Archives for January 2025

Thursday, January 2, 2025

If you’ve read this far in this post you may have noticed two things:

I’ve started a new numbering system,

The title has the word – rexolutions.

I started writing my screeds when the orange one took office the first time and I counted the days. Then Biden won so I started afresh. I can’t count the days again on this guy. I just started from the beginning of the year – screw it. It’s going to be horrible. How horrible is the only question. this leads to the second thing, my new word – rexolutions. I meant to type resolutions, but that didn’t happen. I was going to change it but again – screw it. Besides rexolutions has a nice rebel ring to it. Maybe it’s rev, maybe it rex. I like it.

Okay, where was I? New years – ah yes. We celebrated in London. That is to say we celebrated at 7 pm EST. Watched their fireworks, and went to bed. There was no discussion about staying up, or setting an alarm. The grandkids are here, or were here, and that’s enough to drive one – to bed. To sleep. Perchance, to review the aches and the exhaustion. We loved it, but egads, they wear you out. How exactly, is hard to say, but they do it.

The trouble in New Orleans with a guy deliberately plowing into a bunch of folks on Bourbon Street was first called a terrorist attack, then not (“oh, must be a white guy.”), then back to terrorist attack with a photo (black guy.) We seem not to be able to solve the most obvious of problems. With the new administration that will get worse. How much worse – again – is the only question.

There is, or has been, a cycle to our collective cultural stupidity. Most of the time we’ve been led by people who don’t really know or should I say identify the underlying problem. Instead, they believe the rhetoric they’ve spouted to get elected. We used to at least agree that there was a problem and identify it. The ways to solve it were varied and we disagreed on how to do it. Now? Ha. We are going to see a bunch of not-so-dimwits, attack things that aren’t real. Some think it’s a smokescreen for “their real agenda.” Now that might be partially true. Or perhaps there are certain things they really care about and the rest they are willing to let go to hell. It’s hard to say exactly. Probably a mixed bag of badness. Regardless, it ain’t gonna help you or me, and it ain’t helpin’ it’s making the situation worse. More on this in the next 1,460 days. 

We watched the college football playoffs. Weird how dominant one team can be over another when both teams were thought to be so near the top. My favorite play was when the Arizona guard #77 picked up his fullback, who had been stopped cold, and literally flung him over his own body and put said fullback and football across the goal line.

After that we watched a compilation of inductees into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Wow, mostly old men with long hair playing guitar. I was happy to see Peter Frampton could still play, despite having some muscle disease. I learned about bands I kind of knew of but never really listened to during their heyday. Then the HipHop guys and gal took over. I like the beat of hiphop, but the rest? Eh. They seem angry, but they want your participation and approval. They want to act like they’re poor, and they were, but now? They’re at least millionaires. And Mary J, that outfit? Maybe 30 or 40 years ago, not now.

I was disappointed that they mentioned others inducted and showed John Mayal’s pic and that was it. What? You couldn’t get Eric Clapton to play? Come on.

Thursday, December 26, 2024

The President of the NCAA has stated that there are 510,000 NCAA athletes and that less than ten are transgender. That’s .00196078431% if I take the high side of the numbers suggested (i.e. 10). 

Listening to Senators Hawley and Kennedy question NCAA President Baker was the typical right wing attack. Rather than letting Baker explain his position they wanted to put words in his mouth and try and force him to admit to something he never said. 

Basically, Baker said the NCAA has followed court decisions on the question of trans athletes and Hawley et al accused Baker and the NCAA of not taking responsibility. Baker said every time the issue has come before a judge the issue has been decided in favor of participation. 

Puppy killer Kristi Noem has taken what some would say is bold swift action by banning transgender athletes from competing in her state of South Dakota. Why has a trans athlete not challenged her in court? Well, the answer is simple. There are no trans athletes in South Dakota. 

So why are Senators Hawley and Kennedy so invested in a situation that rarely happens, or in the case of South Dakota non-existent? 

Well, okay, we can talk about the few cases there are, and there is merit to the argument in those cases, but what happens when a case has no merit and these elected officials go ape crazy over them?

It seems many of the elected right wing politicians get excited and spend a lot of their time on low percentage or non-existent problems and no time on problems that affect many of us.

It will get worse when the new administration comes in. Fueled by false hypothesizes and perceptions devoid of fact these Don Quixotes will go off tilting at windmills that they and their partisan hacks have created. We can talk about the whys if we like, but it is a useless pursuit in that there is no reasons to do so. Would a Josh Hawley or Louisiana’s Kennedy change their minds? Why no of course not. Why take a position based on fact or that would solve a non-existent problem? In fact, why work on real problems when you can gin up more coverage by screaming about non-existent BS?

Okay, there are some situations that “we” may agree were not solved in the best way possible. But is that what a U.S. senator should be working on? How does continually interrupting the NCAA President and claiming stupid stuff change anything?

But this is tiny compared to what I fear is coming. I’m afraid we’ll see plans put into action based on nothing. I remember watching Shoah. The 1985 French documentary about the Holocaust. The director gathered whomever he could that had been part of the Holocaust to document their memories about it. One scholar pointed out that Hitler really needed to add little to the cultural prejudice that had been handed down for generations against the Jews to approve the extermination of them. In fact, he did little more than use approve the term “final solution.” The rest he left up to his sadistic underlings. 

What term will a Ron DeSantis of a Josh Hawley or a Steven Miller use to approve some heinous sponsored state approved crime against humanity? “Deconstructing the Administrative State” is their term for destroying the government. Not totally, just the parts that help people. Why do we need that? Musk claims he will cut two trillion in government spending. That’s 2/5s of the government annual spending. Could it be done? Not really, but if it is even attempted the country we live in will be radically changed. Aside from creating a depression that will make the 1930s look like child’s play and plunging the world into a financial crisis that will take decades to recover from I don’t see much of a problem. 

The sadistic underlings of the new administration have announced their intention to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, and Obamacare. They’ve announced a plan to strip the government of people who know what they are doing and replace them with fools. 

It’s not the windmills that are there or might be there that concern me as much as the ones that aren’t, and never have been. Along with machinations laid out in various right wing media and literature that could destroy the economic world we know and the democratic government that our founders created.

But then maybe repeatedly showing pictures of Mussolini hanging by his heels in the town square will be a deterrent. Maybe, when Bobby Kennedy gets rid of vaccines and starts multiple global pandemics people will think, “Hey, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea?” I don’t know. We’ll see. Unfortunately.