Category: Current Events

Focusing on the Foreground

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All of us have to do a myriad of things to keep the plates spinning.  Hopefully 95% of this stuff goes right.  But 5% goes wrong and we need to clean up the mess and take our lumps and move on.  And while all of this is going on in the foreground, in the background evil lunatics are working ceaselessly to put an end to the America that provides the space in which we can hustle along to give our families the slightest taste of the good life.  We can have a week’s vacation at the beach.  We send our kids to the best college we can afford.  We own a home in a town where gangbangers don’t hunt down our kids in the streets.

So, this week we witness the Democrat party melting down because they can’t force their brain-dead figurehead to leave the presidential race.  And when that sideshow act gets stale, they try to eliminate his competition the old-fashioned way, with a “lone wolf” spotted an eight-shot head start at point blank range by the secret service.  And of course, once they fail, the Left declares it time to lower the temperature.  At least for today.

Today, Donald Trump picked J D Vance as his running mate.  Of the favorites listed I guess he’s probably the best choice.  The kabuki theater that is the Republican Convention will drone on until, I think Thursday when Trump gives his acceptance speech.  From what he’s said Trump has had a revelation.  Being spared death has convinced him that his message will be that he wants to unite the country.  Well, I don’t know how that can happen.  I think almost half the country wanted the shooter to succeed.  I mean, it’s admirable to want to unite America but I don’t think it’s one country anymore.  It’s not even two countries that tolerate each other.  It’s diametrically opposed enemies looking to get a permanent advantage in order to conquer the other.

So, while we struggle to keep the balls in the air, out of the corner of our eye we see this absurd pantomime that claims it’s “our democracy.”  Today they kept Morning Shmoe of the air.  He and his demented bride couldn’t be trusted not to start calling for Donald Trump’s blood on the day that Joe Biden was “brining down the temperature” by postponing the release of campaign commercials that probably feature Trump dressed up as Hitler.  Of course, Scarborough is hardly the only or even the most unhinged of the left-wing pundits.  Over the last couple of weeks Joy Reid at times has appeared to be close to an epileptic fit.  I have to assume if they’re allowing her on the air, she must be dosed with Thorazine or something stronger.

Well, as we slouch toward Election Day we are sure to see a lot of crazy things.  Will any of them be worse than the last couple of weeks?  I’d like to say no but I’d be a fool to do it.  If Biden’s numbers slip much lower, I wouldn’t be surprised by any crazy thing, up to and including a nuclear attack.  Joe Biden is demented and the people who pull his strings are various types of maniacs.  I want to believe that behind the scenes there are a few sane individuals that can keep the crazy people in check.  But I’m far from convinced of that.

I’ll tell you.  When I think about the biggest personal challenges I’m facing, and some of them are kind of daunting, I’m glad that I have them to keep me from thinking about this other stuff 24/7.  Because this is bedlam.

2024 Summer Movie Talk – Part 6

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Film Noir (Crime)

So once again there is some chicanery going on here.  Because of my previous list I have to leave out all of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies that should be in this category.  “Strangers on a Train,” “Dial M for Murder,” “Rope” and whole bunch of his stuff is right near the top of this genre.  But consistency was never my strength.  Laziness is.

I have emboldened the movies I particularly like.  Take that as personal preference.

I’ve reviewed some of these movies separately if you want my detailed opinion on them search the site.  So here’s a list of what I think is some pretty good noir.

  1. THE MALTESE FALCON (1941)
  2. HIGH SIERRA (1941)
  3. MURDER, MY SWEET (1944)
  4. DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)
  5. THE BIG SLEEP (1946)
  6. THE STRANGER (1946)
  7. THE BLUE DAHLIA (1946)
  8. THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946)
  9. GILDA (1946)
  10. OUT OF THE PAST (1947)
  11. ODD MAN OUT (1947)
  12. DARK PASSAGE (1947)
  13. THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1948)
  14. KEY LARGO (1948)
  15. SORRY, WRONG NUMBER (1948)
  16. THE NAKED CITY (1948)
  17. WHITE HEAT (1949)
  18. THE THIRD MAN (1949)
  19. ALL THE KING’S MEN (1949)
  20. D.O.A. (1949)
  21. THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)
  22. IN A LONELY PLACE (1950)
  23. KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL (1952)
  24. THE BLUE GARDENIA (1953)
  25. THE BIG HEAT (1953)
  26. SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1957)
  27. TOUCH OF EVIL (1958)

If I left out one of your favorites or if you detest one of my listed films, feel free to speak up and make your opinions known in the comments below.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 14JUL2024 – Unsung Hero

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war pig

So many are sending encouragement to Trump, but he lived with relatively little damage. I am angry with the media, pundits and celebs who are apparently forgetting the bystander who was killed and the two critically wounded. I still have not heard THEIR names mentioned. The dastard murderer’s name we know well, hearing or reading it dozens of times everywhere.

How about the media and pundits showing some respect for the bystanders who caught bullets, hmmmm?

The man who died sacrificed his life to shield his wife and daughters from the bullets. He died a bona fide HERO. And how about his family who saw him take the bullet and die before their eyes?

On Saturday, July 13, 2024, a shooting occurred at a campaign rally for former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. The incident resulted in the death of Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old former firefighter who was attending the rally with his family. Comperatore was fatally shot while trying to protect his family from the hail of bullets.
Corey Comperatore: A Hero
Corey Comperatore, a devoted father and volunteer firefighter, was hailed as a hero for shielding his family from the gunfire. According to reports, Comperatore threw himself over his family members, including his wife and two daughters, to protect them from the bullets. His selfless act ultimately cost him his life.
Other Injured Victims
Two other individuals were injured in the shooting, including a 35-year-old man who was shot in the leg and a 42-year-old woman who was shot in the arm. Both victims were treated at a local hospital and are expected to recover.

 

 

 

 

Trump on the Firing Line

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So, I wanted to write a post on the assassination.  But I’m kind of at a loss.  Where to start?  Most of Donald Trump’s secret service detail looks like an aging, out of shape girl scout troop.  Then we have the anti-sniper unit, they must have been on a coffee break.  Eventually after the shooter emptied a magazine at the president, they got around to killing the guy on the roof in front of them.  I guess that was nice of them under the circumstances.  Then the press goes through some histrionics but their takeaway is that preventing retaliation by insane Trump followers is the most important mission of the security agencies.  Trump’s political enemies prosecute him in every jurisdiction where they can assemble a kangaroo court and then they hyperventilate on the television about him retaliating against them with lawfare if he wins.  What’s wrong with this picture?  We live in a permanent upside-down reality.

But we already know all this.  Basically, we are waiting to find out if Deep State will thwart the will of the people of this country and essentially prove that they can and will do whatever it takes to maintain control over our lives and enact their agenda, which is basically make us into serfs.  We’ve got four months more or less.  Maybe they’ll get lucky with the next psycho.  Maybe his aim will be better or his weapon a little more robust.  Or maybe Trump will survive to election day, and they’ll cheat him the way they did in 2020.  Or maybe they’ll let him win the election and then just stonewall his every attempt at reforming the system with crooked judges and bureaucratic obfuscation.  Who knows, they might have a more effective bioweapon this time or a deadlier RNA vaccine as a follow up.  But the chance of him fixing things seems remote.

Watching Trump on that podium and seeing his defiance after they came within an inch or two of blowing his head off, I was grateful that a man who didn’t have to put up with any of this madness cared enough about this country to try and fix the awful mess we’re in.  Trump is this enigma.  Trump is a businessman, or a salesman, or a huckster, or a con-man or a flim-flam artist depending on whether you like him or hate him.  But he’s definitely one thing.  He’s an American.  And I’m an American.  Now to a lot of people that word no longer has any meaning.  But to a lot of us it still does.  So, I recognize in Trump someone who is trying to save the world we used to live in.  He wants to stop the wholesale destruction of the way of life that we all loved and took for granted.

Now, at this point I’d give him considerably less than a fifty-fifty chance of saving this country.  He’s up against the Democrats, the Republicans, the Deep State, Wall Street, the rest of the globalists of the world and now the lunatics of the Left who want to blow his brains out.

I doubt he’ll win.  But I can’t doubt his courage.  He’s proven that under fire.

2024 Summer Movie Talk – Part 5

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Suspense – Alfred Hitchcock

I’m faking a lot of thinking here with this category.  Alfred Hitchcock usually can be considered as a creator of crime or specifically murder stories.  But sometimes it’s a spy story or something really crazy like birds turning against humanity.  So, suspense is probably as good a label as anything else.

For most of his career Hitchcock produced very high-quality product.  At his peak he could get the best actors and lavish budgets to make his films.  But even on a shoestring like with Psycho he could produce a memorable movie.  At the very end he did produce some awful stuff.  I assume he was beginning to fail due to old age.

I’ve reviewed most of these movies separately if you want my detailed opinion on them.  But here’s a list of what I liked in Hitchcock’s output.  I still haven’t seen all his films but there are enough to form more than a good list of his best stuff.

  1. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
  2. The 39 Steps (1935)
  3. The Lady Vanishes (1938)
  4. Suspicion (1941)
  5. Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
  6. Lifeboat (1944)
  7. Spellbound (1945)
  8. Notorious (1946)
  9. Rope (1948)
  10. Strangers on a Train (1951)
  11. Dial M for Murder (1953)
  12. Rear Window (1954)
  13. To Catch a Thief (1955)
  14. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
  15. North by Northwest (1959)
  16. Psycho (1960)
  17. The Birds (1963)

If I left out one of your favorites or if you detest one of my listed films, feel free to speak up and make your Hitchcockian opinions known in the comments below.  People are usually very decided in their feelings about his films, one way or the other.  For instance, film aficionados consider “Vertigo” Hitchcock’s greatest masterpiece and a seminal work of cinematic importance.  But being a philistine, I despise it.  So, I left it out.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 13JUL2024 – Divine Intervention

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war pig

It’s no fun being a prophet. As I wrote earlier, the left has pulled out all the stops.

Now Trump and me are brothers. I’ve had an AK bullet pass between the right side of my head and my right ear. It nicked my ear and burned the short hair on my head. We both have been within an inch of dying.

What bothers me is how the shooter got that close. ALL rooftops within a mile with direct line of sight of the stage are supposed to be under surveillance by human eyes with binoculars, snipers with scopes, helicopters, and drones. Drones should have been swarming the perimeter and out to at least 400 yards.

Trump has his Teddy Roosevelt moment. Too bad the shooter was killed. Should have been captured and sent to Gitmo for “questioning”, but I guess they had to ensure he couldn’t shoot any more bystanders.

I can say with experience. TRUMP WILL HAVE RESTLESS NIGHTS OVER THIS ONE. He’ll wake up, sit up in bed and grab his ear from bad dreams.

Trump has earned his PTSD.

Update:

TomD:

Thank God the shooter had little experience or was so stressed out that he couldn’t use the fundamentals. Maybe he just didn’t know enough to zero his scope.

A head sized target from 130 yards from a prone position is trivial.

Whatever the circumstances that caused him to miss an easy shot, thank God.

 

Chemist:

The witness in the video said there were multiple higher points around that the SS was not manning.
They did not have the high ground.
Yes, I am Monday morning quarterbacking this.
Doesn’t change anything. They fucked up.

 

Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump

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Above is a video of a witness who saw the shooter crawling up on the roof of a nearby building who got the attention of law enforcement and told them a sniper was on the building and they did nothing.

Well, the crazies are now out in full force.  At a rally in Pennsylvania Donald Trump appeared to be grazed by bullets as he was talking to the crowd.

So much for the peaceful, law-abiding leftists.

Update:

Bigus Macus

This is the picture of President Trump we need to keep showing.

https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1812263848751349892

 

Peak Summer 2024

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July 15th is peak summer; top dead center.  And this year it’s living up to the hype.  Lots of heat, lots of humidity, a pretty good amount of sunshine.  As opposed to 2023, I am satisfied with the ration of summer being provided.  I am watching countless hours of old movies and wandering the fields looking for pictures of bugs and listening to political talking heads panicking or laughing at the latest exploits of the Joe Biden Flying Circus and Freak Show Emporium.  I’ve had to stop watching anything that has James Carville on it.  The Ragin’ Cajun is so distraught that I’m afraid I’ll bust a gut laughing at his apoplexy.  I’ll be shocked if he survives.

Now I will pay for all this joy.  The karmic wheel never stops turning and eventually it will pay me back with pain.  But what the hell.  Let’s let this thing play out.  Sometime in September Trump and Biden are supposed to have their second debate.  I’m sure by then the Dems and the Media will have adjusted their depression meds and decided to stop their Biden freakout and concentrate on destroying Trump by any means necessary.  And ANY is the operative word there.  I won’t be surprised by anything but I may be dismayed anyway.  After all these are desperate and delusional people who control resources that have almost no limits.  Four years ago, they shut down the whole world’s economy for a year and a half just to get Donald Trump.  What might they consider out of bounds?

But I digress.  I read that Shelley Duvall died yesterday.  In honor of her passing I plan to watch “The Shining” this week.  There is a certain contrarian logic in watching that most wintry of horror movies at this most sultry time of the rolling year.  Watching Jack Torrance succumb to the poison that the Overlook Hotel has served up to him is a cautionary tale for every frustrated fiction writer that ever lived.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

And just to give equal time to a less disturbed ghost story I think I’ll watch the George C Scott version of “A Christmas Carol.”  I think Christmas in the middle of July is something that should not be left to only the Hallmark Channel.

Yesterday I got a burst of energy and took out my pruning saw, bow saw and extra heavy-duty pruning shears and went primitive on some small trees that have gotten out of control in one area of the property.  And while I was at it, I searched out some Virginia Creeper vines that had gotten completely out of hand in the woods.  Some of these vines were three inches in diameter.  The trees they were climbing on were almost overwhelmed by the parasite that had wrapped around and choked them.  Looking out at those trees I now see broad swaths of dead leaves up in the canopy where these vines have been cut off at the roots.

Camera Girl mocked me for all this effort for little tangible result.  But self-satisfaction is its own reward.  Vines, especially poison ivy aggravate me.  In August I have a plan to wreak havoc on a patch that’s growing by the road.  I’m going to soak them down with vinegar and cover them with plastic or paper to let them stew in that low pH brew.  I don’t want to use herbicides because of ground water contamination.  But acetic acid passes muster as an organic substitute.  In my book the highest good that bio-engineering could be put to would be building a virus that would drive poison ivy to extinction.  The man who did that would rise to the level of a saint in my opinion as having removed one of the great scourges in this world.

Well anyway, time to get back to peak summer.  At play in the fields of the Lord.

2024 Summer Movie Talk – Part 4

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Westerns – Modern

I’m dividing Westerns into two categories; Classic and Modern, because they really are completely different categories.  I’ll list what I think are among the best or the most popular or the most interesting modern westerns in approximately chronological order.  I’ve reviewed a number of these movies so if you want my detailed opinion, you can do a search on the site.

  1. THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960)
  2. A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964)
  3. FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (1965)
  4. THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (1966)
  5. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1969)
  6. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969)
  7. TRUE GRIT (1969)
  8. JEREMIAH JOHNSON (1972)
  9. HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER (1973)
  10. THE SHOOTIST (1976)
  11. THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES (1976)
  12. THE LONG RIDERS (1980)
  13. PALE RIDER (1985)
  14. SILVERADO (1985)
  15. UNFORGIVEN (1992)
  16. TOMBSTONE (1993)
  17. WYATT EARP (1994)
  18. OPEN RANGE (2003)
  19. 3:10 TO YUMA (2007)
  20. TRUE GRIT (2010)
  21. HELL OR HIGH WATER (2016)

Twenty-one is a long list.  Longer than I intended but I guess I have a soft spot for some of these movies.  I included both versions of “True Grit” and both Tombstone and Wyatt Earp.  And I broke my own western rule by including “Hell or High Water” because the time period is modern day.  But modern westerns are modern!

Now this is just my list.  Your list will be different.  I’ve got a lot of Clint Eastwood in this list.  Not everyone likes his stuff.  I left out Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” and “Ride the High Country.”  I could have left out “Unforgiven” and “Silverado.”  Just how I felt at the moment.

Have at it.  Give your opinion in the comments.

Mutiny on the HMS Biden

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Ah, the last few days without political posts have been really enjoyable.  Movies.  Now, that’s more like it.  And I’ll continue the trend going forward but I thought a short post on Debate-Gate would be okay.

This week’s news has been a steady drum beat of regime media flacks and Democrat operatives reiterating the message that for the good of Democracy Joe Biden must drop out of the presidential race.  They describe the replacing of Biden with Harris or some other, younger, less white, less male candidate in exciting and intriguing ways.  Obama and Clinton will preside over some kind of gameshow-like debate where these wondrous candidates will showcase for the nation their intelligence and charm.  A wonderful candidate will be chosen and it will inspire the voters and Trump will go down to ignominious defeat.  All we have to do is convince Joe to release his delegates.

But he doesn’t want to!

And this brings us to every talk show this week.  The formula is always the same, “I love Joe Biden.  He has done more for us than anyone possibly could and he is the most wonderful human being in the world and may possibly be a demi-god. But…”

And then there it is.  But!

But he is a senile, doddering old fool who will lose to Donald Trump in the general election unless we scare him off the ballot or, or, or…

Or what?  Because right now Joe Biden says he’s staying.  And I think he knows you can’t get rid of him unless one of two things happen.

One thing would be for the Justice Department to discover that Hunter Biden has been giving the “Big Guy” ten percent.  That would really work.  Joe would be hauled away and the Democrat Party could remove him for cause.  But would the Democrat side survive the fallout?  Wouldn’t it tar the whole party just in time for the fall vote?

The second way they could get him to quit is pay him off.  Probably $100 million in an off-shore account would do the trick.   But who wants to give Joe Biden all that money?

So, until such time as they are willing to bite the bullet, Joe is hanging tough.  And in the meantime, he puts out these interviews and press conferences where we can see just how demented he is.  And his poll numbers will keep drifting down.  He’s calling Kamala Harris, Donald Trump.  And Zelensky, Putin.  And he’s making millions into billions, into trillions and who knows what’s next.  And it’s only a matter of time until he stops wearing pants.  Basically, Grandpa Simpson is running the country and our allies abroad are starting to wonder whether they should start sizing up their other options.

And so, as we head into the Republican Convention and then the Democrat Convention media talking heads and congress-critters will continue running around in circles with their heads exploding all over the place.  All because the polls keep getting worse and worse for Biden but he just won’t do what he’s told.

And isn’t that great.