Category: Current Events

This is a Free Country You Know!

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I was looking for something to watch on tv tonight and I noticed that I had recorded “A Man for All Seasons” recently.  But when I started it, I saw that I had missed the beginning and it started in the middle of Henry VIII’s visit to Thomas’s home.  I was disappointed but then realized that even watching part of this movie was more enticing than watching any one of a hundred movies that I had ready in their entirety.  Now why I haven’t already added this movie to my collection is a mystery for which I should be rebuked.  It is indeed an inspirational film.

But what struck me while I was watching it was a line that two of the characters used in the story.  At two separate points someone says, “This isn’t Spain you know, it’s England!”  And this is meant to mean that England is a free country and not full of religious zealots that would burn you at the stake for superstitious nonsense.  But of course, one of them is Cromwell who arranges perjury to have Thomas More beheaded for refusing to sign an oath confirming Henry’s legitimacy as head of the Church in England.  Even more amusing, the Cardinal who assisted Cromwell in this witch hunt was literally burned at the stake a few years later.

And now the reason I’m writing this essay.  That little phrase that the characters recited reminded me of what we used to repeat, “It’s a free country, I can say what I please.”  It was a trite saying.  But it was true.  You could say or believe whatever you wanted to.

But is that still a true statement?  No, it is not.  There are many things you may not say.  The COVID episode proved that.  The government proved that.  They ordered the social media platforms to censor anything they didn’t like about COVID.  And they did it.  And they hid the fact that they did it.  So, most people never knew there were other sides to the story.  They did it so successfully that most people still don’t know just how many lies the government told about COVID.  And they did the same sort of thing about Hunter’s Laptop and a host of other stories that were embarrassing to the Biden administration.

And it’s gone well beyond political issues.  They censor stories about pediatric transgender drug therapies and surgeries, illegal immigration criminality, price increases on food and housing, unemployment figures; basically, anything that makes the Biden administration look bad.  And of course, the biggest coverup was the fact that Joe Biden was suffering from dementia.

So, is this really still a free country?  I would have to say that since the “Patriot Act” was signed into law we have ceased to be free.  The government knows everything we say and the government now censures anything we say that they don’t like.

Well, that’s where we are.  It’s a discouraging thought.  But watching More’s story helped.  Here was a man surrounded by jackals and yet he lived his life in service to the good.  He exemplified intelligence, honesty and humanity.  His enemies ultimately destroyed him and yet history has recognized his excellence while branding his persecutors as pernicious, dishonest and cowardly.

I hardly see myself as martyr material.  I enjoy annoying Camera Girl too much to want to end up on the chopping block either figuratively or literally.  But I do think we should all be willing to pay some price to oppose the forces that have gained a stranglehold on America.  We’re all guilty of laziness in some sense or other and it behooves us to step up and try to make a difference in our families and local communities.  This isn’t Spain you know!

Trustworthy

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Bash:  Hi, I’m Dana Bash and I’m here with Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Walz and this is the first CNN interview for her presidential campaign.

Walz:  That’s right Dana.  It’s the first!

Bash:  That’s right Governor.  That’s right.  Madame Vice President, how would you describe the direction that your campaign is taking now that the convention is over?

Harris:  I would describe it as joyful Dana.

Walz:  That’s right Dana, joyful.  Full of joy.

Bash:  Okay.  Full of joy.  That’s good.  But is there any more, uh, concrete policy statement or theme to the campaign.

Harris:  Yes Dana.  Without a doubt.  My administration will use all of the resources of the federal government to find, prosecute and imprison that guy that made the compilation of me saying, “unburdened by what was.”  Anyone who would belittle and mock a woman of color who is also Vice President of the United States is obviously a racist and a misogynist.

Walz:  Uh, wait a minute.

Harris:  Hey, I’m talking here Tim!

Walz:  Yes, Madame Vice President.  But…

Harris:  But nothing!  And not only will we convict and possibly execute this monster…

Walz:  Execute?  Wait a minute.

Harris:  Shut up Walz!  I’m going to find everyone who shared this video and arrest them.  And then I’ll find anyone who watched it and arrest them too.  They must all pay.

Bash:  Madame Vice President, maybe you remember how President Biden’s debate performance had a very deleterious effect on his re-election campaign.  Basically, not being able to answer simple policy questions or even speak in complete sentences caused the American people to doubt his competency to continue as president for another term.  What the American people want to know is how they can trust you to tell them the truth about all the important events and policy questions that presidents handle if you withheld the important fact that Joe Biden was a dementia patient for most or all of his term?  How can they find you trustworthy?

Harris:  Trustworthy.  When we say that someone is trustworthy, we are saying that that person is worthy of trust.  And a person who is worthy of trust is trustworthy.  And that is what I am.  I am a trustworthy person who is worthy of trust.  That’s what I am.  And the American people can see a future of me being trustworthy unencumbered by a past where I didn’t tell them that Joe Biden was a little bit demented.

Walz:  Okay, that’s enough.  I can’t do this anymore.  I’m willing to do that tour in Iraq now.  Anything rather than listen to any more of this.  I thought I could just ignore the idiocy.  After all I made believe that BLM was a legitimate cause and that letting them burn down Minneapolis and St. Paul was a reasonable thing for a governor to do.    But listening to Kamala Harris for four years would land me in an asylum.  (STALKS OFF STAGE).

Bash:  In light of current events should we maybe postpone this interview until a later date?

Harris:  I can imagine 2028 unencumbered by memory of this interview.  Maybe 2032?

A Pocket Full of Miracles

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For a thousand years from roughly 500 BC to 500 AD the most dynamic civilization on the planet was the Greco-Roman world.  This consisted of a number of Indo-European speaking pastoral tribes who had earlier invaded southeastern Europe and disrupting the existing Mediterranean civilization there, borrowed heavily from their predecessors and founded city states in Italy, Asia Minor and the Balkans while competing with the more civilized Phoenicians and struggling to resist even less civilized Indo-European tribes like the Celts who periodically invaded from the north.  Two of these cities; first Athens in Hellas and then Rome in Italy, stumbled upon the dynamism that comes when some measure of freedom from oppression is codified into a government.

In both cases the limited form of democracy unleashed a power that dominated its neighbors for an appreciable time.  Eventually in both cases this freedom decayed and was replaced by autocracy.

A little more than a thousand years after the remnants of the Greco-Roman civilization collapsed the English resurrected a different but similar form of government.  And the English colonies around the world have continued and adapted this form of government including the former colonies that became the United States of America.  A case can be made that the last four hundred years have represented the practical extent of this experiment in democracy.  And like the Athenians before them the American and the British have tried to force their vassal states to emulate their form of government, so that today the number of democracies in the world is impressive, unless you look too closely.

But four hundred years is a long time.  Athens maintained democracy for most of one hundred and eighty years and theoretically the Roman republic hadn’t devolved into a dictatorship for almost five hundred years.  But truly the last century of the Roman republic was a series of dictators vying to stay in power and unleashing endless wars on the state.

So, four hundred years is a pretty good run.  But the current Anglo-American project is showing many of the warning signs of an exhausted civilization.  And probably the most damning is the plutocrats trying to eliminate the middle-class and replace them with serfs.  Even back in 4th century Athens, Aristotle knew that only with a numerous middle-class can a free state maintain itself.  Well, we are quickly devolving into the condition that the Roman plebians found themselves in the first century BC.  Their farms were bought up by the rich who used slave labor to outcompete the small farmers and left them forced to enlist in the army just to keep from starving.

Our predicament is even worse.  The plutocrats don’t need us at all, not even as cannon fodder.  All they want us to do is disappear.  So that leaves us with Donald Trump.  He says he wants to make us great again.  He’ll have to answer two questions:

  1. Is it too late to get an honest election?
  2. Is it too late to restore the middle class?

Of course, if the first answer is no then the second answer is no by default.  I am hoping he can pull it off.  Getting a fair election is a long shot.  But there’s no reason to hope against it.  Restoring prosperity is a larger and more complicated story.  And finally, if he manages to get some things done, the next question is can he recruit honest men to succeed him and keep the effort going.  Because, let’s face it, there is a generation of work to even begin to fix our problems.  It’ll take a whole pocket full of miracles.

One thing that the Athenians had over us is honest comic poets.  Aristophanes openly mocked the failures and foibles of the leaders of his country.  All we have is Saturday Night Live and the late-night show hosts.  And they’re all in the bag for the Democrats.  And on top of everything else they’re not even funny.  Well, we have this guy.

Reality Returns to the 2024 Election

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Mark Halperin is a left journalist but he has been running an independent zoom-like network with both Republican and Democrat journalists called 2-Way which has been analyzing the race.  This video seems to be preparing his friends on the Left for some new polling that will let some of the air out of the Harris “Joy” campaign that been unleashed on the world during the Dem convention.  It sounds kind of grim despite his best attempt to sugar-coat it.

I’m interested to see what those Fox polls coming out tomorrow look like for the battleground states.

Eureka

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After yesterday’s epic whine about the vicissitudes of home ownership I looked around for some kind of salve for my male ego.  And fate or something provided me with the opportunity to redeem myself.  A clogged bathtub drain.  For the last few weeks, the drain in our tub has been getting slower and slower.  Lately I’ve left the plunger near the tub and after every shower I played a game of trying to get it to break loose.  All I achieved was to dredge up a goodly amount of black flakes that were some kind of fossilized soap scum.  And all that achieved was to waste ten or fifteen minutes while I cleaned up the tub of this disgusting residue.

But today I had had enough.  I gathered my equipment:

  • Screwdrivers … check
  • Needle nose pliers … check
  • Accordion Toilet Plunger with Large Bellows for Extra Powerful Plunge, Black … check
  • Snake auger … check
  • Electric drill … check
  • Safety glasses … check
  • Disposable rubber gloves … check

All that was left was to let Camera Girl see that I was preparing for battle and even though I would be expending tens of thousands of dollars to have someone competent repair my home, at least I was capable of saving the cost of a plumber to get my bathtub back in good operating condition.

I solemnly explained to her how I would be removing the plunger from the trip-lever stopper to properly auger the drain line.  I don’t think it would be possible for me to overstate the intensity of contempt her look communicated to me.  Well, that’s the problem with women.  They don’t understand or appreciate technical genius.

So, I removed the drain filter and tried pulling out hair with the pliers.  Nada.  Then just for old time’s sake I put six inches of water in the tub and tried the “Accordion Toilet Plunger with Large Bellows for Extra Powerful Plunge, Black.”  I pushed down on the stupid thing once and the tub drained in seconds.  And of course, Camera Girl walked in just as it emptied and gave me the same look.  She picked up the plunger and asked, “How much did you pay for this?”  I said, “ten bucks.”  “And this?” (pointing at the auger).  “Sixty dollars.”  She shook her head and walked away.  Women don’t understand about contingency planning.  Very short-sighted.

Well, as pathetic as my victory was, it has transformed my attitude.  We’re definitely on the upswing.  And after she took a shower, she readily admitted that a working bathtub drain is not a commodity to look down your nose at.  And there’s no telling what I might do next.

Who knows, maybe I’ll tell my builder to stop all work, figure what I owe him so far and take over the job myself.  I mean how long could it take me to shovel ten thousand pounds of gravel?  And how hard can it be to jack up a building off its foundation?  And who needs a truck to pour concrete anyway?  What was it Archimedes said?  “Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough and I’ll move the Earth.”  Well, some of my ancestors came from Sicily.  Maybe I’m related to Archimedes (at least by marriage!).  Well, baby steps.  I think I’ll shock Camera Girl and brew my own pot of coffee.  How hard could it be?

Sympathy for Sauron

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Fall of Barad-dûr

The Compound has been invaded by an army.  They have occupied many of the high points and they have laid siege to the citadel.  Actually, I have a contractor doing major surgery on the foundations of an extension of the main building that was rotting out.  The floor of a room had rotted away and the only reasonable solution was to replace a column-on-pier foundation with a poured slab.  Suffice it to say that it is fiendishly expensive and extremely ticklish construction in that the three stories on that part of the building will need to be jacked up off the piers and the columns truncated to accommodate the new height of the foundation which will also be the new floor for that room.  I daily expect the whole building to collapse like Barad-dûr after the destruction of the One Ring.  Poor Sauron.  A ring makes a damn poor foundation for a tall structure like that tower.

But while all this is going on I’m kept amused at just how little insurance companies are willing to admit is within the scope of their policies.  Regardless of how much we pay in premiums their responsibilities are hemmed in by endless deductibles and limitations on liability.  Their favorite retort to almost anything I say is, “You’re not covered for that.”  It’s to the point I’d almost hope that a catastrophe would be truly apocalyptic so that I could see them cower at the size of their payout.  But deep down I know I would still be the loser.  You can’t beat these people.  Compared to them the Mafia are boy scouts.  Poor Sauron.  I’ll bet he got nothing from his insurance company when the Barad-dûr came crashing down.  They probably had a waiver for unforeseen termite or hobbit damage.

So daily I have to reassure Camera Girl that when all this is over, she’ll still have a roof over her head and enough money to buy us pumpernickel bagels.  She is extremely allergic to large checks.  In fact, she insists that I write all of them because that way it’s my fault.  In some sense I guess she’s right.  If it had been up to her, we’d still be living in an apartment in Brooklyn.  I guess in that sense she is the true conservative in the family.

When the dumpster arrived, Camera Girl was hopeful that the builder would allow her to use the dumpster to get rid of some of her least favorite debris.  We have a collection of yard junk that she hates with a passion; garden hoses, wire fencing, a couple of old garden swings and a large pool warming cover that is flaking apart.  I opined that the dumpster would be completely filled and probably filled again before the builder was finished but hope springs eternal.  But then I told her that she could get her own dumpster for less than what a contractor would charge her for interfering in his operation and that seemed to work.  She hates being charged more for anything.  She is a very frugal woman (thank heaven).

I wonder who got the contract to remediate the site of the Barad-dûr collapse.  After all that had to be some serious toxic waste.  I’m guessing it would have been dwarves that took the work.  They worked in metal and stone.  Surely, they could salvage something from the rubble pile.  Maybe they could turn it into Section 8 housing for unemployed orcs.  I mean live and let live, right?

Those who call houses money pits are completely justified.  Unless you yourself are a jack of all trades, the liabilities of owning a home are staggering.  But the alternative of renting is even worse.  I completely sympathize with the Millennials and Zoomers who are confronting the herculean task of trying to buy a home in Joe Biden’s America.  But without home ownership how can you truly know the joy of having someone knock your house down just to rebuild it at great expense.  God bless America.

The Shining City on the Hill

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A question that gets asked a lot is whether the elites who run this country really believe in all their woke pieties or are they just using them as a blunt object to pummel the dirt people that they despise so much.  My belief is that in a sense they do believe the things they talk about.  But not in the way that someone would believe in things like gravity or fire.  The things that they espouse, that are crazy, they believe in the way that kids believe in Santa Claus.  They want to believe in it because it makes them feel good.

And part of the reason it makes them feel good is because it makes them feel better than the bad people who don’t believe in these things.  So, these beliefs, such as America is rife with systemic racism, serve as the basis for membership in the elite hierarchy but at the same time don’t require that these beliefs be tested because membership in the elite insulates the elect from exposure to the real world where reality shows its ugly face.

So, if you’re one of the cloud people you can drive your electric car three miles back and forth from Harvard Yard to your home in Cambridge and the reality of what green energy is doing to the American energy system won’t cause you a moment’s discomfort.  But if you’re a family trying to make it on two minimum wage salaries and gasoline has doubled in price over the last four years there’s a lot of pain.  Or if you’re an old money legacy candidate at an Ivy League school then the minority affirmative action candidates won’t affect you.  But if you’re a poor white kid with 1600 SAT scores it will.

When you’re part of the elite the rules are different.  And you have to know that, but you don’t admit it, even to yourself.  From where you stand, you’re one of the good guys and you deserve to have the game played by your rules.  And in a sense, this may have always been the case.  After all, aren’t these the same people who have been calling the shots since Plymouth Rock?  Whether they were justifying the dispossession of the local Indian tribes or enforcing the blue laws against the Irish riff-raff or finding a pretext for the Spanish American War haven’t the elites always justified their preferences as being moral and on the side of the angels or more recently “on the right side of history?”  Somehow the consequences of whatever crusade they decide to declare are always paid for by less important people; the riff-raff or foreigners who need the work.

People think that because the elites are advocating mass immigration from the third world that they are trying to eliminate their own European legacy.  But I think they have that wrong.  The elites believe and probably rightly that they will still be in charge and they will be immune to the chaos that this importation will wreak on the rest of the country.  And maybe they’re right.  Maybe Cambridge and Martha’s Vineyard and the other homes of the elite will roll right along basically unchanged.

But maybe they’re wrong.

The DNC Through the Eyes of the Former Woke

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Sasha Stone is one of that small group of leftist journalists who sometime in the last four years or so had an epiphany.  People like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald realized after the 2020 election that the Left had thrown away all pretense at objectivity and abandoned all of their former devotion to freedom of speech and other constitutional rights.  Their employers at the New York Times or the Washington Post or Rolling Stone didn’t want the truth.  They wanted good old propaganda and they didn’t need any honesty.

So like her colleagues Stone has had her red pill moment and against all odds is now on the Trump train.  But I have no illusions that Stone or Greenwald view me as anything other than a knuckle-dragging subhuman with my lack of celebratory enthusiasm for the rainbow flag and all its multitudinous perversities.  But it is interesting to read their version of the red-pill moment and its various echoes down the years as they bump into the same dishonesty and delusion we all experience in Joe Biden’s America.

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/they-love-bombed-us-with-kamala

RFK Jr.

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I watched RFK Jr.’s announcement.  His pulling out of the swing states is a very interesting tactic.  I guess it’s possible he might nudge enough voters into Trump’s column to swing a few of those swing states.  Wouldn’t that be crazy!  From everything I’ve read about Kennedy he seems like a very strange man.  I think I read that he may have pushed one of his wives to commit suicide.  So, like everything else about the American political scene, Kennedy is another weird enigma that makes it easier to believe we’re living through some kind of apocalyptic end time.

But when you separate the man from the message, I have to think that his reasons for opposing the Democrats mostly rings true:

  • Free Speech
  • Ukraine
  • Public Health

And especially the first two issues are so clearly aimed at the disastrous policies that the Democrats have allowed the Deep State to foist on the country.  The campaign by the intelligence agencies to dictate to the social media sites what they can and cannot allow to be said is such a transparent violation of the first amendment that it’s shocking that the Supreme Court hasn’t already taken some direct action against it.  I’m guessing it’s through fear.  After all, where exactly is the Supreme Court’s army?  After the Supreme Court tells the CIA to cease and desist who exactly goes down to the CIA and frog marches them to jail?  Nope.

As for Ukraine, I listened to Kennedy’s description of how the State Department initiated the war and it was spot on.  He might as well have had me write it for all the difference in our ideas about it.  He’s right and unless the Democrats lose the chances of a shooting war with the Russians is probably 100%.

So even though I think RFK Jr. is a weird unsympathetic character (a Kennedy) I agree with his reasons for not supporting the Democrats and hope that his support for Trump will be enough to throw one or more swing states into the Trump column.  I wondered if maybe Kennedy has someone else who does his thinking for him.  I’m not implying he isn’t intelligent but the fact that the issues he is championing make perfect sense to me doesn’t jibe with the reputation he has for adopting weird fringe causes.  If he had said that he was opposing the Harris campaign because of their stance on alien abduction and probing that would feel like an RFK Jr. signature move.  But I believe in taking the W when it presents itself.  And if a kook suddenly stops spouting gibberish and wants to help my side, I’ll gladly hand him a shovel point him toward the front lines and tell him to start digging foxholes.

On a personal note, I find listening to his horrible voice impediment almost impossible to do.  It’s like listening to someone scraping a steel nail against a slate chalkboard.  It’s physical and mental torture. But regardless of my personal feeling I say, well done Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Junior.  You have proven that the Kennedy family isn’t a complete and utter waste of everyone’s time.  You’ve done one useful thing in your time on this Earth.  Kudos.

Unjustified

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So, the Democrat Convention is in full swing and Obamas and Clintons and other non-human lifeforms have been paraded onto the stage and allowed to jabber on about this and that.  Now I’m not crazy enough to actually listen to even ten seconds of this kind of thing.  But I have seen some headlines and it’s as expected.  Everyone loves Joe Biden and respects the hell out of his completely voluntary decision to step down from the presidential race.  And the ones who love him the most are the ones who shoved him off the cliff.  Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.

And then they let Joe himself speak and it was apparently a very long and incoherent tribute to himself and his struggles.  Well, hopefully that’s the last time he’ll have the chance to do that.

I guess tomorrow they’ll let Kammy talk.  Of course, it’ll be scripted and tele-prompted so even an idiot like her will be able to bumble her way through it with all kinds of inappropriate pauses and cackles along the way.  It will be about all the free stuff she’ll be giving us that somehow won’t make inflation even worse somehow.  And then she’ll stand there grimacing while the non-player characters applaud thunderously for whole quarters of an hour at a time.  And of course, the whole process is an abomination against actual democracy because none of the Democrat voters voted for Harris.  They voted for that other brain-dead idiot Biden.  But because he already revealed to the world at large that his cerebral cortex has rotted away something had to be done.  And because the only other person who could use the money that the donors have given to Biden is Harris it had to be her.

So here we are.  For the second time in four years a candidate who is dumber than dirt is likely to be installed in the White House and given control of the United States nuclear arsenal.  If that doesn’t give you pause when considering what kind of world we are living in, I don’t know what will.

We have a little less than three months until the result will be announced to us.  That even takes into account the now obligatory extra week for Philadelphia to print up an extra million ballots for the Democrat.  In less than three months we will know for sure if we are living in a banana republic like Venezuela.  Either that or the majority of American voters are criminally insane.  Either way we will have to recalibrate our lives to take into consideration that assumptions based on this being the old American republic are completely unjustified.

In a banana republic it is completely unjustified to assume that the money in your bank account won’t be stolen by the government.  Likewise, assuming that you will receive justice in a court of law is equally unwarranted.  And believing any statement made by any of the organs of the federal government is equally foolish.  What is needed is a new set of rules.  Probably “1984” would be a good primer for reeducating yourself into the dos and don’ts of living in a banana republic.

So that’s what the publicity around the Democratic convention got me thinking.  What I haven’t figured out is how to react if somehow Trump is declared the winner.  Somehow, I have to believe that something really sinister would be waiting for us in that unlikely eventuality.  My guess is COVID 2.0.  Only this time they’ll use the real bioweapon.  I guess I’m just an optimist.