Month: January 2025

1.16.2025 – losses piled up and

losses piled up and
critics piled on Lions stayed
the same old Lions

They mocked him in the beginning, convinced he was going to end up just like the rest, run out of town within a few years because nothing had changed. Nothing ever changed in Detroit. Then they ripped him during the climb for being too honest, for being too out there, for having the nerve to think some sort of miraculous turnaround was coming, even as the losses piled up and the critics piled on and the Lions stayed the same old Lions.

From The genius of Dan Campbell: ‘He’s the best leader I’ve ever been around’ by Zak Keefer in the New York Times on Jan 15, 2025

1.14.2025 – extend alien ban

extend alien ban
scandalous bootlegging of
aliens through seaports

WOULD EXTEND ALIEN BAN

Secretary Davis Will See Coolidge on Canada and Mexico Quotas

Special to the New York Times

Washington. Jan. 13 – The application of the quota provisions of the Immigration law of 1924 to Canada, Mexico and Central and South America, which are at present excepted from the restrictive features of the statute, will soon be discussed with President Coolidge by Secretary of Labor Davis a view to the extension of the act through legislat1on.

Secretary Davis insists that the quota principle be extended to Canada and Latin America to suppress the scandalous bootlegging of aliens through seaports and over the Southern and
Northern borders. He would admit labor when needed but would have the President authorized to limit or prohibit immigration whenever the Secretary of Labor and the Secretary of Commerce found that unemployment in this country made such suspension of the law desirable.

100 years ago today in the New York Times.

We certainly have come a long way since then.

President Coolidge was never arrested.

And the aliens weren’t from Mars but coming from the same old places … Mexico and Canada.

1.13.2024 – intellectual

intellectual
acuity invented
that does not exist

Some speculate that Trump is engaging in Richard Nixon’s deliberately staged “madman” theory of intimidating people into accepting his terms, whatever those might be. Still others wonder if it’s all performative to keep his masses entertained with the show. His grandiosity is certainly a constant expression of his malignant narcissism. Attributing his atavisms of imperialism and blunt-force tariffs to a thought through theoretical exercise to return to the 19th century invents an intellectual acuity that does not exist.

From the article, “Donald Trump isn’t even in office yet and silly season has already begun” by Sidney Blumenthal in The Guardian.

Mr. Blumenthal’s mastery of multi syllable words must be saluted.

I also like the idea that adding Greenland and Canada will add multiple, more likely Democratic Party based, states with their Senators and Representatives to Congress.

Maybe once the GOP figures that out, they will be as excited about adding these new states as they are about adding the States of DC and Puerto Rico.

On the whole, how did this guy end up President.

As Mr. Mencken said in his book, In Defense of Women in 1918, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

1.12.2024 – hatred and attack

hatred and attack
part of man’s civic virtues
his mind is made up

Lacking the cerebral faculty of creating new public ideologies, as a fanatic has developed his unusual capacity for adapting those of others.

Being self-taught, his mental processes are mysterious; he is missionary-minded; his thinking is emotional, his conclusions material.

He has been studious with strange results: he says he regards liberalism as a form of tyranny, hatred and attack as part of man’s civic virtues, and equality of men as immoral and against nature.

Since he is a concentrated, introspective dogmatist, he is uninformed by exterior criticism.

On the other hand, he is a natural and masterly advertiser, a phenomenal propagandist within his limits, the greatest mob orator in German annals, and one of the most inventive organizers in European history.

He believes in intolerance as a pragmatic principle.

He accepts violence as a detail of state, he says mercy is not his affair with men, yet he is kind to dumb animals.

His moods change often, his opinions never.

Since the age of twenty, they have been mainly anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, anti-suffrage, and Pan-German.

He has a fine library of six thousand volumes, yet he never reads; books would do him no good—his mind is made up.

From FUHRER by Janet Flanner. Part III of a three part profile in the New Yorker Magazine, March 14, 1936.

I leave the comparisons and any conclusions to the reader.

I am holding up the mirror and the reader can see what they want to see.