Tag: Current Events

18MAR2025 – How the Week is Progressing

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What’s to say today?  I guess the most interesting news event is Musk’s Space-X stepped in and brought the astronauts stranded on the International Space Station home after Boeing stranded them there six months ago.

There’s something ironic in this situation.  Boeing has been in the news for the last year because of defective aircraft that many have associated with DEI based hiring practices.  And now Space-X; an Elon Musk company that prides itself on merit-based hiring, steps in and solves a frightening situation with a can-do approach to space flight.  It’s like watching the two approaches to hiring compared face to face before our eyes.

I guess the other big story is that lousy judge trying to block the deportation of Central American gang-bangers by the Trump administration.  Afterward Trump said he should be impeached.  And so Chief Justice Roberts opens his big mouth and says that precedent doesn’t call for impeachment on a difference of opinion on a judge’s ruling.

As if that were what is going on.  These slimy leftist judges will stall and block everything the Trump administration wants to get done for the American people.  We will see this for the next four years.  If Roberts wants to be at all useful, he should expedite all requests by Trump’s administration to have these phony judges’ decisions reviewed by the Supreme Court and allow Trump to fix all these problems.  Of course, impeachment will never solve the problem.  We would need a supermajority in the Congress.  What we need is the Supreme Court to provide constitutional review of these awful decisions.

Today I finally got a handle on the impasse I’ve been wrestling with in finishing my book.  What I need is a good crisis/resolution to reach the endpoint.  So here is a situation where you know where you want to end up but there needs to be a struggle to make it feel satisfying.  But I don’t need another physical battle.  I need a popular revolt.  And I think I’ve figured out an angle.  I think I’ll withdraw the consent of the governed.  I’ll have a national guard unit revolt and then let it cascade across a state and then across the country.  Now I have to figure out the dramatic details.  I’ll have the national guard unit refuse to hand over my protagonist then when the Army wants to send in regulars, I’ll have the governors of the four states where Connors people are located close ranks with all of their national guard troops to deny the arrest.  And then I’ll let it swell from there.  That seems pretty good.  After that I’ll let the newly appointed president convene a Constitutional Convention to begin cleaning up the mess that the Deep State has caused.  And that will give me a nice breakpoint to allow my protagonist to be pardoned by the president.  And more than pardoned, exonerated.  And then I can allow him to ride off into the sunset which is something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

So that’s what I was doing today.  Thursday will be a long day when I’ll be working on stuff I hate.  But that’s life.  I have one of the grandsons coming over Saturday.  That should be fun.  Apparently, he’s voted for spaghetti and meatballs and mint chocolate chip ice cream.  So, I’d better do some extra time on the rowing machine this week.  But maybe I’ll burn some of that off with a baseball catch.  I hope my shoulder is still functional after a winter of chopping ice.  I wonder what movie he wants to watch?  I hope it’s “The Return of the King.”  I haven’t seen that one in a while.  I think the “Ride of the Rohirrim” is about due.

Well, that should be enough for now.

Phoning it In on Friday Morning

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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.

Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 03JAN2025 – It’s Her Turn … Again

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Even if the Dems run Kamala as a candidate, never underestimate the Republicans ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The best thing the Dems could do is continue to scold the Americans who disappointed them by not jumping on the EV Kamala bus, and voted against them. They have 4 years to bitch and moan about how they were robbed, and it’s all racist. That would make Vance have an easy run by building up a reservoir of resentment among the undecided. All Trump need to do is hold the stated course of deport, reinflate, and drill baby drill. This could swing the pendulum back to the right, the last election was indicative of a tidal shift against the left wing agenda.

A New Year’s Eve Look Back in Gob Smackedification

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If 2024 had been the plot for a novel no one would have believed it.  The former president is running for the Republican nomination while under indictment in four separate cases in three separate jurisdictions.  He is found guilty in two of them even before the end of the primaries and every time a court case goes against him his popularity grows.  The incumbent Democratic candidate wins the primaries handily but drops out a hundred days before the election because he sounded like a talking turnip during the only debate.  The Democratic candidacy is handed over to the vice president because only she can legally use the multi-billion-dollar war chest but she also sounds like a talking turnip, albeit a slightly higher pitched one.  During the campaign the Republican candidate is put on open display by the secret service to not one but two snipers, one of whom misses a kill shot by fractions of an inch.

The media and the US government conspire to hide the incumbent president’s advanced dementia for his whole term in office, going so far as to claim he is actually some kind of political four-dimensional chess master while video evidence proves he’s forgotten how a door knob works.  When the election can’t even be stolen through massive blue city fraud the media claims that racism and misogyny are responsible despite the large gains the Republicans make among women and minority voters.  And as a parting absurdity the people in charge of the White House start rattling off thousands of blanket pardons including the president’s bag-man son who was already found guilty for various offenses large and small and whom the president had sworn he would never pardon.

And on the other side, the once and future Republican president has allied himself with a whole retinue of unlikely allies and future cabinet picks including the richest man in the world, a scion of the Kennedy clan and other heterodox individuals who would normally be anathema to a Republican administration.  And finally, the greatest absurdity of all is that this president-elect is someone like Donald Trump.  An almost cartoon character.  A caricature of the American huckster.  A modern-day P T Barnum.  But the only Republican to be honest about how the American political system is totally rigged against normal Americans.

And none of that even mentions incipient strains of World War III filtering out of the neo-con madness in Ukraine and with the Middle East in virtual flames as Gaza, Syria and Iran boil over in open war.  Just the other day the explosion of a weapons depot was so huge that some observers mistook it for a tactical nuclear weapon detonation.  And so, with just twenty days left before the end of the Biden presidency there seems to be no pause in the frenetic madness that has engulfed the world stage.

Looking back on this, stuns the mind.  To me this is the result of massive overreach.  When the Democrats unleashed George Floyd, COVID and election fraud in 2020 they pulled out all the stops and ran Washington like some private fiefdom.  And they brought in a collection of misfits and weirdos that couldn’t get out of their own way.  And so, they blew up the economy and unleashed actual stagflation.  They hid the stagnation part by putting everyone and his brother in government no-show jobs.  But the inflation was right out there for all to see and feel.  They tried to tell people that they shouldn’t believe their own lying eyes when looking at their empty wallets but instead bask in the glow of Bidenomics that was making them rich.  Of course, unless you’re an investment banker, tech entrepreneur or tenured Ivy League professor you probably don’t have a seven-figure 401K plan to offset the order of magnitude growth in the cost of housing and eggs but then again poor people should just shut up and vote Democrat.  Right?

So, as it turned out reality really is real.  And now the good(?) guys have their turn at bat.

I think I begin to understand how things speed up during these end of civilization events.  Once instability sets in, unbalanced parts of the system start to randomly knock into each other and catastrophic collapse is more or less inevitable.  Well, I guess this thing has to play out.  Perhaps 2025 will be a chance to do maintenance on the system and get it at least firing on an even number of cylinders.  Who knows?  Maybe Trump will turn out to be a Diocletian-like historical character who comes up with a patchwork solution to allow the empire to limp along for another century or two before complete collapse.

Well, there’s my annual pep talk.  Happy New Years and I’ll put together a look forward for tomorrow.

Adapt and Thrive

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Sunday, I head back to the salt mines to dig out that salt.  I get back onto the galley and start rowing that oar.  I return to the mill and push that millstone round and round.  The mind deadening drudgery looms before me like towering wave that will roll over me and drown me in its awful size.  So let it be written, so shall it be done.

But for tonight I’m content.  I got plenty of sleep last night and I only had a couple of hours of lousy work today and even that was tolerable and unavoidable.  So good enough.

What I was thinking about today is that it’s time to move beyond the election and all of that way of thinking.  All of this anxiety over whether Trump will win or Kamala.  Living in a blue state it really hardly matters.  I already live under a woke communist regime.  Really, all that is necessary is to start thinking about what things I can control and what I cannot.  And just looking at things through that lens clarifies  my thinking and removes a lot of the anxiety that comes from depending on “magical” processes.

For instance, I supposedly have to vote for Trump.  Well, I have to vote anyway because there are local races that I can influence the outcome of.  So not voting for Trump would be kind of silly, so I will.  But I don’t imagine I’m making any difference by voting for him.  And whether he wins or not, my life won’t change very much at all, at least not for quite a while.  If Trump wins and a Republican Congress passes legislation that allows Trump to deport the millions of illegal aliens beyond partisan judges’ ability to block him, then eventually after several years I will notice some improvements in my quality of life.  And if he balances the budget and on-shores the jobs that were sent to Asia then I will see America start to revive.  But that’s a long time from now and I have a limited span on this planet.  So, this election is almost an academic exercise in political philosophy.

Instead, what will be interesting and useful is to try and find private endeavors and resources that individuals can utilize and patronize either collectively or individually.  For instance, if I ever finish my never-ending science fiction novel, I might decide to market it and advertise it by starting a go-fund-me page.  Well, even selecting something as ordinary as that is fraught with challenges because many of these crowd-funding companies are either run by or strongly influenced by left-wing zealots who police these sites looking to cancel anyone who doesn’t share their convictions.  So, researching the activities and tendencies of these types of sites is important if you want to avoid a potentially disastrous launch for a creative work like a book.

And the same applies for other commercial or cultural organization.  Especially if Harris is installed in the White House, I’m hoping that various enterprises will spring up to service an audience from our side of the political spectrum who need everything from entertainment, to news, to snacks, to educational services, to dating services, to you name it.  With the government monolithically leftist it will behoove us to become entrepreneurs and connoisseurs with respect to the things that will be unavailable from official sources.  And we’ll have to become very creative at avoiding government interference, which means we’ll have to become adept at camouflage and subterfuge.  And even that secrecy sounds like fun to me.  Belonging to a private club has its own pleasures.

So, as the election date approaches, I have a new attitude about the future and I think it will serve me better than what happened after the last presidential election in 2020.  In fact, it can’t help but be better, no matter who wins.

Fall Housekeeping

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I was happy to hear that JD Vance had a very successful debate against Tim Walz.  That is all to the good since Vance will be on the short list of real leaders for conservatives going forward.  And by that term “conservative” I mean anyone who is against the Leftist project.  I know that conservative has become a dirty word for the new right but honestly, I can’t keep up with the nomenclature so I’ll just use the old-fashioned meanings of words.  So, for me a conservative is someone who believes in the things that have been true about human nature for untold thousands of years.

But regardless of what JD Vance did or didn’t accomplish last night, life goes on here in Dunwich.  I have photos and quotes to select.  I have posts to write.  I have work of all sorts that must be done, both at home and at the office and I have Camera Girl, the dogs and all the other life forms that she keeps to deal with.  I have now lugged several hundred pounds of potted plants up two stories to her plant windows.  And this is a very important task because of the threat of frost.  One year I played fast and loose with the early frost date and an eight-foot-tall ponytail palm bit the dust.  I was greatly reviled for that faux pas.

We turned on the heat last week but for the last three or four days we’ve set the thermostats below the point where it will demand heat.  It’s just too warm out to need it on.  It was just one of those little cold snaps a week ago that demanded a shot of heat to rally us through.  But soon enough we’ll need it.  My guess is October 21st.

I enjoyed that fresh-eyes approach to viewing Dracula.  These classic movies have become the equivalent of museum pieces and it makes sense to try and strip them of the baggage they’ve accumulated through overexposure in the popular culture.  They deserve to be looked at from the perspective of art that was a product of its time.  It’s like reading Shakespeare.  You have to hear the famous monologues with fresh ears.  You have to meet them halfway.  I think I’ll do something heretical and instead of watching Frankenstein next, I’ll skip to the Mummy.

I’ve begun the re-framing of my American Archipelago “world.”  I realized that I had not done enough outlining of the larger story ahead of time.  I was in danger of painting myself into a corner and cutting off a lot of other stories that I will want to write later.  After all I’m not the Marvel Comic Universe.  I can’t invoke the multiverse to bring back the characters that I stupidly kill off.  And I need a road map ahead of time so I don’t wander too far off into left field.  I think what I’ll do is have my heroes threaten Washington into allowing a “free zone” to exist in a large chunk of the middle of the country where a border won’t be enforced but federal rule will not exist.  My plan is to allow a gradual expansion of this zone until it becomes the majority of the land mass.  I assume I’ll have the requisite number of crises and resolutions before the new state swallows the United States (and maybe Canada).  Making this sound reasonable and figuring out how to make my Connors character a worthy prince (or CEO) is the trick.  Of course I could just model him on me.  Then he would be a veritable Pericles in all respects.

On the political front, if Harris is installed, the quadrillion dollar question is just how bad will the economy get?  Will they keep printing money until hyperinflation kicks in?  Will they let Americans starve to death because a loaf of bread costs a thousand dollars?  Well, I guess we’ll find out.  Barack Obama à  Joe Biden à Kamala Harris à ?  How much stupider can presidents get?  Will Harris be followed by a potted plant?  We’re going to learn so much.  And I assume it will be incredibly painful.  But that is truly the only way that stupid people learn anything.  And apparently this country has a very large number of stupid people.

I’m trying to figure out if we can have Americans without an America.  Can we celebrate things like the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving if we no longer have the America that birthed those holidays.  After all, how can we have an Independence Day when we’re no longer a free people?  And if we’re no longer free then what are we giving thanks for?  That we’re still breathing?  Well, I still like a July barbecue and I still like a turkey dinner so maybe I can keep the celebrations but change their significance.  They can become the Summer and Winter Solstice celebrations (with a little fudging of the dates).  Oh well.

So regardless of the Apocalypse I’m busy, busy, busy.  But once the election is over, I intend to re-order my priorities to use my time more appropriately.  Under a Harris administration I don’t see the need to provide daily updates on the disintegration of the American republic.  I will probably concentrate on entertainment and public service messages about useful things for folks on our side of the political spectrum.  So, send in the clowns.

ZMan Has a Good Post on the Weirdness

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The post considers the unlikely events that seem to be happening more and more frequently.  He points to the two Trump assassination attempts and some of the other weird things that just get passed off as random.

It’s well written and thought provoking, so I won’t write a summary.  I will say that it’s obvious that clandestine operations by agents and subcontractors of the United States government have been given permission to do things that formerly would have been forbidden for fear of being discovered and thus delegitimizing the agencies involved.

Apparently they’re no longer worried.  That can’t be a good sign for us.

Strange Days

Monday’s Done

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Farmer Cthulhu in His Fields

After a hard day of de-lousing a 600 ft tall squid-headed dragon you’d think I could relax and eat my supper in peace.  Instead, I’m confronted with a thousand-point drop in the Dow.  Back during the Black Monday crash in ‘87 a five-hundred-point drop was a catastrophe of mammoth proportions (about a 20% of the Dow).  Now double that drop is just a few percent of the DJIA.  But it certainly makes the talk of recession sound a lot more ominous.  I have to assume that Kamala, Queen of the Cat Ladies, will throw a hissy fit and demand that Dopey Joe threaten to fire everyone at the Fed if they don’t lower interest rates.  Well, sure.  That will fix things up, won’t it?  Well at least until November anyway.

Everybody is thinking that Iran will attack Israel and we’ll get dragged into it.  Well, I hope not.  I’m guessing that Iran will work through Hezbollah to harry the Israelis in the north, but not attack them directly.  Netanyahu has quite a problem on his hands to neutralize Hamas.  It’s almost as if his only option is to separate the women and young children from the adult make population and fight the men without inflicting casualties on the innocent.  Well, if he figures that one out, he deserves a Nobel Prize for War.

The Ukrainians have installed their new F-16s in Odessa and I guess hope to use them to attack Crimea, Zaporizhzhia and maybe elsewhere.  It remains to be seen if Ukraine can change the status quo of Russian dominance in air defense over Eastern Ukraine.  The F-16s are supposed to be superior to the Russian fighters.  But ground-based defenses are a serious threat to even an advanced aircraft like the F-16.  We shall see.

I saw that Real Clear Politics has shifted the polling to a Kamala Harris lead of a point or so.  Well, never underestimate the number of blue-haired cat ladies in the American population.  Imagine Commander in Chief Kamala Harris reviewing the troops in Iran or Venezuela or Mexico by Zoom call and giving a rousing speech about the new battery driven aircraft carrier painted green and “manned” by a wholly trans crew.  Or imagine Kamala giving a speech at the United Nations outlawing “whiteness” and pointing to the success of post-white cultures like Zimbabwe and South Africa.  Or just imagine Kamala dedicating the addition of George Floyd to Mount Rushmore.  Well, not exactly an addition.  More like replacement.  Those dead white guys would have to be erased to make room for Floyd’s head.  Now that’s progress alright.

Looking around at what’s going on so far this week makes me nostalgic for my time at the de-lousing procedure at the boiling acid vat of Cthulhu.  Sure, the sulfuric acid fumes are lethal and the parasites are the size and ferocity of wolverines but the mission is simple and words still have their real meaning.  The same can’t be said for the “real world.”  In what universe is Kamala Harris a world class leader?  By what objective standards are the results of Bidenomics prosperity.  By what double-speak was Kamala’s handling of the border crisis a success?  Bring on the acid vat!

Tighten Your Belt

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I was having a discussion with a younger family member.  Someone of my children’s generation.  And we were talking about how children need to be brought up at this point.  Now this guy is a very impressive individual.  He actually embodies all the of the characteristics that people make believe they have when they describe themselves in their resumes.

What he says he’s doing with his sons is making them ready to survive in a very bad economic environment.  He’s a strong believer in the, “Hard times leads to hard men leads to easy times leads to soft men leads to hard times” theory.  He wants his sons prepared to face adversity because he is of the opinion we haven’t even begun to see the bottom.  And I think he’s right.  Even in the challenging environment we are experiencing we haven’t seen anything like what’s to come.  The powers that be are working to pull the supports out from what used to be the American way of life.

The “great contraction” seems to be the plan to produce a step change in the number of people in the world.  I’m guessing they’d like to go from billions of people down to hundreds or maybe even just tens of millions.  And the way to get there is to remove the ability of average people to be gainfully employed and able to raise a family.  Essentially, they only want their class to continue forward.  And I think they’re succeeding.  Young people no longer believe it is possible to provide a middle-class existence for themselves, never mind for a family.

A family-based strategy seems to be the only way to overcome the reduction in opportunities and resources that is going on.  If kids can’t afford a house, then they’ll have to be housed by their families with their wives and kids in the family home.  Building an addition or trading in the family home for a multi-family building will once again become the way to allow the kids to afford family life.

Now, to some people this seems unacceptable.  Well, then maybe seeing your family end with your kids unmarried and without children of their own is the acceptable solution.  That’s a personal choice.  I guess if you are exceptionally wealthy you can buy them houses.  But then you probably already belong to the class that is supposed to emerge from the contraction; the elite.

For everyone else, surviving the new normal will involve tightening our belts and working twice as hard for half as much.  And maybe this is something that really has to happen.  Maybe the elites really are right and the good times are permanently over.  Personally, I don’t believe that.  Human ingenuity is an enormously powerful force.  Technological solutions exist for all of the “end of affluence” factors; energy limits, Malthusian population predictions, climate change panic.  I think that hard times are not a permanent situation for us today.  Rather I think a mindset by the global elites fosters the idea that Gaia needs our grandchildren to be sacrificed on the altar of depopulation.

I think we are headed for hard times.  Regardless of who wins the election in 2024, prepare to do what you can to help your loved ones to make it in very hard times.  It’s on the way.

Juneteenth Failure

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Today Camera Girl entrusted me with a job she calculated I was capable of performing; renewing the licenses for the dogs.  And yet I failed.  Turns out the town hall is closed on account of Juneteenth.  Well.  Juneteenth can really sneak up on you.  All my preparation, anticipation and concentration undone.  Ah well.  There’s always next year.

Another beautiful day.  Blazing hot sun and hardly a breath of breeze.  Well, we wait all winter for this so why complain about what we said we wanted?  So, soak in the heat and feel the energy.  But all this heat has already got my gardens way ahead of last year’s awful summer of rain marathon.  Based on what I can see I’ll have raspberries this week and blueberries next week.  And that’s just in time for Princess Sack of Potatoes beginning of summer visit.  She’ll be here tomorrow and Friday and she loves raspberries.

The early summer flowers are all over the place.  Black-eyed Susans, cone flowers, Shasta daisies, daylilies, clematis, digitalis, roses and Serbian bellflower are blooming all over the place.

 

The hellebores, rhododendrons, peonies and irises are already finished and the lupines are down to their last gasp.  Last year everything was late and stunted.  And the Elecampane I put in two years ago is already about six feet tall even before it’s flowered.

Of course, all this fertility hasn’t gone unnoticed by my neighbors.  The rabbits and the deer have been enjoying the raspberry and blueberry bushes and also nibbling down some of the outlying hostas and Solomon seal plants but as Camera Girl reminds me everybody’s gotta eat.  Yeah, but why here?

But not everything is sweetness and light.  Massive repair work is in my future.  Contractor negotiation and management is upon me.  Oh, the pain, the pain.  Well, the money pit is well named.

I haven’t noticed too much about the election in November that’s worth discussing this week.  Biden is falling apart and various groups of people are beginning to notice and the Democrat upper echelons seem to be circling like sharks waiting to put him out of his misery.  But there’s not that much for us to say until they pull the plug or the ripcord or whatever the correct metaphor is for this termination.

But whoever and however the Democrats run their race it is the ballot harvesting and drop box stuffing that will probably determine the winner in Pennsylvania.  My hope though is that there will be enough video and other documentation of the fraud to convince the great majority of Americans of the truth about our “election integrity.”  If that is accomplished then a real threshold will have been crossed.  Hopefully enough people will stop trying to force reality to correspond with their idealistic conception of how our leaders are “elected” and move onto concentrating their energies on protecting themselves and their families from the regime and its destructive practices.

A friend in town has donated a large collection of books on Shakespear to me.  So of course I’m a kid in the candy store.  One of the best types of books in the collection are paperback copes of individual plays.  This tends to be much handier than my large heavy “complete works” volumes which are large and heavy and tend to have small print!  I especially want the tragedies and some of the better comedies in that form.  Let’s start with Hamlet, King Lear and Much Ado About Nothing.  That should keep me busy for a while.