So God Made a Dictator The latest Lincoln Project advertisement is a real eye-opener. Its a play off of Donald Trump’s allusions to the notion that God made Trump and that this evangelically appealing narrative is that Trump is doing God’s work by standing up for issues like tighter abortion standards and tighter immigration standards. Of course, as one might expect, Trump is simply too much of a pragmatist and transactional operator to stand by…
Economic Optimism I watch so many movies about the wars of the 20th Century that I find myself wondering what it must be like to be facing the world with nothing in your pocket and no particular prospects for things getting better soon. The two movies I watched yesterday were of this sort. The first was a real D-list movie called Air Strike. This was a 2018 film that was made in China and represents…
SCOTUS v. POTUS There is a great deal of dust in the air right now around Donald Trump and his efforts to run for President for a third time. We all recognize how divided our country is at this moment in history. I wish I could understand why we are so galvanized in our respective positions because it is very hard to find an easy basis for the divide. Historically, I would argue that politics…
Labeling I just had one of my increasingly infrequent text sessions with my two deeply red Republican motorcycle buddies. It started as a circulation of a film clip about a young woman who complained about having to share a locker room with a 6’4” swimmer with full male genitalia who chose to identify as a woman and wasw therefore on her swim team. My reaction to it was “big deal”, which was to say that…
The Price for Being American As someone who grew up in my youth in Latin America, I always knew there was a price to being an American. We were the “Ugly Americans” in the region, which I took to mean that besides being crass and perhaps too uncaring, we were also more prosperous and not ashamed to display that. When I moved to Italy during my high school days, there was a lingering taint of…
The Ripple In The Pond This morning I was watching CBS Sunday Morning, which we believe is the best of the Sunday morning news magazine shows. They are interviewing Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, the guy who had to fill the very big shoes of Steve Jobs a dozen years ago. He has presided over a 9X growth of Apple to being a $3 Trillion company, the largest company in the world. That means…
Kennedy Gone Mad I just watched a YouTube video of a debunking of an interview by Joe Rogan of RFK Jr.. It was a great reminder of what I respect and don’t respect in human thinking. It has long been a head-scratcher for me when you hear MAGA people denigrate liberals for being over-educated elitists. I was raised to believe that education was not just a good thing, it was a necessary thing and a…
Babbitt Today we went to the La Jolla Playhouse to see another play on our season subscription. The Playhouse put the play on in its largest theater, presumably because the starring role was held by Matthew Broderick, the actor that brought us first War Games and then, his most famous role in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Since his fame in the 80’s, Broderick has done some other notable work like in Mel Brooks’ The Producers,…
Ignoring Reality Last night I watched the third Republican Debate. The issues in any of these debates revolve around a combination of social policies, global defense policies and economic policies. Everyone in politics is pretty clear that social and defense policies can stir people up, but nothing gets them more riled up than economic policies. It is fair to say that Republicans have always (at lest since WWII, which is the timeframe I can at…
Portend It’s a good day in America today. Any day when Americans come to their senses and vote for what they want and believe will make their country a place better suited to the life they want, is a good day. Yesterday was an off-off year election which had no federal elections, but which had many telltale state and local elections that serve to test the temperature of the populace open critical issues and political…