G and G

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So, I read today that we lost that fat tub of lard, Chris Christie.  He finally dropped out.  And probably the only reason he dropped out was to give Nikki Haley a better shot at making it close in New Hampshire.  Well, if there’s a candidate I dislike more than Chris Christie it’s Nikki Haley.  In fact, I despise Haley more than Christie by whole orders of magnitude.  Christie is just an annoying gadfly.  He’s on an anti-Trump crusade because it’s the only way he could think of to even reach the debate stage.

But Haley is an honest to goodness GOPE RINO.  She believes in endless neocon war, unlimited illegal immigration, woke evil like transgender pediatric surgery and anything else that progressive Republicans tell her she should believe in.  Listening to her explain why we need to be involved in multiple wars makes my skin crawl.

Currently the plan is for Haley to either win or come close in New Hampshire by means of unaffiliated voters switching their party affiliation to Republican and voting for her.  Then when the South Carolina primary rolls around the hope is that she will have generated enough excitement from New Hampshire to win.  And you never know.  Stranger things have happened.

So, if she manages to win one or both of those states, she hopes to stay in the race all the way to the convention.  Well, I tend to doubt she can make much of a showing.  But what she’s really hoping is to be the last man standing if Trump gets disqualified by the Republican National Committee and then be appointed the nominee.  Basically, she is JEB II.  No, I take that back, she is Mitt Romney 2.0.  One thing I am sure of.  If Haley is on the ballot, she won’t be getting my vote.  I’ll either stay home or vote for Biden as a protest vote.  I despise her even more than Biden and you know how I feel about him.

So here we have the Republican Party doing everything they can to eliminate the candidate that has been polling over 60% for months.  It’s demonstrably clear that they have no interest in adopting any of the clear policy preferences of the great majority of the Republican voters.  All they want is to force the generic GOPE candidate on their voters and if they can’t do that they’d prefer to lose.

I understand that in the short term the Republican Party is the vehicle we are forced to vote for to provide the lesser of two evils.  But a time has to come soon when a successor party must begin to form around populist candidates who won’t owe allegiance to the donors and lobbyists.

It would be an enormous thrill to have a party where everything it stood for was anathema to the Bushes, the Obamas and the Clintons.  Where Nikki Haley, Mike Pence or Chris Christie would be booed off the stage if they dared show their faces.  If I could name it maybe I’d call it the Normal People’s Party.  Or maybe we could call it the God and Guns Party.  Since these are all the things that Barack Obama hated about America.

But in the meantime, just look and listen to Nikki Haley and know exactly what the Republican Party is all about.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 10JAN2024 – The Incredible Empty Suit

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Biden is not the one running this country and the SecDef’s recent Houdini act should convince more of the public of this reality.

The implications of the Secretary of Defense ‘disappearing’ for nearly a week without (allegedly) the president knowing reveals a larger truth that the American public need to understand.

It should be pointed out that the current geopolitical situation in the world regarding global conflicts would require daily briefings between the president and his cabinet. Situational awareness and evolving conditions would prompt multiple meetings daily to stay current on these issues.

Between China, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, the Houthis, North Korea-hell, even the border crisis with its contingent of military assets being deployed would tell anyone with common sense that of all people the Secretary of Defense for our nation would be joined at the hip with the American president.

With them admitting that Biden didn’t know for nearly a week where his SecDef was, or his medical status is a damning indictment on the reality that he is an empty figurehead for the country, and not the Commander in Chief.

The bigger question is, who is running our government?

The Decisive Moment

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Writing about Biden yesterday left a black cloud over my soul.  I must purge it with something less depressing.  So, I did some looking around for things that would cheer me up.  And I found this guy Alex at a YouTube channel called the “The Photographic Eye.”  He’s a Brit and says he’s been a professional photographer for about 30 years.  Which is fine and all that but what I found was a video he had called “Train Your Mind To See Photos Everywhere”.

So, the video is a talk on how to approach everyday items and circumstances to look for the interesting photographs hidden there.  And the images he provides as examples are mostly very mundane things; inside a city bus, a table with a partially unfinished jigsaw puzzle, details inside a restaurant or a construction site.

And the images are indeed mundane and some of them had no appeal for me as photographic subjects and yet others made me stop and look and think, “Yes, that would be an interesting shot.”

SONY DSC

As a second exercise he discussed the classic idea of “the decisive moment.”  Even a lazy individual such as myself has read enough about photography to have heard about the French street photography pioneer Henri Cartier-Bresson and his idea of identifying an optimal or even a unique moment when a photograph reveals some dramatic aspect frozen in time. But here Alex advises us to take this same idea and translate it into a mundane environment.  Maybe a train station or a street corner.  But by studying the dynamic nature of the people in that environment you may find the moment when this situation provides an optimal chance for an interesting image.  Here he says that the skill is to tune into the rhythm of the location and stop ignoring the details that we usually tune out when on a street or in a supermarket.

And his third exercise he recommended that a photographer keep a book or even capture some ideas with his phone, where he writes down ideas for future photographs.  Maybe it is a place you saw as you were driving or maybe it’s a thing you saw on tv or in a book.  His point was that ideas often occur when you haven’t got a camera or you haven’t got the time but if you can build up a list of ideas you can plan an expedition or even an indoor shoot around your neighborhood or even in your house.  But as long as you jot it down you have the chance of following up on this good idea, instead of forgetting it again.

And so, these exercises are away to develop your sense of what makes an interesting picture and at the same time to make photography an everyday activity and make it an active rather than passive activity and finally to make it fun.

And in that final aspect, his advice worked.  I grabbed my camera with my macro lens and started stalking around my living room looking for juxtapositions with nick-nacks, books and random household articles.  And before I knew it, I was having a lot of fun.  Now I haven’t reviewed any of these shots in my post processing software so I have no idea whether I’ll still think they were worthwhile once I have a chance to look at them critically.  But I can say that my excitement about taking some shots was higher than it’s been since the leaves fell off the trees this fall.

So, to hell with Joe Biden and all of his rot.  If we let him destroy this country then we probably deserve it.  But I sure as hell won’t spend every waking hour thinking about it.  Life’s too short.  I’d rather spend it looking for the decisive moment.  Or maybe just getting a really nice butterfly shot.

Geriatric Twerking Madonna Adds Support Bar. AARP Applauds

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Words fail me.  I almost asphyxiated from laughing so hard at this clip.

This image is so grotesque that it’s beyond hilarious.  The fact that Madonna doesn’t recognize how pathetic and absurd she looks performing this aluminum foil wrapped granny-twerk should give the shivers to her younger avatars; Taylor Swift and Beyonce.  In this clip they can see their future.  Twerking to the Oldies.

Sister Morphine

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As I’ve said it’s always a bad idea to write a post at night.  At night the brain is tired and unlikely to give of its best.  The mood tends to be dark.

But here I am.

When you’re young, the world is a fascinating puzzle that you throw yourself into.  And the immediacy of your little neighborhood; your family, friends, work acquaintances and enemies, takes up almost all of your attention.  Sure, you notice things like recessions and wars because they impact you directly but as soon as things are resolved for you, your attention reverts to your little world.  And so, you are shielded by indifference from the spectacle of how our world works and who runs it.

So, it’s unsurprising that my familiarity with Joe Biden in the time before he was vice president was limited to the few times, he made the papers.  He ran for president long ago and almost immediately was singled out as third rate at almost everything except lying.  That was his only true excellence.  Plagiarism and misrepresenting his own achievements were his oeuvre.  This is what I remember about him from before he ascended to a larger stage.

Of course, since then he’s become a phenomenon.  As president of the United States, he’s the most famous man in the world.  He wields enormous power which he has used to impoverish his countrymen and immiserate whole areas of the world with his wars.  Knowledge of the sordid financial arrangement that his son Hunter Biden has perpetrated to extort money from foreign governments is ubiquitous.  Everyone has heard that Joe Biden is “the big guy” who skimmed 10% off the top of all of Hunter’s pay offs.  And the governments that he squeezed were places like Ukraine and China; authoritarian regimes that could pay for the influence peddling with no questions asked.

Now, this is all old hat.  There’s no end to the talk of Biden’s dishonesty and other character faults.  Everyone has seen the videos of him sidling up to children and women and pawing them and nuzzling them.  It’s extremely disturbing almost shocking.  But it’s old hat.

But here’s the thing.  What does this say about our society?  Do the stories about Biden and Clinton and Obama and their depravity mark our society as terminally decadent and tottering on the edge of dissolution or is this just the routine state of all societies?  Were all the presidents creeps?  Or have we reached a dangerous low point.

I guess I can’t claim I have a definitive answer.  I’d be interested in getting people’s opinions.  But I’ll give my opinion here.

So, human beings are extremely flawed.  And when handed incredible power and responsibility they can go off the deep end.  Jack Kennedy had many sexual dalliances while he was in the White House.  Bill Clinton had the Lewinsky scandal.  And both Clinton and Obama leveraged the contacts and probably the criminal evidence they possessed through the FBI to make themselves billionaires.  Therefore, there is a rich tradition of tawdry behavior by US presidents.

But I think Joe Biden is an order of magnitude worse.  Biden is an odious misfit that should never have come anywhere near the White House.  It’s as if a circus monkey had been appointed a municipal judge.  Sure, partisan politics will allow a lot of latitude with the selection of a candidate.  But this should have been a red flag.  Everything about him adds to a picture that is a caricature of a despicable creep.  With Biden we’ve lost even the illusion of honor.  I can only imagine what foreign dignitaries must be thinking when they have to interact with this demented wretch.  They probably wash their hands as soon as they can after shaking his.  Most of them probably make a point of leaving their wives behind on trips and I can only imagine what the female dignitaries experience when he comes in range.

So, I think we have dropped down a very long way in the caliber of our leaders.  Politicians like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi use their powerful leadership positions mostly to enrich themselves through insider stock trading which is a protected perk of the federal legislature.  And the president of the United States is bought off by one of the most corrupt governments in the world; Ukraine, to pay over a hundred billion dollars to finance a war from which no one benefits but the politicians and the merchants of death.

People will say that this is just the way business is done in an empire.  Caligula or Nero is just as valid a leader as Augustus or Marcus Aurelius.  As long as the army and the tax collectors do their jobs we’ll roll along for another few centuries.  I disagree.  I think the rot is advanced and has eaten its way through the other levels of the elite.  The managerial class seems to be far from the best and the brightest.  The universities have become clown college.  Even our supposedly state of the art information age corporations seem to lack initiative and inspiration to produce real innovation.

I think Joe Biden is a symptom.  But I think this symptom is one of those markers that are used in triage.  When a doctor notes this one, he sends the patient displaying it to the hospice for the morphine goodbye.