John Kass is a Chicago reporter who used to work on one of the big newspapers there but now writes an independent column. This was a good Christmas wish.
Category: Country Music Reviews
All country music reviews
A Tardy Winter Solstice Post
Funny how these things can sneak up on you if you’re not careful. So here’s Ian Anderson with his band celebrating the beginning of the lengthening daylight. Why I can feel those extra two minutes for sure! Ring out those bells, Jethro Tull.
Tom’s World – 19DEC2024 – Incarceration; Retribution or Isolation?
Check this link, the subject is about something I can’t remember ever before having seen.
As far as I can remember, I’ve heard of incarceration in the context of the benefit to society, i.e., putting them away so they can’t do more damage. Among reasonable people, there is no dispute as to the truth of that proposition. (Unreasonable people? Who cares, screw ’em)
The link above is about the mass commutation Biden recently issued and how there is a very low chance of recidivism from the individuals freed, therefore not a net negative to society based on the principle of isolation. But the article disagrees with the commutation based on this principle: retribution, some of those people just flat deserved punishment.
The poster boy for this principle is a judge who was receiving $millions in kickbacks from a for-profit-boy’s prison for sentencing boys to that institution and betraying every principle, every person, and the trust (such as it is these days) in the judicial system, all for his personal enrichment.
So the guiding principle behind punishment for crime is now extended from incarceration for isolation from society to also include retribution, or the principle that people who do evil deserve punishment based on society’s perception of right and wrong.
Bring Back Our Jobs
In the 1990’s America began off-shoring almost our entire industrial footprint. I saw some of that migration first hand. China hired American engineering companies with the technology and experience to build petrochemical synthesis plants. And they built them in pieces, shipped them to remote sites in China and then assembled and even started them up for the Chinese. On their own it would have taken the Chinese generations to learn all the particular technologies and avoid all the hazards in running plants that produce all the myriads of organic materials that the US chemical engineering companies like Dupont pioneered in the early twentieth century.
And we did it on purpose.
Now multiply that by the number of other products that we used to make in America and you have an inkling of the betrayal that Wall Street has wreaked on us. And the result is the wreckage that we call the Rust Belt. But it’s not just the Midwest. Every area of the country has been hollowed out. Even the most cutting-edge manufacturing, the most valuable computer chips are made in Taiwan. And it’s even worse than that. Even our food is now imported from Asia and South America. That is how much American businesses hate us. So, if I want to sum the whole thing up, the boardrooms of American business eliminated the American middle class to globalize their operations and minimize their labor costs.
And reversing this project is what I think is the highest priority of anyone who loves this country and the people who call themselves Americans. It really doesn’t matter to me if the people who work to fix this call themselves Republicans or Democrats. Populist might be the closest thing to a label for the project. Obviously, anyone who is getting most of his income from Wall Street lobbyists and insider trading tips is not on this team. It’s not Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi or the Bushes. Maybe it’s Donald Trump. He sounds like he understands some of what’s going on. He talks about tariffs and that’s part of what needs to be looked at. But where I see the tariffs helping is putting them on American companies who try to sell cars and other products made in Mexico and Cananda and elsewhere as if they were “Made in America.”
We’re missing about a hundred million good manufacturing jobs in this country. That’s about what it would take to restore the middle class in this country. Of course that will do a lot of damage to China, India, Southeast Asia and parts of Latin America. Well, that’s too bad. Charity begins at home.
On-shoring American manufacturing will take decades. Of course it will. It took forty years to off-shore it. But every step the government takes to worsen the economics of off-shore manufacturing will work to improve the job prospects for our grandchildren. And now is the time for legislation. The Republicans have (slim) majorities in both houses of Congress and a sympathetic president. All that is needed is for Trump to co-opt a few Democrat votes. Who knows, he might even get someone like Bernie Sanders to sign on for some of the votes.
But the important thing is to prevent this country from turning into a feudal system with the super-rich lording it over a peasant class hanging on by the skin of their teeth. There is still a chance to turn this around. Come on Mr. Trump, to make America great again, you have to resurrect the middle class. Bring back our jobs.
A Million Miles Away
In the last week or so there have been a number of reports about large drones flying over New Jersey and New York City. When reporters have asked the Department of Defense and the FBI about this they were that the drones are unidentified. But at the same time there was no sense of urgency by these agencies to calm the civilian population by assuring them that an investigation is in effect. It was more or less a shrug of the shoulders and the comment that local law enforcement would handle these mysterious craft.
A congressman from New Jersey posited that there was a rumor that the drones were Iranian and that they were associated with a “mothership” based off the east coast in the Atlantic. The Pentagon spokesman denied this and said there was no indication that the drones were foreign or controlled by adversaries of the United States. But at the same time there was no indication how this could be known if the drones were unidentified.
So, then what is going on?
Well, of course I can’t prove anything. But it occurs to me that Iran makes a lot of military drones and Russia uses an enormous number of military drones in the Ukraine war. And both those countries are looking to make trouble for the United States because of military actions we have currently going on in their neighborhoods, in other words Syria and Ukraine.
Maybe they’re sending a message that they can retaliate for the attacks going on in their world. Or maybe they’re scouting around to find the easiest or the most valuable targets to hit. Well, isn’t that something!
And, of course, all of this is in response to US initiatives that were activated after the Democrats lost the November election. After November 5th the United States gave Ukraine permission to use long range missiles in the Russian homeland. And of course the toppling of the Assad regime by American proxies just occurred in the last week. So, the State Department and the Department of Defense unleash chaos around the world and the blowback from it will hit home about the time President Trump is inaugurated. Isn’t that something!
For me this just reinforces what kind of psychopaths we have running our foreign policy. Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland play their color revolution games with foreign countries and the blowback will be felt by innocent Americans and especially by our military that shouldn’t be put in harm’s way for egregious adventures that only alienate the rest of the world and benefit no one except the military contractors that feed off of the arms buildup that follows after these obscene plans are put in action.
Well, there’s basically nothing that can be done until that undead creature is finally packed into his mummy case and carted away from the White House. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the other shoe doesn’t drop before January 20th and Donald Trump can inform our adversaries that sanity has reasserted itself over US foreign policy and that all ticking time bombs will be deactivated and we can start from a simple position of mutual hatred but without the added factor of sociopaths with delusions of grandeur running foreign policy for the world’s deadliest weapons stockpile.
Well, anyway, I’ve got my fingers crossed and I’m usually a pretty lucky guy. It’s less than 40 days but why does it seem like a million miles away?
Michael Anton to Return to a Trump Administration Job
“Donald Trump announced Sunday his selection of Michael Anton to be the director of policy planning at the State Department under the prospective secretary, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). Anton held a position on the National Security Council during Trump’s first administration, and was also appointed by the president to the National Board for Education Sciences.”
Anton famously wrote the “Flight 93” essay during Donald Trump’s 2016 run claiming that despite any personal shortcomings Republicans needed to embrace Donald Trump to avoid the disaster that a Hillary Clinton extension to the Obama presidency would entail. And in retrospect he was very right.
On a personal not Anton once quoted from an OCF post which I found very surprising. The power of the internet.
Well, best of luck to Anton in his new position. I hope he remembers the hopes and fears of people who read his words and now hope that Donald Trump’s new administration begins to apply the philosophy that he has avowed and make America great again. But at the very least they should strive to make America sane again.
The End of the Penny’s Persecution
By a miracle there must have been some honest men on Penny’s jury.
The End of Yellowstone
So, something happened to Yellowstone. I think Kevin Costner got sick of playing cowboy “JR” and quit. Well, good. It’s a bizarre nighttime soap with a cast of characters that run the gamut from absurd, to revolting to demented. Now granted, the visuals of Montana and the use of excellent non-mainstream country music does make watching the show interesting from time to time. But it’s still a weird and wacky cartoon in my opinion. But Camera Girl loves her some psycho-drama. So of course we’re in.
And the current situation does appear to be headed for a small screen Armageddon. The first episode opens up with John Dutton (Costner’s character) dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in the Montana Governor’s mansion. His insanely driven daughter Beth and his likeable son Kayce converge on the scene to plan what to do about the death of their father. But Beth is already sure that the death is murder set in motion by their adopted brother Jamie.
And she’s right. The flashbacks show that Jamie is in cahoots with a vixen from a hedge fund company that will do anything including murder to get their hands on Dutton’s land to build a resort and airport complex. And we see deals being made with black ops contractors and other ridiculous things.
Okay, so this could be a lot of fun. I already know how I think this will end. Kayce Dutton’s son is half Indian. I’m guessing the ranch becomes a Native American possession with Kayce as the steward of the land on behalf of his son. It goes along with a bunch of anti-colonial jibber jabber that Kayce’s wife was spouting a couple of years ago.
But the fun will be a full-fledged shooting war between the Dutton Ranch and the bad guys. Who knows, there could even be tanks and helicopters with sidewinder missiles. Kayce is the head of the livestock police (really?) and apparently that gives him access to armored vehicles and other military grade equipment. He’s not just the dog catcher.
There will be bullets and rocket propelled grenades and all kinds of ridiculous stuff going on. And as a finale Beth has sworn a blood oath that the last thing Jamie sees before he dies is Beth laughing at him. Now that I’d like to see. Because it is the outcome that the show has been working up to from the beginning. Beth is barking-at-the-moon crazy but Jamie is a cowardly, smarmy, disloyal worm and seeing him get terminated by Beth will be enormously cathartic. Of course, I’m pretty sure Beth and a bunch of other characters will probably end up dead too. But that would make the whole crazy thing a little less improbable. So sure, why not?
So, bring it on, bring it on, bring it on. Let the lead fly and let all the cowboys, cowboy up. We’re headed for the last roundup and when the dust settles all the black hats will be pushing up daisies and one cowboy and one Indian and their son will be left living happily ever after. How can you not love that? Well, sorta.
26JUN2024 – Country Song for the Morning – Wild Billy’s Circus Story – Bruce Springsteen
Springsteen is a Leftist jerk. But he’s written one or two songs that I could include here. I’ve always gotten a chuckle from this ditty.
19JUN2024 – Country Song for the Night – Cowpoke – Colter Wall
Colter Wall updates the concept of the cowboy song. Well, maybe not updates. It sounds like classic western.