybe it takes time to plan and organize a color revolution in 2025. Maybe they’re looking to publicize a mistake made by ICE agents during a deportation arrest. Possibly a child hurt or killed during some firefight with gang members or drug traffickers. Or maybe they’re looking for a valid US citizen accidentally mistaken for an illegal alien. Possibly that’s what they’re looking for to spark a firestorm against Trump’s administration.
Of course, it’s also possible that the popularity of Trump’s agenda will protect him from even some problems and mistakes that inevitably will happen in something as massive and difficult as finding and deporting tens of millions of people hiding in the general population. The scope of such an endeavor is sobering to consider. It will consume enormous resources in dollars and man-hours. It will not happen quickly or easily. But so far people are increasingly supportive of this project as it becomes a reality. Especially as we see him going after gangs and cartels that are wreaking havoc in cities across the country.
So maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just winning all the way down. But for some reason it seems too easy.
The Human Element
Einstein is said to have made the imaginative leap when he based his Theory of General Relativity on the notion that time (t) is just another dimension to go along with the three spatial dimensions (x, y, z). Space-time. When we talk about the where of a particle (or a person) we must also specify the when.
So yesterday when I travelled back to the place where I was born, I would have to travel back in time to reach my place of origin (x, y, z, t = 0, 0, 0, 0). But Einstein also said that for matter time can only travel forward. But maybe the mind (or the soul) isn’t composed of protons and electrons; leptons and hadrons. Because I had an uncanny feeling I had stepped back into an earlier era.
After battling New York City traffic that defied belief, to attend a family funeral, I walked into the little Roman Catholic Church that I attended as a child and was transported into my past. Sure, a few little things had changed. They had freshened up the paint on the ceiling over the altar and on the bas relief stations of the cross but the stained-glass windows, the icons around the altar and the pews we sat in triggered memories that perfectly mirrored my surroundings. And then there were my cousins and their children and their children’s children surrounding me with proof that the world I left behind decades ago still existed in a very human, very tenacious way. God said be fruitful and multiply. And we have. From a tiny family that set foot on this continent less than 150 years ago there are now a whole town’s worth of descendants.
And some of the latest additions were unknown to me by name. But just looking at their faces I could see the kinship. And in the middle of the Mass one of the youngest made such a noisy nuisance of himself that he forced his mother to retreat to the annex to return the ceremony to dignified order. But this outburst was of the very nature of the family. We are noisy, somewhat spoiled, sometimes rude but genuinely good natured and extremely funny people. And we do enjoy each other’s company. Being surrounded by this small army of family felt so right.
One of my cousins remarked that it was a pity that only such occasions rounded us all up together again. He spoke nostalgically about when we were all living within blocks of each other within the Italian ghetto that we all were now flocking to for this solemn occasion. He reminisced about the parties and get togethers we used to have on a regular basis; holidays, birthdays, weddings, graduations, births. But I reminded him that no one’s grandchildren could hope to afford the multi-million-dollar price tags that now attached to the buildings in this once humble neighborhood. What young people could afford to buy houses here now? I kidded that we would have to buy a whole town somewhere in the middle of nowhere if we wanted to live together in this modern and expensive age. He ruefully nodded his head in agreement.
Quickly the ceremony ended and we said our goodbyes. I wasn’t headed out east to the Long Island cemetery. I was headed north toward New England through the grid-lock of the outer boroughs and onto the highways beyond. But we made one stop before we headed home. There was an old time Italian Bakery that specialized in Italian pastries. They had sfogliatella riccia (seashell), coda d’aragosta (lobster tail) and various other pastries stuffed with cream that we would eat on Sunday nights when we were kids. The only problem with this wonderful store was the old woman who had run the counter. She was a sharp-tongued shrew who carped at everyone who entered the store.
I entered the store today and found the shelves still lined with all those Italian delicacies. But now the store was run by a Chinese family that had bought the recipes for the pastries when they purchased the business. And thankfully the pastries were just the same! And even better, the young lady running the counter was entirely friendly and polite. A miracle!
After too many hours I returned home with my small cache of desserts and told Camera Girl of my epic journey. We’ll eat the cakes with our coffee this week. And that will remind me of what I learned. Einstein was wrong about not being able to go back in time. You can. What you can’t do is go back to the same place. It’s always different. But it can be worth the trip.