Category: photog’s Corner

Here you will find the stuff that shouldn’t be mixed in the other categories but interest me. caveat emptor.

Times that Try Men’s Souls

photog Camera Reviews, Country Music Reviews, Current Events, Life in Dunwich, Music Reviews, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Photography Reviews, Trump , , , , ,

One step forward two steps back.  Ah, the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune.  Last week the mainframe that I keep my photos and editing software on died a terrible death.  I had hoped at first that maybe the power supply had given out.  I sent it off to the local computer geeks with this dream of a call back the next day about how a wire had come loose or a fuse had blown and all was well.  Yeah.  Not so much.

I received the dreaded news that, “The motherboard is fried and all you can reuse is the case, drives and the fans.”

The horror.

Well, at least my photos didn’t go up the chimney so that’s good.  But this has put a kink in my photo-editing schedule.  For the last week I’ve been scouring my camera memory card for stuff to post and I’m reaching the bottom of the barrel.  I’ll need some more stuff really soon.  Plus, I can’t use my favorite editing software or the big monitors I usually use.  Well maybe I can, but I’d have to fiddle around with the wires and I’m too lazy to do it as a one-off.  But I must be stoic.  As the bard reminds us, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;  They kill us for their sport.”

Or something like that.

But not everything was bad this week.  I decided on a path forward for my story.  If you remember in the last installment, I had my good guys strike back at the vicious President of the United States who had hurled a 10-megaton nuke into their underground retreat.  As a counter attack they undermined the White House, the US Capitol, the Pentagon and a few other key federal buildings and sent them hurtling hundreds of feet into the underground abyss.  This effectively decapitated the United States federal government.  Specifically, the president, vice president, the congress and the cabinet secretaries are all dead.

What I’ve decided to do is arrange for the only honest man in the FBI to be selected to succeed the president.  And this is the guy who I’ve been using to track down my protagonist and his sponsors.

So, the antagonist I have who has been hunting for the sniper is selected for succession to the presidency.  In part he is selected for the knowledge he’s gained hunting the sniper and the organization supporting him.  But because the head of the FBI had been assassinated earlier, he was also the acting head of the bureau.  Of course, that isn’t technically in the line of succession for the presidency but with all the legitimate successors dead, the military and the supreme court put their heads together and after doing an inventory of who was left and who was willing, they chose my guy.

Now this is an outrageous scenario.  And so, it’s really a lot of fun to poke around with.  And because it’s so outlandish I can do more or less whatever seems like fun with it.  I have the poor schnook summoned to a military base and he’s thinking that he’s about to be blamed for the catastrophic failure of the manhunt for the sniper and instead he’s being asked if he will accept the presidency.  That’s a pretty great scene.  I think I’m going to have him ask if he can work remote from home.  That would be a nice touch.  I think that’s what I would ask for.

So anyway, the story is moving forward.  So that’s good.

Camera Girl laid down the law today and had me put the weatherstripping around the basement door.  She found where I had hidden the supplies and brought them out to me.  So, I grumbled and dragged myself over to the door and did it.  And you know, it really made a big difference.  But I really did a lousy job installing it and I’m planning to redo it and add a sweep to the bottom of the door.  Funny how these home improvement projects can grow on you.

And looking around at the Trump juggernaut I see he’s making headway in all directions.  He’s travelling to North Carolina and Los Angeles to get involved with the hurricane and fire victims.  And tonight, JD Vance was the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to confirm Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense.  Collins, Murkowski and good old Mitch McConnell were the holdouts that made Vance’s vote necessary.  Well, that’s why we needed the other Senate pickups last November.  But things are looking up everywhere in Trump world.

So that’s my post, a little this and little that.

Where’s My Slide Rule?

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner, Science, Trump , , , ,

Thank you, Donald Trump.  Watching your show on Monday and Tuesday was like a canteen of cold clean water to a man dying of thirst in the desert.  I feel I’ve been paid back for any trouble I’ve taken on your behalf in the last four years.  Hallelujah and amen.

Okay now it’s up to Trump and his merry band of madmen to fix Washington and fix the country and do that list of a million impossible things that he said he’s going to do.  Have at it, boys.  Give ‘em hell.

So, what’s for me to talk about tonight?  Well, I’ve got to talk about what’s chasing around my head tonight.  First off, I’m grumbling about how damn cold it is today.  The heating system at the Compound is undersized.  Or maybe the insulation should be the focus.  When the outside temperature dips below zero Fahrenheit, it won’t hold a set point above seventy.  And that’s too bad because I hate being cold inside my own home.  Camera Girl holds me directly responsible because I never put the weatherstripping around two of the external doors.  I explained to her that these small insulation problems are only a minor part of the problem and that I’m addressing the problem holistically by spending considerable time thinking deeply about all the ways that a solution can be reached.  I’ve considered the thermodynamic aspects of the problem.  The psychological ramifications of the fear of cold.  The physiological mechanisms by which the human body adapts to hypothermia.  The cultural involvement of cold in the human industries that are called clothing and shelter.  The quantum meaning of absolute zero.  And finally, the latest bill from the heating oil company.  All these things I showed her and admonished her to have patience and faith in my stewardship of the Compound’s Overall Heat Transfer Coefficient (U).  None of this registered with her at all.  She made certain primitive Sicilian gestures with her face and hand that I won’t dignify with detail.  Suffice it to say they were not helpful in the least.  I’m going out tomorrow for other reasons.  But I may also pick up some weatherstripping.  Maybe.

I was recently in a discussion about General Relativity with a friend.  The question of the curvature of space came up.  I told him I’ve never been convinced of the idea that mass curves space-time.  I stated that what is the difference if gravity bends the path of light and matter when it comes close to an object like the sun but space is unaffected?  How would we know the difference?  After all, how the hell can you bend something that isn’t even there?  It’s empty space.  Now sure, particles are always popping into existence because of quantum effects.  But by definition those things aren’t empty space they’re matter.  So how the hell can something that’s nothing bend?  Anyway, after the argument got us nowhere, I got hold of a book on general relativity and started reading it.  But my mathematical skills have degraded so I’ve had to break out a book on vector analysis to try and remember what tensor notation means.  Oh, my aching head.  I had an old advanced calculus test from my undergraduate days that would be very helpful on some points but then I remembered I threw it out (stupidly) about thirteen years ago when I moved.  I was going to buy it used and was amazed how expensive text books have gotten.  Yikes!

So anyway, I’m ensconced with the Kronecker delta, the curl and the Laplacian.  And I think I’ve made a big mistake.  I predict by the end I’ll have nothing but a murky idea of the meaning of the proofs of relativity but no explanation as to why we would think of space as being curved.  I think the idea that space is curved is just a figure of speech.  The reality is “space’ goes on endlessly in every direction.  I don’t think it loops back around behind us or anything like that.  It just keeps going.  It’s the same as physicists saying that the beginning of the universe was the Big Bang.  Well, what about five seconds before that?

So here I am with my cave man cosmogeny and cosmology trying to relearn Einstein’s equations (at my age!).  Well, why not?  Trump’s fixing the country.  The least I can do is straighten out the theoretical physicists.  Camera Girl! Where’s my slide rule?

Phoning it In on Friday Morning

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner ,

Thursday was just such a busy day that I didn’t get anything done on the site until late at night.  I had to process some photos and set them up.  And so late at night how can I think of a topic no less speak intelligently on it?  My mind is a spent force.  So, I’ve just watched Orson Welles’ “Chimes at Midnight.”  This was Welles’ cut and paste job from the two Henry IV plays to showcase Falstaff and his time with Prince Hal.

And it’s a brilliant idea that should be remade again.  But who could be Falstaff now?  Who’s funny enough?  Who’s fat enough.  Who can act Shakespeare?  No one.

But no reason to be gloomy.  These things will turn around.  All the nonsense that has been pushed on the kids for the last thirty years will not last.  All of it is rot that won’t last.  All those who truly believe it are self-selecting themselves for extinction and they will leave room for those who don’t.  There are plenty who make believe that they believe for self-preservation.  But when the winds change, as they already are changing, they’ll move on to where their advantage lies.

I was watching the movie “Fury” today with one of my friends.  I had never seen it.  Brad Pitt is an American tanker in WWII.  He and his men including a raw recruit are deep into German territory in 1945 and everywhere they turn they’re hip-deep in death.  The action and personal actions of the soldiers are as gritty as can be.  I won’t give away the plot but suffice it to say that the tank crew was beyond hardened.  They were approaching psychotic.  But they had a camaraderie that was stirring.  My friend told me that the movie’s ending was based on a true story although instead of an American tank in WWII it was based on a British tank in WWI.  Well, it is a rousing battle scene.

You know, YouTube is an interesting concept.  They must know I’m writing a novel because I keep finding videos on fiction-writing in my feed.  And one of them was by Vonnegut.  And I watched it and it reminded of when I met the guy by accident at the carousel in Central Park.  And it’s funny, I wasn’t a fan of his writing but he came across very friendly and normal.  And it got me thinking which other celebrities are regular people when you meet them off the cuff.  I once spoke to a car service driver who brought people in and out of the Northeast casinos.  He said Jerry Seinfeld was an arrogant jerk.  Well, I won’t say that shocked me.  The one guy I’d really like to meet completely candidly is Donald Trump.  He’s a complete enigma.  How much of the Trump we see is real and how much is make believe?  And is he crazy?  Well, I’ll never find out so I’ll just have to keep making stuff up.

I hope to catch up on the website chores tomorrow so I’m not working from behind.  I guess Dunwich is a busy mythical place where even humans find themselves trapped in warped space-time.  But this will have to do for tonight.  Good night and good morning.

Cold Fusion, Again

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https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.07245v2

Cold nuclear fusion is real!  But it’s also extremely lame.  Apparently when deuterium gas is put in contact with solid palladium metal the gas can find its way into the crystalline metal structure and fill voids in the lattice of palladium atoms and the structure of the metal lattice can somehow shield the deuterium nucleii from each other’s positive charges in order to fuse into a helium atom (²H + ²H → ⁴He).

Unfortunately, the rate of fusion is so low that it’s barely detectable.  And if energetic means such as lasers are used to enhance the rate then the energy balance is extremely poor with much more energy put in to speed up the reaction than is produced by the fusion reaction.  As a practical energy source this would be described by the technical term “lousy.”

But all is not yet lost.  The authors of the paper speculate if three separate accelerating processes are employed simultaneously there is the potential to produce the forty orders of magnitude improvement needed to make cold fusion a useful energy source.

Forty orders of magnitude.   Hmm.  That’s a lot of orders of magnitude you know.  That’s 1040.  That’s a really, really big number.  If I had 1040 pennies I’m pretty sure it would form a black hole of pennies.  It’s a lot.

So somehow they think they can increase the fusion rate that much?  Hmm.

So I really like the idea of cold fusion.  The fact that you can take palladium and heavy hydrogen at ambient temperatures and somehow get a nuclear reaction that produces really clean energy is extremely appealing to me.  It sounds like what E. E. “Doc” Smith used as his source of energy for interstellar flight in the “Skylark” series of space operas.  It’s amazingly exciting.  But  1040 anything is a lot.  So I’ve decided not to hold my breath or invest heavily in the technology or rip the oil burner out of my basement just yet.

The good thing about cold fusion research is that you don’t need billions or even hundreds of millions of dollars to work on it.  You don’t need magnetic containment to avoid your nuclear plasma from eating through the metal walls of your reactor.  And you don’t need giga-watt lasers to blast a pellet of boron hydride or anything else that would break the budget of any second world nation.  It can all be done in a lab with all the stuff found in MIT or even Brooklyn College for that matter.  So I’m all for research into this avenue of science.  After all twenty years ago cold fusion was declared a hoax and that turned out to be wrong.  Who knows what else they’ll find.  Maybe if you use alloys of several of the platinum group elements the geometry of the spaces in the lattice will make the process run at some phenomenally faster rate.  Maybe not 1040 times faster but something reasonable and that would be enough to throw the whole thing into the range of practical applications.  But to reiterate I won’t be holding my breath.

But it is something cool to think about.  Or even write into an sf story!  But instead of palladium I’m going to make it tantalum.  It’s just cooler.

In a Businesslike Manner

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After a little fuss and muss Speaker Johnson is Speaker Johnson again.  Okay.

And I hear the judge in New York City is going to sentence Trump right before his inauguration.  Who knows, maybe he’s going to try some dirty tricks like locking him up for the inauguration ceremony.  Maybe the Supreme Court Justice will have to swear him in from Ryker’s Island.  Yeah, yeah, whatever.

Okay, so we’re dealing with mental cases everywhere we’re supposed to have sages and scholars.  Well, what can I say.  These are fallen times and we have to expect idiots to drool on themselves quite a lot of the time.  But things continue to fall apart apace.  Some percentage of our veterans harbor homicidal tendencies toward the United States.  Well, they have lowered the standards for mental fitness so this should be expected.

But this is going to continue while Donald Trump begins to assemble and deploy his cabinet and they get to work terminating the deep state.  I won’t be surprised if some disgruntled former FBI agents decide to take pot shots at him going forward.

But I have bigger fish to fry.  Camera Girl was complaining about the foaming soap dispensers that I bought a bunch of years ago.  It seems they weren’t working smoothly.  The pump would get jammed.  So, I took one apart and tried to figure out what was wrong.  Well, there wasn’t much there so I washed the components and put them back together and tried it out again.  Well, now it wasn’t jammed but the damn thing didn’t work.  Nothing came out.  So now I was getting mad.  I took another one apart and cleaned it up and still couldn’t find anything wrong.  And when I put it back together it didn’t work.  Nothing came out.

So, I stopped taking them apart and since the internet is our friend I did a search for foaming soap dispensers and found this cool exploded view of the mechanism and noticed something.  There is a tiny ball that acts as a check valve.  This ball allows soap to be sucked into the valve but not pushed back out.  And I couldn’t remember seeing such a thing in the two pumps I disassembled.    Well, the stupid thing is only an 1/8th of an inch in diameter and transparent plastic so when I cleaned out the pump, I must have washed it down the drain both times.

Now this was very annoying.  I have since ordered fifty 1/8th inch polypropylene balls and a tube of food grade silicone grease.  With these invaluable supplies I intend to restore the two dispensers back into functionality.  Moreover, I will grease all of the pump pistons with the silicone and thereby satisfy Camera Girl’s original complaint about my equipment choices for the various sink areas of the house.  There are currently six of these dispensers in the place and each one will require this overhaul.

I wonder if she appreciates how lucky she is to have a technical individual of my caliber at her disposal twenty-four/seven?  I doubt that she could have gotten the quick response and analytical acumen that I provided in this foamed soap crisis from just any regular husband.  Far from it.  The only thing I regret is that because of the critical nature of the crisis there was not time for me to send out RFQ’s (requests for quotations) to three qualified bidders on the project.  Business, after all, should be conducted in a businesslike manner.

New Year’s Resolutions – 2025

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner, Trump ,

At this dawning of the rolling year, it is more than normally desirable that we make some slight provision for improving our behavior.  Some people try to lose weight or stop smoking.  Others look for a better job or start a hobby.  I’ve vowed to finish my book.  And to accommodate that effort I will be clearing the mornings for writing and editing the book.  This may impact my posting schedule (from time to time) but I think it’s necessary.  Time slips by too quickly if there are too many competing priorities.

Now I don’t intend to abandon the website.  OCF will have its daily photo and quote.  And whenever something needs my approbation, scorn or explanation I will promptly respond.  And I will link to anything that I think interesting or thought-provoking.  But when there’s a slow news week and I’ve already gassed off about the usual suspects I may just take a pass.  On days like that maybe I’ll link to a song I like or a clip from a movie that makes me smile.

And from time to time, I’ll put up a chunk of my story to get feedback from the readers here.  And I’ll write about writing sometimes!

So, none of this is dire.  With Trump entering the White House in a couple of weeks I’m sure I’ll have all kinds of stimuli for posts that will make it impossible to do my fiction writing work.  After all, the world is drifting into troubled times and that is sure to goad me into taking to my little soap box and barking out condemnations and propounding simple-minded plans of action.

But I do see that I’ll have to prioritize writing if I ever hope to finish that darn book.  I do think there is some writing in me.  And I won’t know how hard or easy selling books is until I give it a good old American try.

As for the news today, we’ve all been watching the attack in New Orleans and then listened to Biden try to string a few dozen sentences together without sounding like Max Headroom (and failing).  I love how he tells us the guy is a follower of ISIS but not to jump to conclusions.  So, because he’s a Moslem whose parents came from the Middle East and he’s declared jihad on America we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that he’s an Islamic terrorist?  Would that be insensitive to the various followers of the religion of peace?  Well, never mind.  Biden is so laughably irrelevant that he might as well have started to read from a Dr. Seuss book as the words of that speech his handlers handed him.  More interesting would have been a statement from Trump advising the federal law enforcement agents not to destroy any of the evidence before his team has a chance to see what really went on.  Well, this is a small part of what I expect at the border for the foreseeable future.  So, it barely merits comment.  Let’s pray nothing bigger is in the wings.

 

And just to show that my heart is in the right place, I’ll put together a few things that might lighten your day.

 

 

Gear Acquisition Syndrome in 2025

photog Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner, Photography, Photography Reviews, Reviews , , , ,

I’ve been very happy with my Sony A7 IV camera since I bought it a few years ago.  It does everything I need it to do and I’m not sure what would tempt me to trade it in.  So, I haven’t bought any photo gear in quite a while.  But recently a new lens has tempted me.  But it’s a long story (and thus the reason it’s a post). About fourteen years ago I bought the Sony (badged as Carl Zeiss) A-mount 135mm, f\1.8 lens.  It was an extremely extravagant purchase at $1,500 and I couldn’t justify it in use terms because basically it was a very long portrait lens for which I had very rare need.  But after seeing some of the extraordinary results it could produce, I plunked down the cash.  And it was every bit as sharp and contrasty as the critics claimed.  And I managed to find quite a few excuses to drag this big heavy lens with me to places and events where longer and shorter and lighter lenses make better sense.

But not too long after this purchase, Sony, in its infinite cruelty, stopped making A-mount cameras and went mirrorless.  I won’t repeat my long sad story of enduring the e-mount introduction.  But I will mention that Sony salved over the initial problem of having no lenses for their new mirrorless cameras by producing a line of attachments for adapting A-mount lenses to e-mount cameras.  They were designated with the prefix LA-EA and numbered successively 1 through 5.  And with each introduction I dreamed of my e-mount cameras working with my A-mount lenses as if they were native lenses.  Well, that never happened.  Granted they got better.  But even the LA-EA-5 never allowed my A-mount lenses to enjoy the full capability of the camera’s auto-focus or special features like magnified view, in the same way as my e-mount lenses could.

And so, one by one I sold off my A-mount lenses and mostly bought the e-mount equivalent lenses (or just didn’t replace them).  But not the 135mm f\1.8.  By the time the equivalent e-mount lens appeared my A-mount lens was no longer very marketable.  A-mount lenses had a fairly small pool of users and so the market prices sank to fairly low prices.  And when the new lens came out in e-mount they wanted $2,100.  And that seemed a bridge too far for a lens that wasn’t really needed for a major part of my shooting style.

Over the years third party manufacturers have come out with their versions of this lens in the e-mount.  First Sigma, then Samyang and now Viltrox.  Each time I looked at the combination of price savings and quality and I shrugged my shoulders and said meh.  But finally, it’s reached the breaking point.  A review of the Viltrox lens (actually several reviews) claim that it is very slightly better than Sony’s $2,100 version but at about 1/3 the price ($760).  So, I checked the trade in value of my old A-mount lens and finding it to be about $350 I mailed it out and now await my thirty pieces of silver (figuratively) before finishing off the transaction to buy the Viltrox.

Wrapping up the lens gave me a pang of regret.  It was a beautiful piece of kit that had worked flawlessly when attached to the camera it was designed for, the Sony A-850 DSLR.  It wasn’t the lens’s fault that the geniuses at Sony had almost simultaneously with buying the Minolta camera line, relegated all of its products to obsolescence by going mirrorless.  But such is life.

Well onward and upward in 2025.  I will record the arrival of the new lens with photos it produces.  After all that’s the real reason they make these darn things.

View from Campsite 5 at Toroweap

SONY DSC
SONY DSC

The Intersection of Christmas and the Woke

photog Current Events, OCF, photog's Corner, Reclaiming the Family ,

It’s at this time of the rolling year that we think about what matters most in our lives.  Just as Charles Dickens designed into his story we think of the past, present and future.  And at this point in my life these become very distinct groupings.

When I think back to my childhood and youth it’s as if I’m looking out on a different world.  The America of my past was like a fantasy world where opportunity and optimism was omnipresent.  And Christmas was the epicenter of that sense of optimism because children are the center of Christmas and America was arranged around providing the next generation with a future of limitless opportunity.  And that culture back then was still a Christian culture and the religious and moral aspects of the Christmas story were at the very least still acknowledged.  Even Charlie Brown ended his troubled search for the meaning of Christmas with Linus reciting the New Testament text at Luke 2:8-14.  And all this positivity and solidarity produced a remarkably happy life for the great majority of Americans.

Now look at the present.  It’s not an exaggeration to say that pessimism is the dominant sentiment among Americans of every stripe.  And young people are convinced that the opportunities their parents and grandparents enjoyed will not be there for them.  And as far as Christmas goes, not only is religion now almost abandoned by the young but any spirituality or even morality associated with Christmas has been drained out of it by the popular culture and the cultural institutions on the Left.  Christianity is only referenced as a symbol of Western oppression or the patriarchy.  What has replaced it is a confused cult of “social justice” that allows any depravity as long as it’s in the name of sexual identity.

But what of the future?  I think it’s certain there’s no way back to the past I knew.  But that does not rule out escaping from the desolation we find ourselves in now.  We do not have to try to reclaim the lost souls that surround us on the Left.  We do not even have to hate them.  But we do have to separate from them.  In their confusion and despair, they have taken it upon themselves to destroy our children by confusing them with their insane views.  This must be prevented by any means possible.  The beginnings of this resistance can be seen appearing in various parts of the country.  To know if this will be effective, we’ll have to wait and see if it starts expanding during the friendlier environment of the Trump administration.  And there is some hope that the Supreme Court will lend a hand.  There are hints in the statements after the reversal of Roe v Wade that gay marriage may be headed for a similar reversal.  As with any discussion of the future every fork in the road is a flip of the coin.  But sometimes the coin comes up heads.  So, there’s hope.  What we’ll need to do is rebuild our culture on the durable parts of our heritage.  Morality will have to be redefined to support a healthy community that centers around normal family life.  Those who don’t fit into that pattern will have to be left to the other side to find a place in the world.  We’ll concentrate on people who can face reality and want to build something positive for their children.

So here we are on Christmas Eve and I try to remember and point to the past as a template, ignore the worst of the present and hope for and work for a better future.  Now past the roast beast and gravy and let’s get this show on the road.

Getting in the Spirit

photog Camera Reviews, Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner, Photography Reviews, Trump ,
SONY DSC

Some snow falling today surprised me into remembering how close Christmas is.  Of course, I dasn’t say such a thing aloud in Camera Girl’s presence or she would toss an oven mitt or a ladle at me for my oblivious attitude as she soldiers on in her pre-Christmas baking and cooking marathon.  She is calculating cooking and storage times down to the nanosecond as enormous quantities of baked goods, meat, pasta, cheese and vegetables are processed in the run up to the big event.  My party line is that I am available to help in any capacity she sees fit.  This merely elicits rueful head-shaking and eye-rolling.  Well, that’s my story.  And anyway, I serve many useful functions.  I am the snow removal department and I also serve as chauffeur if the roads seem too tricky for her.  And I have a thousand and one other jobs.  For instance, I’m in charge of the yearly Christmas card design and procurement.  Well, of course.  I’m a photographer.  But such things are easily forgotten by someone who can point to a table groaning under the weight of a feast.  Well, we also serve who wait and eat.  But who’s keeping score anyway?

I have all of next week off and I’m looking forward to the get togethers.  But I’ve been keeping an eye on the situation in Washington.  It’s almost unbelievable how feckless and dishonest the Biden administration intends to be right up to the final day of their reign of terror.  Biden’s pardoning of hideously evil people would be shameful if Biden and his cronies had any shame.  I have to assume that there was a price list posted somewhere for the scum of the earth to figure out whether they could afford to be freed by Hunter and Jill and whoever else wrote out the pardons for Joe to scribble his signature on.  And the Republicans don’t disappoint with their nitwitted attempts to pass legislation in the House of Representatives.  Only the dishonesty and corruption of the Democrats allows the GOP to seem better by comparison.  But it really is a sad sideshow to behold.

The clowns and the cretins, the monsters and the madmen; the whole cast of this insane drama that is playing out on the deck of a sailing ship headed straight for an iceberg.  And at this point Donald Trump is the captain and he and his crew are locked in a cutlass fight with the usual pirates and so no one is steering the ship.  Well, it should give us a reason to pop popcorn in 2025.

But this is all beside the point.  We have Christmas to celebrate and the relief from knowing that somehow, we dodged the bullet of a Kamala Harris presidency.  And, sure, so many things will go wrong in 2025.  Trump will waffle, Democrats will lie and cheat, bureaucrats will obfuscate and interfere and Republicans will prove themselves inept and obtuse.  In other words, standard operating procedure.  But things will be better than they’ve been the last four years.  God willing, the wars will start to die down.  Energy prices will come back to Earth and that will tend to drive down the prices of everything else.  And the biggest bonus, we may never see any of the Bidens for the rest of our lives.  That alone is worth a hallelujah.