November Eighth, 2022 – Day of Reckoning

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I almost feel like adding between the date and the descriptor in the title above the sound effect, “dunt, dunt, DUUUHHHH!”  Reading it, it sounds overblown and comically self-serious.  But personally, it’s gratifying to think that I’ve managed to survive two years since the horrific 2020 election debacle and that Joe Biden has generated such animosity by his dumpster fire presidency that left, right and middle are almost unanimous in their appraisal of him as a failed president.

But more importantly, I am looking forward to knowing whether the electoral system in this country is salvageable or hopeless.  And that is something I’m waiting for with bated breath.  Because I’m just tired of thinking about it.  Thinking about it distracts me from too many other things that need to be attended to.  And the uncertainty prevents me from making decisions and makes me delay things that I could go forward with if I knew which way the world will be going.

I don’t know if I’m unique in this way of looking at things.  I guess I’ve always kind of obsessed about the political elections going on around me.  But since 2016 I’ve become extremely cynical about our country’s future.  Waking up to the reality of how the FBI operates and how partisan the whole administrative state is has lowered my opinion of our government to the point where I see no meaningful difference between it and East Germany or even Venezuela.  It’s power politics and corruption.  And respect for constitutional rights and freedoms is non-existent and not even a façade has been maintained.  The Left in government, corporations and academia wear their contempt for these things like a badge of honor.

At this point all I’m looking for is an answer.  I want to know if this is still the same country I used to belong to.  If it is they will reject Biden & Co. unmistakably.  He will lose both Houses of Congress convincingly.  If not then we are in a new place, post-America.  And at that point agonizing over elections is pointless, stupid and most importantly a waste of time.  So, the outcome of this election will be a clarifying moment, an epiphany.

In a real sense I’m actually hoping that the answer is that there is no hope.  I’m that tired of being disappointed.  If I don’t have to hope anymore, I can forget about the majority of people living in this country who aren’t on my side and concentrate on making my plans for me and mine.  I can take the measures that will hide and protect me from that majority and their representatives who have turned this country into a banana republic.  I can use this new found clarity to concentrate on making alliances with those who are on my side, or at least aren’t my sworn enemies.

And I can finally break away from obsessing about Tuesday nights in early November and start using my time for things that I enjoy and that provide some kind of return on investment.

So come on November Eighth, hurry up and get here.  Put an end to this whole stupid passion play that we reenact every two years or so.  Answer the question, thumbs up or thumbs down.  I no longer fear either answer.

CNN Just Keeps the Hits Coming – Jim Acosta On Deck

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You know, I’m not sure if the new owners of CNN are serious about reentering real journalism or if they just need to replace the current occupants of their clown car because of the really bad smell coming from it.  But whatever the reason, they’ve provided me with some of the happiest news moments I’ve had since the 2016 election video montage.  Just think of it; Fredo, Harwood, Stelter, Toobin.  And now Jim Acosta?  What’s next?  Will they tell Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper they have to butch it up a little to keep their jobs?

Well, whatever it is all I can say is I hope it spreads to MSNBC and results in Morning Shmoe and his blushing bride Lycra Spandexy getting the boot from the Morning Shmoe show.  Well done CNN, well done.  And here’s hoping that Gentleman Jim Acosta lands on his feet and enjoys his new gig as a dog walker or pool boy somewhere in the greater DC metropolitan area.

Jim Acosta Next, But Not Last, To Be Let Go From CNN, Report

Will America Get Another Chance?

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The post-WWII boom made two generations of Americans remarkably prosperous.  The generation who fought the war and their children lived in a time when America ran the world politically and economically.  The captains of industry were in a position to expand their businesses on a scale never before seen.  American companies dominated the global market in just about every major category of manufacturing.  That expansion employed two generations of Americans in a way that hadn’t been seen before.  Americans came to believe that each generation would be richer and happier than the one before.  Everyone would have a nice home.  Everyone’s kids would go to college.  Everyone would prosper.

Now the 1970s was the first wake-up call.  With an energy crisis and a financial crisis and the first big recession in twenty-five years Americans were worried and confused.  But along came Ronald Reagan and the wonders of deregulation and before you know it “Greed is good” and the good times are rolling again.

But what nobody noticed, or at least no one in the big cities noticed was that corporate America had decided that employing Americans was too expensive and unnecessary.  So slowly but surely, they moved their manufacturing operations off-shore.  They went to Mexico and the Philippines.  They went to Japan, South Korea, China, then Thailand, Vietnam and finally Myanmar.  Anywhere except here.  So, thirty years later the rust belt now looks like a third world nation.  Towns and cities are filled with houses that haven’t been painted in decades.  Main streets are full of abandoned and dilapidated commercial and industrial properties.  In fact, the towns are now empty of young people.  Only the old people are hanging on, living off their social security and the dregs of their savings.

In the big coastal cities, there were still white-collar jobs to be had running these nominally American corporations.  And tech companies provided high paying jobs for IT professionals.  But in the last ten years even these jobs are more and more being off-shored.  The hollowing out of the American work force is almost complete.  There are still jobs at hospitals and government agencies that are tasked with servicing the needs of the human flotsam and jetsam that are still clinging to life in the battered US economy.  There have to be jobs for Democrat voters after all.

So, the second generation after the WWII generation, the Millennials were the first generation to discover that they would be worse off than their parents.  And the next generation after that is acutely aware how bad things are out there.  None of that post war optimism exists.  But what lingers is the sense that Americans have been double crossed.  They’ve been sold out by corporate America but more correctly, they been sold out by the federal government that allowed these corporations to abandon their countrymen to joblessness and poverty.  They allowed the states that they supposedly represented to be picked clean of factories and warehouses and retail businesses.  They were paid off to ignore the dismantling of the industrial base of the United States of America.

Well, it’s already done.  No one will be going to jail for it.  George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton got their cut.  Obama did too.  And George W. Bush sent all those unemployed Midwesterners to Iraq to be blown up by maniacs with road-side IEDs.  That’s ancient history now.

But that sense of being double crossed still lingers among the dispossessed but still living victims.  I guess the only question is will there be any kind of attempt to save what’s left of America’s people?  Donald Trump did something.  He called out the outrageous trade deals that his predecessors inflicted on us.  He boosted energy production and even did something to try and get some jobs brought back here.  So of course, they unleashed COVID and the BLM riots to crash the economy.  Then Dementia Joe applied the coup de grâce.  He shut down the energy industries and unleashed hyperinflation.

Assume that Americans successfully pry the federal elective offices of President and Congress away from the Democrats in 2022 and 2024.  Will the Republicans follow the lead of Trump or his successor to try and force corporate America to reinvest in this country?  Sure, they’ll be busy trying to clean out the Deep State (if they’re interested in anything more than business as usual) but just as important is fixing the economy.  And the only way to do that is to return all those manufacturing jobs.  But will they do it?  If they don’t there won’t be a generation after the one growing up now.  That’s simple arithmetic.  No jobs, no families.

Eastern Promises (2007) – A Movie Review

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This is a movie about some Russian mobsters in London.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Anna Khitrova is a nurse in the maternity ward of a London hospital.  One day a pregnant underage girl Tatiana shows up hemorrhaging and in cardiac distress.  We’re shown the needle marks on her arms.  She’s rushed into surgery and the baby is saved but the mother dies.  Anna finds a diary written in Russian in Tatiana’s possessions.  She asks her uncle Stepan to translate the diary but after looking through it he tells Anna not to get involved.

But Anna wants the baby to go back to Tatiana’s family instead of into foster care.  She finds a card for a Russian restaurant in the diary and goes there to find out about Tatiana and to get the diary translated to find her family.  She meets the restaurant’s owner Semyon a courtly old man and his son Kirill and their “driver” Nikolai (played by Viggo Mortensen).  In reality Semyon is the head of the local Russian mafia family.  Semyon tells Anna he has never heard of Tatiana but agrees to translate the diary for her.

Meanwhile we see what Kirill and Nikolai are up to.  Kirill has ordered a hit on another Russian mobster and Nikolai helps to “process” the body by removing the teeth and cutting off the fingers in a scene that tells you how cold blooded he can act.  They dump the body in the Thames but all this was done behind Semyon’s back.  Kirill is a loose cannon who acts out of emotion.  The murdered gangster has an organization that will be looking for revenge.

Semyon reads the diary and realizes that it implicates Kirill and himself in statutory rape and much more.  He orders Nikolai to murder Anna’s uncle because of his knowledge of the diary’s contents.  When Semyon’s contacts tell him that a Chechen hit squad is hunting for Kirill but does not know what he looks like he hatches a plan.  He decides to elevate Nikolai to a “made man,” so to speak, in the organization.  He is given the “star” tattoos on his shoulders and knees.  And he is invited by one of the organization to a meeting at a bathhouse.  It’s a set up for a hit.  The two Chechens are told that Nikolai is Kirill and they attack him as he sits in a towel in the sauna.  After a harrowing battle in which he sustains numerous knife wounds he kills both hitmen.

At the hospital where he is recovering from his wounds Nikolai is visited secretly by a high-ranking Scotland Yard officer named Yuri.  We learn that Nikolai is an undercover FSB agent infiltrating the Russian mafia with the approval of the British government.  Nikolai insists that what must be done is arrest Semyon for the statutory rape of Tatiana based on DNA evidence of his paternity of her child.  This will allow Kirill to assume titular control of the family but leave Nikolai in actual control to do his work from the inside.  Anna finds out that Nikolai did not murder her missing uncle but sent him out of town (Scotland) to hide from Semyon.  She now believes that Nikolai is not part of the plot to hide Tatiana’s abuse.

But when the police demand a blood sample from Semyon, he figures out what’s going on and sends Kirill to the hospital where Tatiana’s baby is being held to kidnap her.  He intends to drown her in the river.  But Kirill is guilt ridden over the idea of murdering the child.  By the time he steels himself to commit the murder Nikolai and Anna arrive to talk him out of it and save the child.  Nikolai convinces Kirill that his father must be allowed to go to prison in order for the two of them to gain control of the business.  Kirill begs Nicholai to believe that he had nothing to do with the Chechen hit squad going after Nikolai and they are reconciled to this new partnership they are forming.

In the last scene Semyon is in prison and Tatiana’s baby has been adopted by Anna.  The last image is of Nikolai now dressed as a prosperous business man in the restaurant apparently wondering what has become of his life.

This is a brutal movie.  Scenes involving the degrading treatment of the prostitutes in Semyon’s bordello and the graphic violence is disturbing.  The depraved nature of Kirill and the various other “soldiers” is depressing to watch.  It’s hard to imagine that a government agent would go through all that Nicholai does even if it is the means by which a large criminal organization is destroyed.  The depravity and the suffering he goes through is mind altering.  Who can I recommend this movie to?  Well, not the easily offended.  Sexual content and violence are pretty extreme.  In addition, I’d say this movie is for people who go in for gangster movies.  If you fit into both those categories then this is actually a legitimate film.  The acting is mostly very good.  Viggo Mortensen does a superb job as the fake hitman.  And if action scenes are what you crave then the hit in the sauna is one for the record books.  It’s extremely harrowing and effective.  Hopefully I’ve spelled out what this movie is.