Guest Contributor – Bigus Macus – 25MAY2025 – America First

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The Trump Doctrine

This President inherited 30 years of foreign policy built around what was good for the world. The decisions we made as a government in trade and foreign policy were basically, is it good for the world and the global community? And under President Trump, we are making foreign policy based on is it good for America. What that means is foreign policy is about three things: Does it make America stronger? Does it make America safer? Does it make America richer? If something doesn’t do those three things—and hopefully all three things—we are not doing it.
 
Read the rest…
https://wemeantwell.com/blog/2025/05/23/the-trump-doctrine/

Trump and Rubio Are Gutting the Deep State

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Trump administration places dozens of National Security Council officials on leave.

Now that’s the way to do it.  Wholesale.

“The moves will cut the agency’s 350-member staff roughly in half. “The NSC is the ultimate Deep State. It’s Marco vs. the Deep State. We’re gutting the Deep State,” a White House official said in an Axios report, which the Washington Examiner confirmed with the White House.”

Think of all these Harvard graduates suddenly cut loose from their lucrative, powerful sinecures.  No fat salary, no clout with defense contractors, no free lunches as four star restaurants!

“Politico reported that committees and their meetings will be reduced and that the White House reinterviewed a large number of NSC staff members to see whether they should keep their jobs. The outlet also reported that notices went out to staffers late Friday afternoon after a staff meeting, with many out of town for the holiday weekend.”

I’d love to be a fly on the wall during those interviews.  “What would you say…you do here??”

 

And I Think It’s Great

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I was watching a clip of Capon and Books on the PBS Snooze Hour and they were talking about how Trump’s decision to stop foreign students from attending Harvard was spite.  And you know for once I actually agreed with them.  I think Donald Trump is doing everything he can to punish Harvard for defying him.  Depriving them of the tuitions that foreign students fork over will badly hurt Harvard financially.  It’s unfair and bordering on unconstitutional.

And I think it’s great.

There’s nothing I would enjoy more than to see Harvard lose billions of dollars and come crawling back to Trump to get his forgiveness.  Listening to Booksie gush about what an important elite institution Harvard is and how he used to stand in awe of the gravitas and fame of the professors who taught there.  What a sniveling fop.  He sounded like a 1960s teenybopper adolescent girl screaming and fainting over the Beatles.  If he hasn’t already had his testicles removed, he might as well get it over with now.  There can’t be a picogram of testosterone in his entire body at this point.

As has been noted elsewhere, the same people who go to Harvard and Yale and the rest of the Ivy League are also the ones who end up working at the mainstream media, the State Department, USAID and the NGOs that are paid for by USAID.  And of course, they also work at these same colleges.  All these people have the same values and they all have the same contempt for us.  All of the damage that Trump is doing to them by shutting down USAID and running the DOGE cuts and harassing the IVY League colleges and firing the Deep State is causing all of these people great pain and confusion.

And I think it’s great.

It is my most fervent wish that he causes as much pain and disruption to these people’s lives as is humanly possible.  It would be music to my ears to hear that all of their plans are ruined and they were forced into bankruptcy and ruin.  I’d love to see Harvard closed down and sold off to the lowest bidder and turned into low-income housing for homeless drug addicts.  I would love to see all the idiot children of the managerial class forced to go back to their parents’ homes in New York and Boston and Washington and sponge off of them for years to come.

Some might think I’m being mean-spirited.  Maybe I am.  But these are the people who laughed at working class people who couldn’t get work of any kind because the elites decided to move all those jobs to China, Vietnam and Mexico.  When these poor people despaired and ended up dead of fentanyl overdose the reaction was, “Bring in the third world immigrants to take their place.  They were too lazy to cut our lawns.  They deserve to die.”  Well, the shoe is on the other foot.  Donald Trump is getting rid of the waste now.  He’s decided we can live without people researching transgender mice and intersectional race ranking.  He’s going to eliminate the nice cozy spots funded by deficit spending.  They’re going to be the ones despairing.

And I think it’s great.

Tom’s World – 24MAY2025 – Batteries Not Included

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TomD

For chainsaws you’ll probably want a smaller one to start, maybe 14” or 16” max. I’ve moved a lot of my outdoor power equipment from gas to battery after a lifetime of small motor gasoline problems am delighted.

I’ve now got battery weed eater, chainsaw and blower. No snow blower for me, I live in Florida. I’ve settled on the Ego system. You want the same maker and battery commonality between tour tools. A 56V x 7.5 amp hour battery costs $400, close to double what the tool costs and you can buy tools sans battery much cheaper. I’ve got a 7.5 a 5 and a 2. The 2 will run my weed eater to last much longer than I and with every bit of the power of my gasoline ones but without the hassle.

And stepping down, my battery hand tools have almost totally displaced the 110V from yesteryear. I still have 110V slide miter and skill saw. My battery skill saw doesn’t the ability to, say, rip a sheet of 3/4” plywood easily. But impact driver, 1/2” impact wrench, 1/2” drill, jigsaw, sawzall, trim nailer, router all mostly Makita but with DeWalt and Bosch thrown in over the years have become standard. I hate power cords.

Fun and Games in Dunwich

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Last night Ithaqua, the Great Old One known as the “Wind-Walker” took a walk through our corner of Dunwich.  This morning when I arrived for breakfast Camera Girl said, “Don’t get excited.”  These are three of my least favorite words.  This is what she showed me:

Well, that’s not technically right.  When I first saw it, the tree was hung up in the branches of two trees on the left side of the driveway.  It took considerable yanking on the trunk with a rope that I managed to throw over it before it finally came crashing down on the ground.

Camera Girl told me to call the “tree guy” and have him take his chain saw to it and get it out of the driveway.  This didn’t sit right with my rock-ribbed conservatism and spirit of self-reliance.

I got out my bow saw and other paraphernalia and got to work.  I sawed the trunk.  I took a hammer and a pry bar to it.  I used an automobile jack to jack up one side.  I even climbed on top of it and jumped up and down on it.  Finally, a combination of all these actions succeeded.  Seven hours later a tired but morally self-satisfied man emerged drenched in sweat, favoring a sore lower back and triumphant over this malevolent natural disaster.

I think Winston Churchill will forgive me if I paraphrase him in saying, “Never have so few owed so little to me.”

So unfortunately, when I went to the endodontist on Thursday, he confirmed that there is indeed a crack in the root of that molar.  And that means that a root canal will not prevent the tooth from becoming infected again.  The tooth must be extracted.  So, I said “Okay, let’s do that.”  Imagine my chagrin to discover that endodontists don’t extract teeth.  And as it then turned out neither does my dentist.  In fact, at this point I don’t think he does anything at all as a dentist except refer me to other dentists!  So eventually I found a dentist who will extract the tooth but not until Tuesday (it’s Memorial Day weekend you know.)  All talk about implants will be delayed until this simple procedure is completed and I can eat food without my mouth aching or worse.

But it has been an educational experience into the arcane world of dental specialty practices.  Most of my discussions with the office personnel consisted of them warning me that I would have to pay them the full amount of the procedures and attempt on my own to get my dental insurer to reimburse me some pathetic subset of my outlay.  Well, one thing for sure.  A lucrative dental practice does not guarantee good taste in office art design.  Some of the photographic decorations that I sat looking at as a patient were not that inspiring.  Although I did like them better than the abstract paintings that some of their colleagues favored.  Honestly there should be laws or at least professional ethics guidelines to protect people suffering from dental pain from being exposed to these awful things.  Well, Tuesday is just around the corner.  Surcease from sorrow is a mere ninety-six hours in the offing.  Unless the climate gods unleash a biblical plague of fiery hail I should be “detoothed” by Tuesday morning.