Chaos
16/04/23 07:02
My God, is there any truth to the rumor that it will be 85 degrees later this week? Temperatures barely get into the fifties this time of year, so 85 seems like a bit of a stretch. I'll have to get my bike rides in early in the day. I made it a point to get an early start yesterday, given that it was Easter and traffic along the ocean would only get heavier the longer I waited to get out on the road. The missus asked me the other day why I usually wait so long to ride every day. It's usually based on motivation, or maybe I'm just waiting for the temperatures to warm up a bit. Sometimes, if the wind is expected to pick up in the afternoon, or maybe rain is on the way, I'll try and beat it all by getting out on the road by 10 or 11 AM. Sometimes, the fear of not getting in a ride will get me out for a ride.
Easter is not a big deal hereabouts, but I will say that we ended up doing very little of what we had planned to do. We had planned to take Mrs. G out for a ride, and we thought that she might like to have one or more of the take-out dishes we had in mind to give her. By the time Easter came around, I felt like doing none of it. I think the missus was still game, but I told her that I was not, so that was that. We hadn't heard from the Ev man all day, so we phoned him later in the afternoon to tell him that we would drop by with the take-out dishes we had bought the previous day. If we do nothing else, we try to go out for a ride just to get out of the house at least once a day, so stopping by to see the Ev man was just what the doctor ordered. We walked around downtown Exeter for a bit, and we ordered some Asian take-out. It was worth noting that one of the brick buildings in downtown Exeter bore a date of 1770 up around the eaves. That makes it 250 years old! It was settled, according to Wikipedia, in 1638.
We'll start to see first-quarter earnings from the banks this week, so that should be interesting. Financials have lagged this past quarter, and I'm guessing banks are part and parcel of that bleakness. I don't know how I feel about this bear/bull market business anymore. I don't even know how we're still in the low 4,000's in the S&P with all of the carnage we've seen beneath the surface over these past few months. It's true as well that there are just a handful of high rollers, from the tech sector, especially, that have held up the market, so maybe I do know why we are where we are. The constant banter from the Fed heads about this or that pivot in terms of raising or not raising interest rates has also come to the rescue here and there to keep things buoyed. They understand how important a strong stock market is to the psyche of the American consumer. It's a veritable Kabuki dance with the devil, and, in the end, the devil always gets his due. You can only put so much lipstick on that pig.
It seems that the Chinese have now completed their three-day military encirclement of the island of Taiwan. Was it a dry run for the real thing? You know, the invasion of the island itself? Was this what they promised when they got their knickers in a bunch over the president of Taiwan visiting the United States? I'll take from their response that they (China) are not happy with all of the talk about the US assisting Taiwan with military assets and fortification of same in anticipation of a full-scale assault by the Chinese mainland. It's almost like the boy who cried wolf these days when it comes to China and their preoccupation with everything Taiwan. At some point, and maybe we're already here, the good folks in Taiwan and the people around the world who care about such things will just ignore whatever China says and does when they take to the waters of the Straits of Taiwan in a fit of bluster over whatever.
Did you see any of the coverage of that little French pissant, Macron, during his visit to China this past week? Protestors are burning down the City of Paris over revised retirement rules, and this little baguette Macron takes a delegation of French businessmen to China while Paris burns. On his departure following his visit, Macron said something about moving away from the US dollar, and he never pushed back one bit on Xi's claims on Taiwan. In fact, he said something about America being on its own when and where protecting Taiwan was involved. That had to be music to Xi's ears. I'm not sure the US would be so eager to run interference when China invades Taiwan were it not for the fact that the EU and other allies had our back. Now, I'm not so sure they do have our back. It is yet one more example where the United States has lost face on the global stage due to our having a senile, feckless, and woke old fool at the helm of our nation. The cat is out of the bag.
You wonder if Bumbles even knows where he is from day to day. The old fuck hasn't had a press conference in months if not years. His praetorian press may even yearn for the good old days when Bumbles had his list of people to call on and his cue cards at the ready when Bumbles took prearranged questions. In other words, even though he knew what questions were going to be asked, he still needed to read from the cue cards when giving his answer. Even then, his handlers limited the number of questions that he was willing to take to one, maybe two. These days, the trepidation on the face of his handlers when someone asks a question out of the blue is palpable. This is the leader of the free world? This is what passes for a Commander-in-Chief of the greatest nation on the face of the planet? It's no wonder that the rise of China is so worrisome to Americans who fear that having a demented president sitting in the Oval Office makes us more vulnerable, less powerful, less capable as an ally, more subject to ridicule, and less competitive as a nation in apparent decline.
Bumbles made a statement in the past week about his plans to run for the presidency in 2024 but has yet to make a formal announcement. Meanwhile, this clownish governor of California, Gavin Newsom, is running around the country giving speeches and sounding very much like a presidential candidate. Can you think of a bigger buffoon than Gavin Newsom running for the presidency? If he does for our country what he's done for California, we're fucking toast. People couldn't get out of California fast enough when the pandemic hit a couple of years back. You couldn't find a U-Haul if your life depended on it. Oh, but people vote for him regardless, his supporters say unabashedly. The illegal aliens vote for him because they know that without governmental assistance, they'd be better off back in Guatemala or whatever other shithole of a country they escaped from. The Leftists in Hollywood live behind 8-foot walls and have security up the wazoo, so they could care less. What nobody outside the Oval Office knows is how and when the Democrats plan to replace Bumbles with Gavin. And then, of course, there's what to do with Kamala Harris.
I mean, who wants more of what Bumbles Biden has given us? Raise your hands! And, how are we supposed to make sense of what we see happening to Donald J Trump? Is the prevailing thought inside the Democrat tent that the more indictments they bring against Trump, the less likely it is that he can win a general election? Are they thinking that no matter how ludicrous the charges are that it's really just the weight of the charges that will turn suburban moms away from a candidate with that much baggage? Have we learned nothing from the day that Trump came down the escalator and the Democrats declared all-out war and threatened from day one to impeach him? Have we learned nothing from the actions of the FBI and other intelligence agencies who got in bed with Hillary Clinton in order to bring down a duly elected president? This is just more of the same, folks. They're going to muddy him again with these indictments, but not so much that he won't win the primaries. He'll just be easier to beat in the general election, or so they think. It's Machiavelian, I tell you.
There was another senseless shooting this week. This fella went to work one morning and opened fire on his fellow employees minutes before the bank opened for business. He had apparently been informed previously that he was going to lose his job. I thought people got walked out the door when they got fired. Box up your shit, and the security guard will escort you out of the building. The shooter's pronouns were he/him. Does that tell us anything about his frame of mind? Maybe I'm dating myself, but I never put my preferred pronouns on my resume back in the day. Anyway, imagine the abject panic and fear around the conference room table as this guy whips out his AK-47 and starts spraying the room with bullets. Was he targeting specific individuals? Did he spare anyone in the room? It's a sad story, really. Sad in the sense that it had to come to this. Sad that people had to lose their lives when it could have been prevented. Why didn't he seek help? Why didn't his parents or friends see this coming and do something to head it off?
This apparently had less to do with guns and more to do with his mental health, which was clearly deteriorating by the minute. Like the tranny killer in the Christian school just weeks before this yesterday's killing, the killer allegedly had a bone to pick with his or her victims. None of it would have happened had either of these two killers resolved their differences in a way that didn't involve guns. Was the goal to inflict as much pain and/or death as possible? How do you hate someone so much that nothing short of ending their life satisfies your lust for killing in your deranged mind? You'd think we as a society would benefit from some sort of post-mortem in these kinds of cases. Unfortunately, that will never happen because they want you to stay focused on the narrative that guns kill people, and the fewer guns we own, the fewer victims we'd see. Killers will find a way to kill if killing is what they want to do. Let's get them the help they need before these kinds of things happen.
It's looking more and more like both the raid on Mar-a-Lago and the indictment of Donald J Trump were done at the request of the Biden Administration. Jim Jordan, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has now subpoenaed Fatso Bragg to appear before his committee so the American people can know all there is to know about how it came to pass that for the first time in American history, a former president of the United States has been indicted. Jordan will follow the breadcrumbs all the way to the White House if that is what it takes. A FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request has already produced records that Biden was behind and approved the raid on Mar-a-Lago. Bragg has now filed suit to stop Jordan's subpoena, but that will likely fail spectacularly since Congress has not only the right but the duty to perform its oversight duties when it comes to entities in the Judiciary who use federal funds in their prosecutorial roles. If justice is to be served here, Bragg will be both disbarred and prosecuted, and Biden will be impeached for using the power of the federal government to jail his likely political opponent in the 2024 presidential elections. Like I said, if there is a God.
I thought I saw something in my Twitter feed this morning about the EU falling in line with Macron's comments in China this past week about needing to distance themselves from the US and, maybe more importantly, the US dollar. I also saw something about Australia resolving some of its differences with China. What the fuck? Who isn't jumping on China's Belt and Road initiative? Is this the thanks we get for pouring billions of dollars into the shithole, Ukraine, to protect the countries in Europe from the ravages of Putin and the Wagner Group? I thought the Europeans cared about an ever-expanding Russian territory at the expense of one or more countries in the EU. Is it possible that the recent trove of American intelligence documents found on the internet exposing the corruption behind the Ukraine morass has our allies thinking twice about the motives of one or more countries involved? Or, worse yet, China has convinced the rest of the world that America is a country in decline, and they are planning accordingly. It's the new world order, don't you know.
I was telling the missus last night about the latest leak of intelligence materials posted to a gaming site called Discord. Don't quote me on the name of the gaming site. It was a pretty big deal as leaks go, and its effects were far-reaching. I think the materials were akin to a road map for the Ukrainian Spring Offensive against Russian forces on Ukrainian soil. It laid out in detail which countries would play a part, and it even speculated on end-game body counts for each of the participants. Here's the kicker: The missus hadn't a clue about any of it. She reads all of the liberal rags like the New York Times and certain sections of the Wall Street Journal, and she had seen nothing about the leak. What the hell is that all about? Everybody and anybody who needed to see the materials got to see the materials because they were readily available on the Internet. Why would these publications choose not to cover them? I think they are still looking for the leaker, or whatever they call people who post stolen state secrets to the internet these days. What do you suppose Russia is doing with these so-called materials? And, inquiring minds want to know. Is the Spring Offensive still on?
You know what else I'm seeing less of these days? I'm seeing fewer and fewer posts in my Twitter feed about what's going on in Ukraine. Something tells me that it has something to do with not giving one side or the other information about troop movements, casualty counts, and whatever else qualifies as intelligence on the ground. This isn't Elon Musks' decision. This must have something to do with a request by our government to put the kibosh on reports from various and sundry reporters on the ground in Ukraine. I'm tired of them trying to control what we hear, how much we know, and how we're supposed to feel about any of it. It's okay, I guess, that they sign off on what they want us to know when accounts of this and that get published in rags like the NYT and the Washington Post. I'm being facetious, of course. One thing they can't control are the voices of patriots like Colonel McGregor, who appears now and then on Tucker Carlson. In so many words, he says the Russians are beating the bejesus out of the Ukrainians. That probably explains why our government is working with Twitter to turn off the spigot of reporting from the field.
At what point does our country cut and run? Isn't that what Bumbles Biden and his cohorts do? Think Afghanistan. You can't keep throwing money and arms at a losing venture, can you? What sense does that make? Maybe the question now is, how do we save face when we stop supplying Ukraine with these things? What narratives will take shape in the media allowing the war hawks in Congress to step back from their insane and seemingly endless support for the war in Ukraine? The only question left now is how much Ukraine territory will be ceded to Russia when the dust finally settles. Someone should be asking the grifter, Zelensky, for an accounting of the billions of dollars we've sent to him and his oligarchs and how much of that bounty can be clawed back from banks and institutions across Europe. If we see Zelensky hanging from a rope when this is all over, it will be because the good people of Ukraine had the good sense to ask why so many of their countrymen had to die needlessly when they could have avoided it all by ceding territory sooner than they did. It's a reasonable question. Think Nuremberg.
I read an article last night about Tupperware. Tupperware was a $50 stock some five years ago. It closed yesterday at $1.52. The article said something about Tupperware going out of business. On one hand, this story is like so many other stories about stocks that have fallen on hard times in the last year or so. You hear a lot about the resiliency of the major indices like the NASDAQ and the S&P, but what they don't tell you is that only a handful of the Amazons and Apples of the world are what's holding up the indices. Tupperware was the go-to container before go-to containers became fashionable. These days, nobody pays full price for Tupperware when you can go to the Dollar Store and pay Dollar Store prices for the same product. Tupperware is still the standard in a world of knockoffs, so I'm grateful for its commitment to quality despite the costs and risks to its business for doing so. Is there anyone who doesn't have Tupperware in their kitchen? Here's hoping that some white knight will step in and restore Tupperware to its rightful place in the pantheon of great products that have graced our kitchens since Earl Tupper introduced his first bell-shaped container to the public in 1946.
It's amusing to me how some of these big box stores bend over backward on the diversity, equity, and inclusion bullshit. The missus and I were in Target the other day, and she pointed out the fact that all of the murals gracing the walls throughout the store were of black people in various and sundry poses. They were benign enough in that I saw no blowhorns, no raised fists, no black people shouting from rooftops, no one crying for social justice, and oddly enough, no pictures of white people. Oddly enough, my ass. This was by design. Somebody somewhere in the Target organization, most likely hired as a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) officer, decided that demographics be damned. The organization would push its DEI bullshite on the public no matter what. It mattered not a whit that the state and stores in which they plan to hang their murals have a black population that amounts to a pee hole in the snow, statistically speaking. I don't think I've ever seen a black person in this particular Target. And by the way, what about Asians? Where are their pictures? How about Indians, native-born or not? Forgetting the color of their skin, when do we get to celebrate the children in our society? Are they not the future?
I listen to this one particular person on progressive radio here and there just to get a sense as to the latest cultural and social injustices from her perspective. Lately, she's been making a lot of noise about what life will be like when white people are no longer in the majority in our country. Can you imagine? It almost sounds like a threat or a reckoning of sorts that awaits us. You know, like the white farmers in South Africa who fled their farms, fearing for their lives and the lives of their children when the blacks took power and descended on their properties in the dark of night, wielding machetes and carrying kerosene-soaked torches. You can hear the vengeance in her voice as she takes calls from like-minded vigilante wannabes. Somebody has been drumming some evil shit into her head since she was born, is what I'm thinking when I listen to her going off on this and that tangent. She's never in the "can't we all get along" camp, and it's always about exacting some form of social or racial comeuppance for her and her peeps living in so-called marginalized communities. I'm in the glass-half-full camp, so I'm having none of it. I don't think that's going to matter.
Every other day or so, I hear about one country or another developing some hypersonic weapon that can reach this or that destination. More often than not, that destination is the United States. I heard yesterday that Kim in North Korea now has a ballistic missile that can reach the United States. I'm no whiz when it comes to geography, so the first thing that I wanted to know when I heard that story was the relative proximity of North Korea to either the west coast or the east coast. I was willing to feel better about my long-term prospects for survival, knowing that I live on the coast which is basically out of reach when it comes to Kim and his particular form of craziness.
How silly am I? I'm also thinking that losing California in the process may not be such a bad thing after all. Did I really just say that? I don't think that the Democrats, assuming they are in power when shit hits the fan, politically speaking, would allow North Korea to take out a state that is the key to their political future. We would have to do something preemptively, and that portends bad things for the Hermit Kingdom. Kim knows that too, right? See how tenuous and potentially dangerous all of this missile talk is? Here's the bottom line: Kim is the least of our worries.
They finally caught up with the culprit responsible for leaking governmental secrets. He wasn't a spy, nor was he one of those guys wishing to drop a dime for ideological reasons, as far as anyone can tell. Some people think the suspect, Mr. Teixeira, is far too young and was unlikely to have access to the materials that he's been charged with leaking in light of his rank as a third-class airman in the Massachusetts Air National Guard. He has now been charged with espionage in a Federal Court in Boston, Massachusetts. When Bumbles Biden was asked by a reporter about the leaked materials, he shrugged it off as a "nothing burger."
I'm quite certain that our allies and enemies who have seen, and have quite possibly been implicated one way or another in the leaked materials, didn't think the leaked materials were a "nothing burger." It's just one more oddball response in a series of oddball responses from a bewildered and demented oddball of a president that leaves you wondering about lights on at the top of the stairs. And then you have Majorie Taylor Green, the Republican Congresswoman from Georgia, who is singing Mr. Teixeira's praises for getting the truth out to the American people about what the hell we've been doing in Ukraine and elsewhere during Bumble's first term. Make of it what you will.
Another bombshell of a revelation coming out of those leaked materials was that there were four spy balloons sent our way from China earlier this year, not just the one we all knew about that Biden allowed to traverse our country before giving his approval to have it shot down off the coast of North Carolina. Remember that bullshit? Oh, we can't shoot it down over Montana. We can't take a risk of having the remnants fall to earth and injure someone or something on the ground. How stupid do they think we are? Don't answer that.
So, they had the entire country following the one balloon in the news for the better part of a week that we all knew about because someone in Montana snapped a photograph of it when, in fact, there were three others that no one in our government was talking about. The kerfuffle in the headlines every night would have been fourfold if not more if the public knew about ALL the spy balloons directed by China to gather intelligence over the continental United States. If Bumbles allowed the one balloon to spy on us, he sure as hell allowed the other three to do the same thing. Where are the fucking impeachment hearings? Is this not treasonous behavior by our nation's Commander-in-Chief? I'm getting a little tired of asking that question.
There was ANOTHER train derailment yesterday near Moosewood Lake in Maine. This is in the wake of that killer fire in Texas this past week that killed 18,000 head of cattle. The aerial videos of the "accident" in Maine showed clouds of billowing black toxic smoke rising up from the scene and drifting across the sky towards the pristine waters of Moosehead Lake. This could be another East Palestine, Ohio, disaster in short order. You know, the one you never hear anything more about despite the fact that the residents of that small town are dying a slow but certain death due to the chemicals that poisoned their town a few months back after a train derailed in their town. Let me know when you start to understand that we're under attack on our own soil by God only knows who. Are we talking about Russians here? Have the Communist Chinese infiltrated our southern border? You know, the one that Bumbles and his administration don't bother even monitoring anymore. Worse yet, are we under attack by our own government? Is this how they express their disgust with those of us still unwilling to buy their electric cars and buy into their climate change bullshit? Make it make sense.
Did you happen to see the video of the mayhem on the streets of Chicago last night? I think this is the beginning of the end for that once-great city in the Mid West. If you thought you'd seen it all during Lori Lightfoot's tenure as mayor, you would be wrong. If what we saw last night in Chicago is any indication of what's to come once the new mayor of Chicago is sworn in, the city of Chicago is for some serious shit. It was well on its way to a lawless hellhole with Lightfoot in office. It's going to be a lawless hellhole on steroids when Johnson is sworn in. Did you see that clown talking about not giving his students a failing grade because he doesn't believe there is any such thing as a "failing" student? Keep it up, dickwad. Keep making the poor poorer, the destitute more destitute, the drug-addled even more drug-addled, the desperate youth even more desperate, and the city in which it all takes place even more lawless than it already is. If you think the departure of the four Walmarts in town is a fluke, keep doing what you're doing. Your city, our nation's once great city, will be but a hollowed-out shell of its former self in short order. Let the voters decide, my ass. I'm not sure this is what our Founders had in mind when they crafted our Constitution.
The world is falling apart, and Bumbles Biden is touring Ireland with his bagman of a son and their criminal entourage. Not that having him sitting in the Oval Office would make any difference because it wouldn't. What is it going to take to get that damn fool to stand at a podium for two minutes to answer a few questions? It has to be a terrifying prospect for his handlers. One that keeps them up at night, if I had to guess. You think our enemies don't see this? You think they aren't moving ahead with plans to take advantage of one of the greatest countries on the face of the earth while its leadership is fiddling and diddling away in a far-off land? Our country is, for all intents and purposes, in an undeclared war with Russia, seemingly unprepared for the devastation that the Chinese Communists are wanting to bring to our shores, and completely paralyzed and transfixed in the cultural trenches of our society by photos of a biological male pretending to be a female while posing in a tub of suds and holding up a once-iconic brand of one of America's many brands of beers. If this isn't a recipe for disaster, I don't know what is.
Easter is not a big deal hereabouts, but I will say that we ended up doing very little of what we had planned to do. We had planned to take Mrs. G out for a ride, and we thought that she might like to have one or more of the take-out dishes we had in mind to give her. By the time Easter came around, I felt like doing none of it. I think the missus was still game, but I told her that I was not, so that was that. We hadn't heard from the Ev man all day, so we phoned him later in the afternoon to tell him that we would drop by with the take-out dishes we had bought the previous day. If we do nothing else, we try to go out for a ride just to get out of the house at least once a day, so stopping by to see the Ev man was just what the doctor ordered. We walked around downtown Exeter for a bit, and we ordered some Asian take-out. It was worth noting that one of the brick buildings in downtown Exeter bore a date of 1770 up around the eaves. That makes it 250 years old! It was settled, according to Wikipedia, in 1638.
We'll start to see first-quarter earnings from the banks this week, so that should be interesting. Financials have lagged this past quarter, and I'm guessing banks are part and parcel of that bleakness. I don't know how I feel about this bear/bull market business anymore. I don't even know how we're still in the low 4,000's in the S&P with all of the carnage we've seen beneath the surface over these past few months. It's true as well that there are just a handful of high rollers, from the tech sector, especially, that have held up the market, so maybe I do know why we are where we are. The constant banter from the Fed heads about this or that pivot in terms of raising or not raising interest rates has also come to the rescue here and there to keep things buoyed. They understand how important a strong stock market is to the psyche of the American consumer. It's a veritable Kabuki dance with the devil, and, in the end, the devil always gets his due. You can only put so much lipstick on that pig.
It seems that the Chinese have now completed their three-day military encirclement of the island of Taiwan. Was it a dry run for the real thing? You know, the invasion of the island itself? Was this what they promised when they got their knickers in a bunch over the president of Taiwan visiting the United States? I'll take from their response that they (China) are not happy with all of the talk about the US assisting Taiwan with military assets and fortification of same in anticipation of a full-scale assault by the Chinese mainland. It's almost like the boy who cried wolf these days when it comes to China and their preoccupation with everything Taiwan. At some point, and maybe we're already here, the good folks in Taiwan and the people around the world who care about such things will just ignore whatever China says and does when they take to the waters of the Straits of Taiwan in a fit of bluster over whatever.
Did you see any of the coverage of that little French pissant, Macron, during his visit to China this past week? Protestors are burning down the City of Paris over revised retirement rules, and this little baguette Macron takes a delegation of French businessmen to China while Paris burns. On his departure following his visit, Macron said something about moving away from the US dollar, and he never pushed back one bit on Xi's claims on Taiwan. In fact, he said something about America being on its own when and where protecting Taiwan was involved. That had to be music to Xi's ears. I'm not sure the US would be so eager to run interference when China invades Taiwan were it not for the fact that the EU and other allies had our back. Now, I'm not so sure they do have our back. It is yet one more example where the United States has lost face on the global stage due to our having a senile, feckless, and woke old fool at the helm of our nation. The cat is out of the bag.
You wonder if Bumbles even knows where he is from day to day. The old fuck hasn't had a press conference in months if not years. His praetorian press may even yearn for the good old days when Bumbles had his list of people to call on and his cue cards at the ready when Bumbles took prearranged questions. In other words, even though he knew what questions were going to be asked, he still needed to read from the cue cards when giving his answer. Even then, his handlers limited the number of questions that he was willing to take to one, maybe two. These days, the trepidation on the face of his handlers when someone asks a question out of the blue is palpable. This is the leader of the free world? This is what passes for a Commander-in-Chief of the greatest nation on the face of the planet? It's no wonder that the rise of China is so worrisome to Americans who fear that having a demented president sitting in the Oval Office makes us more vulnerable, less powerful, less capable as an ally, more subject to ridicule, and less competitive as a nation in apparent decline.
Bumbles made a statement in the past week about his plans to run for the presidency in 2024 but has yet to make a formal announcement. Meanwhile, this clownish governor of California, Gavin Newsom, is running around the country giving speeches and sounding very much like a presidential candidate. Can you think of a bigger buffoon than Gavin Newsom running for the presidency? If he does for our country what he's done for California, we're fucking toast. People couldn't get out of California fast enough when the pandemic hit a couple of years back. You couldn't find a U-Haul if your life depended on it. Oh, but people vote for him regardless, his supporters say unabashedly. The illegal aliens vote for him because they know that without governmental assistance, they'd be better off back in Guatemala or whatever other shithole of a country they escaped from. The Leftists in Hollywood live behind 8-foot walls and have security up the wazoo, so they could care less. What nobody outside the Oval Office knows is how and when the Democrats plan to replace Bumbles with Gavin. And then, of course, there's what to do with Kamala Harris.
I mean, who wants more of what Bumbles Biden has given us? Raise your hands! And, how are we supposed to make sense of what we see happening to Donald J Trump? Is the prevailing thought inside the Democrat tent that the more indictments they bring against Trump, the less likely it is that he can win a general election? Are they thinking that no matter how ludicrous the charges are that it's really just the weight of the charges that will turn suburban moms away from a candidate with that much baggage? Have we learned nothing from the day that Trump came down the escalator and the Democrats declared all-out war and threatened from day one to impeach him? Have we learned nothing from the actions of the FBI and other intelligence agencies who got in bed with Hillary Clinton in order to bring down a duly elected president? This is just more of the same, folks. They're going to muddy him again with these indictments, but not so much that he won't win the primaries. He'll just be easier to beat in the general election, or so they think. It's Machiavelian, I tell you.
There was another senseless shooting this week. This fella went to work one morning and opened fire on his fellow employees minutes before the bank opened for business. He had apparently been informed previously that he was going to lose his job. I thought people got walked out the door when they got fired. Box up your shit, and the security guard will escort you out of the building. The shooter's pronouns were he/him. Does that tell us anything about his frame of mind? Maybe I'm dating myself, but I never put my preferred pronouns on my resume back in the day. Anyway, imagine the abject panic and fear around the conference room table as this guy whips out his AK-47 and starts spraying the room with bullets. Was he targeting specific individuals? Did he spare anyone in the room? It's a sad story, really. Sad in the sense that it had to come to this. Sad that people had to lose their lives when it could have been prevented. Why didn't he seek help? Why didn't his parents or friends see this coming and do something to head it off?
This apparently had less to do with guns and more to do with his mental health, which was clearly deteriorating by the minute. Like the tranny killer in the Christian school just weeks before this yesterday's killing, the killer allegedly had a bone to pick with his or her victims. None of it would have happened had either of these two killers resolved their differences in a way that didn't involve guns. Was the goal to inflict as much pain and/or death as possible? How do you hate someone so much that nothing short of ending their life satisfies your lust for killing in your deranged mind? You'd think we as a society would benefit from some sort of post-mortem in these kinds of cases. Unfortunately, that will never happen because they want you to stay focused on the narrative that guns kill people, and the fewer guns we own, the fewer victims we'd see. Killers will find a way to kill if killing is what they want to do. Let's get them the help they need before these kinds of things happen.
It's looking more and more like both the raid on Mar-a-Lago and the indictment of Donald J Trump were done at the request of the Biden Administration. Jim Jordan, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has now subpoenaed Fatso Bragg to appear before his committee so the American people can know all there is to know about how it came to pass that for the first time in American history, a former president of the United States has been indicted. Jordan will follow the breadcrumbs all the way to the White House if that is what it takes. A FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request has already produced records that Biden was behind and approved the raid on Mar-a-Lago. Bragg has now filed suit to stop Jordan's subpoena, but that will likely fail spectacularly since Congress has not only the right but the duty to perform its oversight duties when it comes to entities in the Judiciary who use federal funds in their prosecutorial roles. If justice is to be served here, Bragg will be both disbarred and prosecuted, and Biden will be impeached for using the power of the federal government to jail his likely political opponent in the 2024 presidential elections. Like I said, if there is a God.
I thought I saw something in my Twitter feed this morning about the EU falling in line with Macron's comments in China this past week about needing to distance themselves from the US and, maybe more importantly, the US dollar. I also saw something about Australia resolving some of its differences with China. What the fuck? Who isn't jumping on China's Belt and Road initiative? Is this the thanks we get for pouring billions of dollars into the shithole, Ukraine, to protect the countries in Europe from the ravages of Putin and the Wagner Group? I thought the Europeans cared about an ever-expanding Russian territory at the expense of one or more countries in the EU. Is it possible that the recent trove of American intelligence documents found on the internet exposing the corruption behind the Ukraine morass has our allies thinking twice about the motives of one or more countries involved? Or, worse yet, China has convinced the rest of the world that America is a country in decline, and they are planning accordingly. It's the new world order, don't you know.
I was telling the missus last night about the latest leak of intelligence materials posted to a gaming site called Discord. Don't quote me on the name of the gaming site. It was a pretty big deal as leaks go, and its effects were far-reaching. I think the materials were akin to a road map for the Ukrainian Spring Offensive against Russian forces on Ukrainian soil. It laid out in detail which countries would play a part, and it even speculated on end-game body counts for each of the participants. Here's the kicker: The missus hadn't a clue about any of it. She reads all of the liberal rags like the New York Times and certain sections of the Wall Street Journal, and she had seen nothing about the leak. What the hell is that all about? Everybody and anybody who needed to see the materials got to see the materials because they were readily available on the Internet. Why would these publications choose not to cover them? I think they are still looking for the leaker, or whatever they call people who post stolen state secrets to the internet these days. What do you suppose Russia is doing with these so-called materials? And, inquiring minds want to know. Is the Spring Offensive still on?
You know what else I'm seeing less of these days? I'm seeing fewer and fewer posts in my Twitter feed about what's going on in Ukraine. Something tells me that it has something to do with not giving one side or the other information about troop movements, casualty counts, and whatever else qualifies as intelligence on the ground. This isn't Elon Musks' decision. This must have something to do with a request by our government to put the kibosh on reports from various and sundry reporters on the ground in Ukraine. I'm tired of them trying to control what we hear, how much we know, and how we're supposed to feel about any of it. It's okay, I guess, that they sign off on what they want us to know when accounts of this and that get published in rags like the NYT and the Washington Post. I'm being facetious, of course. One thing they can't control are the voices of patriots like Colonel McGregor, who appears now and then on Tucker Carlson. In so many words, he says the Russians are beating the bejesus out of the Ukrainians. That probably explains why our government is working with Twitter to turn off the spigot of reporting from the field.
At what point does our country cut and run? Isn't that what Bumbles Biden and his cohorts do? Think Afghanistan. You can't keep throwing money and arms at a losing venture, can you? What sense does that make? Maybe the question now is, how do we save face when we stop supplying Ukraine with these things? What narratives will take shape in the media allowing the war hawks in Congress to step back from their insane and seemingly endless support for the war in Ukraine? The only question left now is how much Ukraine territory will be ceded to Russia when the dust finally settles. Someone should be asking the grifter, Zelensky, for an accounting of the billions of dollars we've sent to him and his oligarchs and how much of that bounty can be clawed back from banks and institutions across Europe. If we see Zelensky hanging from a rope when this is all over, it will be because the good people of Ukraine had the good sense to ask why so many of their countrymen had to die needlessly when they could have avoided it all by ceding territory sooner than they did. It's a reasonable question. Think Nuremberg.
I read an article last night about Tupperware. Tupperware was a $50 stock some five years ago. It closed yesterday at $1.52. The article said something about Tupperware going out of business. On one hand, this story is like so many other stories about stocks that have fallen on hard times in the last year or so. You hear a lot about the resiliency of the major indices like the NASDAQ and the S&P, but what they don't tell you is that only a handful of the Amazons and Apples of the world are what's holding up the indices. Tupperware was the go-to container before go-to containers became fashionable. These days, nobody pays full price for Tupperware when you can go to the Dollar Store and pay Dollar Store prices for the same product. Tupperware is still the standard in a world of knockoffs, so I'm grateful for its commitment to quality despite the costs and risks to its business for doing so. Is there anyone who doesn't have Tupperware in their kitchen? Here's hoping that some white knight will step in and restore Tupperware to its rightful place in the pantheon of great products that have graced our kitchens since Earl Tupper introduced his first bell-shaped container to the public in 1946.
It's amusing to me how some of these big box stores bend over backward on the diversity, equity, and inclusion bullshit. The missus and I were in Target the other day, and she pointed out the fact that all of the murals gracing the walls throughout the store were of black people in various and sundry poses. They were benign enough in that I saw no blowhorns, no raised fists, no black people shouting from rooftops, no one crying for social justice, and oddly enough, no pictures of white people. Oddly enough, my ass. This was by design. Somebody somewhere in the Target organization, most likely hired as a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) officer, decided that demographics be damned. The organization would push its DEI bullshite on the public no matter what. It mattered not a whit that the state and stores in which they plan to hang their murals have a black population that amounts to a pee hole in the snow, statistically speaking. I don't think I've ever seen a black person in this particular Target. And by the way, what about Asians? Where are their pictures? How about Indians, native-born or not? Forgetting the color of their skin, when do we get to celebrate the children in our society? Are they not the future?
I listen to this one particular person on progressive radio here and there just to get a sense as to the latest cultural and social injustices from her perspective. Lately, she's been making a lot of noise about what life will be like when white people are no longer in the majority in our country. Can you imagine? It almost sounds like a threat or a reckoning of sorts that awaits us. You know, like the white farmers in South Africa who fled their farms, fearing for their lives and the lives of their children when the blacks took power and descended on their properties in the dark of night, wielding machetes and carrying kerosene-soaked torches. You can hear the vengeance in her voice as she takes calls from like-minded vigilante wannabes. Somebody has been drumming some evil shit into her head since she was born, is what I'm thinking when I listen to her going off on this and that tangent. She's never in the "can't we all get along" camp, and it's always about exacting some form of social or racial comeuppance for her and her peeps living in so-called marginalized communities. I'm in the glass-half-full camp, so I'm having none of it. I don't think that's going to matter.
Every other day or so, I hear about one country or another developing some hypersonic weapon that can reach this or that destination. More often than not, that destination is the United States. I heard yesterday that Kim in North Korea now has a ballistic missile that can reach the United States. I'm no whiz when it comes to geography, so the first thing that I wanted to know when I heard that story was the relative proximity of North Korea to either the west coast or the east coast. I was willing to feel better about my long-term prospects for survival, knowing that I live on the coast which is basically out of reach when it comes to Kim and his particular form of craziness.
How silly am I? I'm also thinking that losing California in the process may not be such a bad thing after all. Did I really just say that? I don't think that the Democrats, assuming they are in power when shit hits the fan, politically speaking, would allow North Korea to take out a state that is the key to their political future. We would have to do something preemptively, and that portends bad things for the Hermit Kingdom. Kim knows that too, right? See how tenuous and potentially dangerous all of this missile talk is? Here's the bottom line: Kim is the least of our worries.
They finally caught up with the culprit responsible for leaking governmental secrets. He wasn't a spy, nor was he one of those guys wishing to drop a dime for ideological reasons, as far as anyone can tell. Some people think the suspect, Mr. Teixeira, is far too young and was unlikely to have access to the materials that he's been charged with leaking in light of his rank as a third-class airman in the Massachusetts Air National Guard. He has now been charged with espionage in a Federal Court in Boston, Massachusetts. When Bumbles Biden was asked by a reporter about the leaked materials, he shrugged it off as a "nothing burger."
I'm quite certain that our allies and enemies who have seen, and have quite possibly been implicated one way or another in the leaked materials, didn't think the leaked materials were a "nothing burger." It's just one more oddball response in a series of oddball responses from a bewildered and demented oddball of a president that leaves you wondering about lights on at the top of the stairs. And then you have Majorie Taylor Green, the Republican Congresswoman from Georgia, who is singing Mr. Teixeira's praises for getting the truth out to the American people about what the hell we've been doing in Ukraine and elsewhere during Bumble's first term. Make of it what you will.
Another bombshell of a revelation coming out of those leaked materials was that there were four spy balloons sent our way from China earlier this year, not just the one we all knew about that Biden allowed to traverse our country before giving his approval to have it shot down off the coast of North Carolina. Remember that bullshit? Oh, we can't shoot it down over Montana. We can't take a risk of having the remnants fall to earth and injure someone or something on the ground. How stupid do they think we are? Don't answer that.
So, they had the entire country following the one balloon in the news for the better part of a week that we all knew about because someone in Montana snapped a photograph of it when, in fact, there were three others that no one in our government was talking about. The kerfuffle in the headlines every night would have been fourfold if not more if the public knew about ALL the spy balloons directed by China to gather intelligence over the continental United States. If Bumbles allowed the one balloon to spy on us, he sure as hell allowed the other three to do the same thing. Where are the fucking impeachment hearings? Is this not treasonous behavior by our nation's Commander-in-Chief? I'm getting a little tired of asking that question.
There was ANOTHER train derailment yesterday near Moosewood Lake in Maine. This is in the wake of that killer fire in Texas this past week that killed 18,000 head of cattle. The aerial videos of the "accident" in Maine showed clouds of billowing black toxic smoke rising up from the scene and drifting across the sky towards the pristine waters of Moosehead Lake. This could be another East Palestine, Ohio, disaster in short order. You know, the one you never hear anything more about despite the fact that the residents of that small town are dying a slow but certain death due to the chemicals that poisoned their town a few months back after a train derailed in their town. Let me know when you start to understand that we're under attack on our own soil by God only knows who. Are we talking about Russians here? Have the Communist Chinese infiltrated our southern border? You know, the one that Bumbles and his administration don't bother even monitoring anymore. Worse yet, are we under attack by our own government? Is this how they express their disgust with those of us still unwilling to buy their electric cars and buy into their climate change bullshit? Make it make sense.
Did you happen to see the video of the mayhem on the streets of Chicago last night? I think this is the beginning of the end for that once-great city in the Mid West. If you thought you'd seen it all during Lori Lightfoot's tenure as mayor, you would be wrong. If what we saw last night in Chicago is any indication of what's to come once the new mayor of Chicago is sworn in, the city of Chicago is for some serious shit. It was well on its way to a lawless hellhole with Lightfoot in office. It's going to be a lawless hellhole on steroids when Johnson is sworn in. Did you see that clown talking about not giving his students a failing grade because he doesn't believe there is any such thing as a "failing" student? Keep it up, dickwad. Keep making the poor poorer, the destitute more destitute, the drug-addled even more drug-addled, the desperate youth even more desperate, and the city in which it all takes place even more lawless than it already is. If you think the departure of the four Walmarts in town is a fluke, keep doing what you're doing. Your city, our nation's once great city, will be but a hollowed-out shell of its former self in short order. Let the voters decide, my ass. I'm not sure this is what our Founders had in mind when they crafted our Constitution.
The world is falling apart, and Bumbles Biden is touring Ireland with his bagman of a son and their criminal entourage. Not that having him sitting in the Oval Office would make any difference because it wouldn't. What is it going to take to get that damn fool to stand at a podium for two minutes to answer a few questions? It has to be a terrifying prospect for his handlers. One that keeps them up at night, if I had to guess. You think our enemies don't see this? You think they aren't moving ahead with plans to take advantage of one of the greatest countries on the face of the earth while its leadership is fiddling and diddling away in a far-off land? Our country is, for all intents and purposes, in an undeclared war with Russia, seemingly unprepared for the devastation that the Chinese Communists are wanting to bring to our shores, and completely paralyzed and transfixed in the cultural trenches of our society by photos of a biological male pretending to be a female while posing in a tub of suds and holding up a once-iconic brand of one of America's many brands of beers. If this isn't a recipe for disaster, I don't know what is.