on the assumption president is rational … admit have my doubts
We must therefore prepare for the following possibility: That Mark Carney was right, and this relationship will remain altered, regardless of who occupies the White House.
No one is coming to save us. Our response must take these facts into account if it is to be effective and sustainable in the long term. While it is entirely understandable that tempers are running high and that a majority of our fellow citizens are feeling a strong desire for revenge, a response based on retaliatory tariffs will not take long to rebound to our collective detriment.
Let us look at this purely objectively: This response assumes that Mr. Trump, when backed into a corner by any damage arising from countertariffs, will call off the tariff threat in order to save face before, or soon after, the midterm elections. In short, it is based on the assumption that the U.S. President is a rational actor – something I must admit I have my doubts about.
From the opinion piece, Canadians can’t assume the next U.S. president will drop tariffs by Daniel Dufort in the Toronto The Globe and Mail (Ontario Edition) 2 Sep 2026.
In short, it is based on the assumption that the U.S. President is a rational actor
– something I must admit I have my doubts about.
One more time.
Something I must admit I have my doubts about.
What is the word I am thinking of here … what is that word?
Understatment?
I feel using the word understatement is an understatement.
let’s be clear it’s not about house or rules any HOA would make
It is NOT about the house.
It is what the house stands, well, stood for.
There are places around the world that most folks feel better knowing both these places are and that these places are protected.
I think there was, for a large part, a global sigh of dismay when the Cathedral of Notre Dame burned down.
I would count the White House where the President of the United States has lived since the John Adams moved in 1800.
Yes the place has been renovated, added on to, rebuilt from the inside out and even burned down.
But at its core, in a country where anybody, it was said, could grow up to be President, it was where the President lived.
Where Ronald Reagan, JFK, Ike, FDR, Teddy and old Abe himself all lived.
It’s where Thomas Jefferson once served ice cream.
That house stood for something.
It said to the occupant that they were temmporary.
That holding the office and living in that house was a trust that came with the job.
It was implied that who ever lived there would work for all American’s to make America better by the time they moved out than it had been when they moved in.
That’s what that house …
That’s what living in that house stood for.
Well, maybe anybody could grow up to be President, but I think we have proved that having just anybody doesn’t work.
So the Supreme Court says the National Trust for Historic Preservation has no standing is saying what should and should not be allowed in the way of White House Renovation.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation has no standing when the most recognizable home in America gets an addition that any HOA would have over ruled anywhere else.
You know what I mean?
Any HOA Board of beer drinking neighbors would have made a better and quicker decision that the group sitting in the Supreme Court Building.
And ONCE AGAIN, here is the real tradgedy.
Five of nine members of the Supreme Court ruled against the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
And when they made their ruling, they knew, in their hearts, in the F. Scott Fitzgerald world where it is always 3 a.m., they know they made the wrong ruling for the wrong reason for the wrong feller at the wrong time.
They knew it.
They know it.
And I will say this.
If it wasn’t for the hatred in their hearts for anything opposition, I would bet that 99% of American’s don’t like this either.
They know it.
And still, it goes on.
The trick of this administration has always been taking the level of offense to the next level so that earlier levels of offense pale in comparision.
But we think each day, now we have reached the limit.
And each day, we find, there are no limits.
As former President Obama said once about the birth certificate nonsense, “remember when we thought that was as crazy as he could get.”
I am sick about this and sick about what it stands for as a measure of how far we have fallen away.
I am sick, that as a measure of what was destroyed by those people, it could turn out to be a half way mark.
North Front of the White House at the time of Lincoln’s inauguration. Iron fences and railings control public access to the grounds. The graveled walk, set in a flat-rolled lawn, encircles the Pierre Jean David dAngers statue of Thomas Jefferson, placed there by President James K. Polk in 1847 and since 1874 in Statuary Hall in the Capitol. To the right of the house barely can be seen the Conservatory, which was built atop the west terrace in the later 1850s and was filled with tubbed camellias and fruit trees.
these are the days of miracle and wonder and don’t cry baby, don’t …
Adapted from the refrain of the Paul Simon song, The Boy in the Bubble that goes:
These are the days of miracle and wonder This is the long distance call The way the camera follows us in slo-mo The way we look to us all The way we look to a distant constellation That’s dying in a corner of the sky These are the days of miracle and wonder And don’t cry, baby, don’t cry Don’t cry
The song came out 40 years and has the verse about:
It’s a turn-around jump shot It’s everybody jump start It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts Medicine is magical and magical is art Think of the boy in the bubble And the baby with the baboon heart
And I believe These are the days of lasers in the jungle Lasers in the jungle somewhere Staccato signals of constant information A loose affiliation of millionaires And billionaires and baby
Staccato signals of constant information.
1st meal in new pad …
I spent the weekend up in the State of Ohio (and such a state that State is in … as I understand it most of the folks who live there CANNOT spell OHIO unless someone else first gives them the O and the H) moving one of my kids from one place to another place.
I left on Friday with a backpack with some clothes for three days, my iPhone and my credit card.
I flew.
I ubered.
I uhauled.
I stayed overnight.
I ate.
I got rides from available family when I could.
I shopped.
Didn’t sleep for three days it seemed.
Hands are swollen from lifting and toting but I survived and kid survivied.
I handed that credit card over when I had too.
Read the credit card off when I had too.
Started services.
Stopped services.
So long as everything showed that magic word, approved!
All I had was a backpack, an iPhone and a credit card.
Some numbers and a connection.
Staccato signals of constant information.
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry, baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry
Even my enemies will say no one can pack a uhaul the way I can pack a uhaul.
two bridges across river one closed for repairs other for painting
Education a Failure
The minor stupidities of my world dominate that world— as when
with two bridges across the river and one closed for repairs the other also
will be closed by the authorities for painting! But then there is heaven
and the ideal state closed also before the aspiring soul. I had rather
watch a cat threading a hedge with another sitting by while the bird
screams overhead athrash in the cover of the low branches.
As published in The Collected Later Poems of William Carlos Williams by William Carlos Williams (James Laughlin: Norfolk, Connecticut, 1944).
According to Wikipedia, “William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism. His Spring and All (1923) was written in the wake of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). In his five-volume poem Paterson (1946–1958), he took Paterson, New Jersey as “my ‘case’ to work up. It called for a poetry such as I did not know, it was my duty to discover or make such a context on the ‘thought.'” Some of his best-known poems, “This Is Just to Say” and “The Red Wheelbarrow”, are reflections on the everyday. Other poems reflect the influence of the visual arts. He, in turn, influenced the visual arts; his poem “The Great Figure” inspired the painting I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold by Charles Demuth. Williams was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962).”
The Great Figure
By William Carlos Williams Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.
rigors the people undergo justified in concrete achievement
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
‘While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
From the essay, Politics and the English Language as published in Inside the Whale and other essays by George Orwell (This selection first published in Penguin Books as Selected Essays 1957).
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.
No kidding.
How is our current situation explained?
While freely conceding that the American régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the American people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.
