Saturda, June 7, 2025, has fallen upon us splay-legged with sunshine and muggy with clouds. 84 is Ashlandia’s rough temperature, depending on where you stand. It’s cooler by the creek in the park in the old trees’ shade. Today’s high will be in the low 90s, beginning a string of days with highs in the 90s. Looks like summer is doing a temperature check preparatory to taking the stage.
My wife remarked today, “How long will it be until some U.S. citizen will challenge a masked ICE gunman and get shot?” She thinks we’re due for another Kent State moment, when Ohio National Guard killed four demonstrators in the early 1970s. I agree with her point. Any time we have armed people being pressured by resistance, the chance for violence goes up. Wonder what oddsmakers are saying about it? I hope my wife’s fortune telling is wrong.
Today’s song come about from broodling — that is, brooding and noodling — about another novel underway. Sipping the first dark brown hot fluid this morning, I thought, “You gotta find a way for what you want to say.” I answered myself, “Yes, but do you know what you want to say?”
Bored with the exchange, The Neurons unleashed Oasis and their 1994 song, “Supersonic”, into the morning mental music stream. I recognized that they did it because there is a line which goes something like my thoughts. I didn’t do much more thinking about it at that point because Papi was urgently wrapping himself around my legs while purring like an old VW Beetle. I fed him and then he and I hit the backyard sunshine to take the day’s measure for a few minutes.
Stay safe and have the most solid day you can develop. Me, I’m in for more writing, more yardwork, more reading. It’s a rough life but it’s where I landed. Cheers
Did you see Trump’s fantasy spin involving himself, Lincoln, and Reagan?
It’s been out for a while so you probably have. I saw it again today and couldn’t stop thinking about it.
See, he has a painting of himself with Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln. Titled ‘Great American Patriots,’ illustrator and painter Dick Bobnick created this. Mr Bobnick describes his painting, “Three American presidents who changed American History for the better in the areas of race, taxation, religious liberty, military strength, international relations, the economy and morality.”
I’m going out on a limb and suggest that historians are going to disagree with Bobnick on his assessment of Trump. Many people already disagree with his conclusion that Trump changed history for the better in the areas of morality. Trump is an actual felon, convicted in a court. Been married several times and cheated on every wife. Trump lies and lies and lies and lies and lies, and is in the business of weaponizing the legal system to go after his enemies. This is not the epitome of ‘morality’.
Trump has no idea who Lincoln and Reagan are. He has no idea who he is. He has a warped and twisted vision that the three of them are cut from the same American fabric. He, an unchecked and unrepentant serial liar whose every action and word is tearing our nation apart, dares to compare himself with Abraham Lincoln, who worked so hard to re-unite the nation, a man with the nickname of honest Abe, renown for his honesty and integrity. Con Don Trump thinks he’s on par with Abraham Lincoln. My body splits with laughter just considering the insanity.
That’s just half of the comparison going on. The third person depicted is Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator. And rambling, word salad Donald Trump. Trump who said, “You look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me, it would have been so easy, and it’s not – as important as their lives are, nuclear is so powerful. My uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power, and that was 35 years ago. He would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right – who would of thought – but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners, now it used to be three – now it’s four- but when it was was three and even now I would have said, it’s all in the messenger fellas and it is fellas because you know they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so you know it’s going to take them about another 150 years but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators so and they, they just killed, they just killed us.” That’s from an August of 2016 speech. He’s gotten much worse in the years since.
And he compares himself to Lincoln and Reagan. It’s so surreally, magnificently — and Trumply — unreal.
Here we go. It’s Frida, June 6, 2025, memorable as D-Day in the big one, WW 2, which was finished with an atomic bang. Trump, meeting with the German Chancellor, gave us more cringespeak while discussing the war and D-Day.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz attempted to provide President Donald Trump with some positive reinforcement by crediting Americans for ending a war in Europe during his visit to the White House on June 5.
He reminded Trump their meeting was taking place a day before the 81st anniversary of D-Day, when Allied forces, most of them U.S. troops, invaded Normandy, France, marking the beginning of the end of World War II and the defeat of Nazi Germany.
We are having June 6th tomorrow, this is D-Day anniversary, when the Americans once ended a war in Europe,” Merz said.
“That was not a pleasant day for you,” Trump responded. “This was not a great day.”
WTF, PINO TACO? Guess that’s why the United States and most of the world remembers and honors D-Day. But not you, TACO, no. Honor, courage, and sacrifice are outside of your awareness. So is history. There’s no room in you for these things because your oversized ego pushes everything but greed, malice, and lies out.
Back to local deets. It’s cloudy but sunshine from somewhere still streams in. Current temperature at 11:30 is 80 F. We expect 91 today. Rain? No. Wildfire smoke from somewhere? Maybe. We’re tracking that shit. Gotta stay vigilant.
Today’s musical inspiration was incubated with highlights about the growing Musky TACO rift. Noted weird hair spokesperson Steve Bannon jumped in to urge PINO TACO to seize little Musky’s SpaceX toys. That’s in accordance with the Retribution Clause in the Constitution: “If a business pisses off the royal President, said President may seize assets from the pissee.” The pissee would be little Elon Reeve Musk, of course.
I was chuckling to myself, wondering if this is dinner theater to distract us from some other Musky TACO monstrosity but still had the bandwidth to mutter, “What fucking losers.” Hearing that from me, The Neurons jumped in with the 1994 Beck song, “Loser.” Remember 1994? Much better person in the White House back then. Not perfect but about 10,000 times better than the meatbag currently in the Oval Office.
Beck’s “Loser” was not about others. The weird rift reflects how low he felt at the time. But such logical distinctions escaped The Neurons, as it often does. So I have Beck performing “Loser” in the morning mental music stream, and I’m gifting it to you as a Frida special.
Time to kick it. Wishing you the best of days in always and all times. Coffee has been ingested. Here we go. Cheers
My fellow Terrans. Today is Thirstda, June 5, 2025 in Ashlandia. Some refer to the day as Thursday.
Summer is rising in Ashlandia. Ridiculously blue skies have us covered like a fine duvet. Sunshine is showing up early and staying late, putting on a bright display. Today’s high will be 82 F, about 8 degrees north of our present temperature. Humidity is not bad, and light winds lazily stir the leaves and brush past.
Papi is happy as a floof can be, chirping around the house in the early morning before floofsconcing into a nap nest. My wife isn’t as happy. Although her various ailments are easing, mosquitos are finding her irresistible. Their bites swell on her which is an annoyance. As for me, I’m embroiled in an agent hunt put my personal happiness and satisfaction both at 7.5 on the scale, where ten means it’s all awesome. That might just be coffee influencing my spirits.
The world continues its status as fascinating but complex. For example, forecasters and personnel at NOAA. We’d heard that DOGE took its usual cleaver to NOAA. Meteorologists vacated the business, taking early retirement, etc. But there was U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick at a Senate hearing telling us that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is “fully staffed” with weather forecasters. Meanwhile, a search for news updates about NOAA tell multiple other stories.
Those stories were all posted a day ago. Lutnick testified last week.
There’s always been news churn where politics encumber how facts are related. But vetting those facts with the TACO Regime is increasingly challenging. We do understand that. Trump is a dedicated liar and butchers facts. He’s willing to make up anything to make himself look good. The people he hired are right off the same cookie sheet.
Today’s music is by Billy Joel. “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is Joel’s musical recitation about facts and history culled from his lifetime. The song came out in 1989. From Wikipedia:
Joel conceived the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a 21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon who said “It’s a terrible time to be 21!”. Joel replied: “Yeah, I remember when I was 21 – I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y’know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful”. The friend replied: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties”. Joel retorted: “Wait a minute, didn’t you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?” Joel later said those headlines formed the basic framework for the song.
Looking further back in U.S. history, there’s been multiple awful times to be 21 years old, a truth known around the world. Some irony creeps in for someone from a privileged background, Sean Lennon, son of John Lennon, making that observation back in 1989.
The Neurons brought the song into the morning mental music stream after I read about actual wildfires in the United States and Canada. I feel for the people and animals in those places, as we’ve worried about California and Oregon wildfires for much of the last twenty years.
But the song is a good song for today, mostly because it strikes me that the TACO Regime is trying to fan the flames rather than fight the fires. As others note, it’s increasingly evident that TACO is tearing down the world order to make it easier for the wealthy to take over, rule, and make more money. Anyway, here is the song.
Got my coffee. Hope you have your beverage of choice. Let’s do the best that we can today. Here we go. Cheers
This is a reblog of Jill Dennison’s post, “Time To Stop Kidding Ourselves“. I tried using the Reblog button first, but that WordPress feature continues to fail for me. I ran down an article to answer fix it but the fix didn’t work. So here I am.
That aside, Ms Dennison points out that we’re already living under an authoritarian regime in the United States, and our behavior needs adjusted to face that fact.
The article is worth a read. Here’s a taste to push you over there.
Ithink it’s time to stop kidding ourselves. I am as guilty as any when I say things like “we are on a slippery slope leading to a dictatorship”, or “the Trump regime greatly resembles an authoritarian government.” No, folks, we’re not “on a path” to an authoritarian regime … we are already HERE. Most of us in this nation have zero representation in our federal government today – the only ones who truly do are those who are still foolishly applauding a dictatorship, who have somehow been convinced that it will make their lives better.
I recently came across a few articles published by the Open Dialog Foundation in Brussels about authoritarianism – what it is, how to survive it, and how to communicate with friends, co-workers, and family who have drunk too much of the Kool-Aid. I wanted to share the first one titled “Year One Under Authoritarianism; What to Expect?” with you – I think you’ll recognize many of the signs …
First up, PINO TACO is poisoning Americans, followed by American Resistance.
It’s not enough that the TACO Regime is encouraging people to avoid vaccinations, which is helping measles stage a deadly return. Now the inept and ignorant TACO Regime is POISONING OUR FOOD SUPPLY!!! Yes, deadly tomatoes are out there! IT’S ATTACK OF THE KILLER TOMATOES!!!
My confession: I don’t know if this salmonella outbreak can be attributed to the TACO Regime and the DOGE cuts. A look back through history shows that these outbreaks happen. But PINO TACO would not hesitate to hyperventilate with all caps and exclamations points were a Democrat POTUS. So I’m really just emulating TACO’s style.
Does a post like this help with civil discourse and problem solving? Hell, no. But when the GOTP and TACO Regime stops doing it and get serious, so will I.
Next, American Resistance! This was posted over on Mock Paper Scissors. WP still won’t permit me to properly reblog from them, so here’s my work-around. Summary: Masked gunman are trying to round people up. Without badges and insignia, they could be anybody.
This should give us a little lift to start our day. Make no mistake, if you get the mellow beach bums of San Diego to rise-up, anyone can rise-up.
The thing that worries me is that without badges or other identifying insignia, any crack-pot militia can start playing this game and rounding-up people in white vans and disappearing them, and vigilantes are not exactly known for rules. We need more of this to stop the Gestapo/ICE (and maybe the Proud Boys).
As much as I hate saying this, IF you are white use your white privilege if you see this happening: it’s your Superpower against these fascists/racists. Demand to see warrants signed by a judge, and don’t let them disappear people.
(Hat tip: Scissorhead Purplehead)
Remember to resist this and other un-American behavior on No Kings Day, June 14th.
Summer is pushing more blue sky and sunshine on us. Chastised clouds have slipped the area and the sun reigns supreme. 70 F at 11 AM, we’re anticipating…78 F as our high. Sweet to me.
Papi the butter butt floof loves this warm weather. He came in this morning. We shared a purrful visit, then he stuffed himself on kibble, wet food, treats, and water. Now he’s floofsconced in the vinca. Only his sweet ginger and white face is visible among the green leaves.
Today’s music arrived with a boost from my wife. I was listening to a video which played a few seconds of every Billboard weekly number one hit song in the United States from the beginning of 1960 to the end of 1969. This came to my attention via 1440’s deep dive into the history of rock and roll.
My wife came in as the video advanced through “These Boots Are Made for Walking”, “The Ballad of the Green Berets”, “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration”, “Good Lovin'”, and “Monday, Monday”.
“What year are you listening to?” she asked.
“Guess,” I replied.
She tried 1970, 1968, and then 1965. “1966,” I said. A little later, Bobbie Gentry sang, “Harper Valley PTA”.
My wife sang along and then said, “I love that song. But the very first record I ever wanted was “Society’s Child” by Janis Ian. I think I was thirteen. I asked for it for Christmas but I didn’t get it.”
I looked it up. “That came out in 1967.”
“How old was I then?”
“Ten.”
Anyway, The Neurons slipped “Society’s Child” into the morning mental music stream when I wasn’t paying attention. My wife thought the song had hit number one; I never told her that it didn’t break the top 10. Of course, bigotry and racism and it’s controversial topic of interracial dating kept it from getting airtime.
I’m at the coffee shop, my fix at hand. There was a line and a hold up. As I waited, the manager came around with my drink, along with the side of ice water which I always request. “Where do you want these, Michael?” she asked.
Laughing, I answered, “I can take them,” but she insisted on delivering them to my table for me.
Yesterday was a hot one, as they advertised. Today, Saturda, May 31, 2025, is expected to cool into the mid-80s. It’s 72 F and sunny now, and the clouds have ran away for grayer skies.
It’s May’s last day. Five months of 2025 are history. It’s been as chaotic as a Black Friday sale in the United States. As we spring into summer, I’m not enthused about what will come out of the Gold House, as Nan calls it. Her reasoning is spot on. It ssed to be the White House, but the present occupant, PINO TACO, is remaking it in the right’s craven, gold-worshipping image. They say that’s what the Bible says to do.
From Gold House, I crossed to Heart of Gold.My Neurons went onto a Neil Young kick. Soon they had “Old Man” playing in the morning mental music stream. The music faded for a while as I rambled through a litany of problems, stories, and challenges. Some were personal and narrowly defined from my novel-writing half of living. Thoughts about Mom’s health boiled in, and then came sympathy for a friend who is enduring a mess in his life. Prosaic matters like fixing the oven — the part has arrived — took over. Then there’s the ever-growing worries about the human rights, war, climate change, the nation, the world, and measles.
There are 1,088 confirmed measles cases in the U.S., up 42 from last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday. Texas, where the nation’s biggest outbreak raged during the late winter and spring, reported 10 additional cases this week for a total of 738.
The Neurons shot a gap to bring “Don’t Let It Get You Down” by Neil Young into the morning mental music stream. It’s a 1970 song which will probably get you down, because it makes you listen, think, and feel. I once heard a DJ say that Young announced this song by saying, “This song is guaranteed to bring you down. It’s called “Don’t Let It Get You Down”.” It was a song I preferred to hear with a glass of red wine, either overlooking a body of water at sunset, or in a dark room, alone.
Into the day I go, with a cuppa coffee to help me carry the load. Funny, but our existence is fleeting in the great rush of time and space, but sometimes it seems so long.
This reminder comes to you courtesy of Mock Paper Scissors. I tried reblogging it, but, WordPress. So here it is, with a link to them. Respect to them for the reminder, this felon is the leader of the former GOP, which is now the Greedy Old TACO Party, GOTP. The Trumplicans who were once Republicans sometimes weakly mew with indignation have certainly demonstrated that they are, like him, racist, greedy, unprincipled, with little regard for due process, the oaths they swore, or most of their constituents.
Corporate profits fall $118.1 billion in first quarter
Economy contracts at 0.2% rate in Q1 by all measures
WASHINGTON, May 29 (Reuters) – The number of Americans filing new applications for jobless benefits increased more than expected last week and the unemployment rate appeared to have picked up in May, suggesting layoffs were rising as tariffs cloud the economic outlook.
The report from the Labor Department on Thursday showed a surge in applications in Michigan last week, the nation’s motor vehicle assembly hub. The number of people collecting unemployment checks in mid-May was the largest in 3-1/2 years.
The dimming economic outlook was reinforced by other data showing corporate profits declining by the most in more than four years in the first quarter, pulled down by nonfinancial domestic industries.
A U.S. trade court on Wednesday blocked most of President Donald Trump’s tariffs from going into effect in a sweeping ruling that the president overstepped his authority. They were temporarily reinstated by a federal appeals court on Thursday, adding another layer of uncertainty over the economy.
“This is a sign that cracks are starting to form in the economy and that the outlook is deteriorating,” said Christopher Rupkey, chief economist at FWDBONDS. “There is nothing great about today’s jobless claims data and the jump in layoffs may be a harbinger of worse things to come.”
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 14,000 to a seasonally adjusted 240,000 for the week ended May 24, the Labor Department said. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 230,000 claims for the latest week.
They said Trump’s aggressive trade policy was making it harder for businesses to plan ahead, a sentiment echoed by a Conference Board survey on Thursday, which showed confidence among chief executive officers plummeting in the second quarter.
Meanwhile, as the economy begins to show the cracks all of us expected with TACO’s economic policies, Paul Krugman adds insights into how TACO’s malicious stoppering of foreign students at US colleges and universities will impact the economy.
My wife and I are co-authors of a widely used textbook on the principles of economics, which is revised on a three-year cycle. When a new edition comes out, I normally visit a number of schools that might adopt it, usually giving a big public talk, a smaller technical seminar, and spending some time with students and faculty. I enjoy it, by the way; there are a lot of good, interesting people in U.S. education, and not just in the high-prestige schools.
So it was that at one point I found myself visiting Texas Tech in Lubbock. Yes, it seemed pretty remote to someone who has spent almost his whole life in the Northeast Corridor, but as usual the overall experience was very positive. And it was also surprisingly cosmopolitan: there were students from many nations. I just checked the numbers, and currently 30 percent of Texas Tech’s graduate students are international.
So it is all across America. Our nation’s ability to attract foreigners to study here is one of our great strengths. Or maybe I should say was one of our strengths.
According to Politico, a cable from Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has directed U.S. embassies and consulates to halt all processing of visa applications from foreigners hoping to study in the United States. This is reportedly a temporary measure in preparation for a new system in which would-be students will be screened on the basis of their social media history. And you can be sure that the criteria for denying entry will go far beyond, you know, advocating terrorism. Probably asking “Why was Trump talking to West Point grads about trophy wives?” will be grounds for rejection.
This completely insane policy move is presumably a temper tantrum in response to a court’s rejection of the administration’s attempt to prevent Harvard from admitting foreign students, which was in turn a temper tantrum in response to Harvard’s rejection of demands from Trumpists that they be allowed to dictate the university’s hiring and curriculum.
The courts will probably reject this policy move, too, but I worry that Rubio and co. can put enough sand in the gears of the visa process to bring the entry of international students to a near halt. And even if they can’t, the clear message to students that they aren’t welcome (and may be arrested once here) will have an immensely chilling effect.
It’s hard to overstate the self-destructiveness of this move, and the war on higher education in general. This is madness even in purely economic terms.
We don’t often think of education as a major U.S. export, but it is. International students typically pay full tuition and require little or no financial aid. Here’s “education-related travel,” basically international students, compared with some other major U.S. exports:
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
And because international students typically pay full freight, while domestic students often don’t, foreign students help support higher education financially. That’s a big deal. My sense is that most people have no idea how important higher education is as a source of jobs, many of them middle-class. Here’s a comparison of employment in “Universities, colleges and professional schools” with employment in some politically prominent sectors:
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Apparently, Making America Great Again means destroying one of our most successful indust
Michael Seidel, writer 