Predictions 2/16/2025

I am going to predict the general destruction of large parts of the US government in the current situation.

Trump/Musk will not stop.  The courts wont stop them. Congressional Republicans wont stop them.  Congressional Democrats wont stop them.  And then, when the Trump/Musk shitstorm has passed, no one will be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

First, Elon Musk and his fanboys and Trump with his orders will continue to violate the law and the constitution.  They will fire people right and left, destroy Medicare and Medicaid, USAID, the Veterans Administration, DEI everywhere, the NIH, CDC, whole chunks of science, academia, etc.  Who will stop them?  Well, we can be sure that the Republicans in congress will not stop them and will not defend the constitution.  As for the Democrats, they could potentially hold up the budget and shut down the government.  But I dont think they will based on past experience. They are too weak and living in another universe.  And even if they do, my guess is that Trump and the Republican congress will just ignore them and declare their budget law.  Who would stop them?  The courts?  Not likely.  Not only is the federal appeals system filled with complete jokes like Cannon, any court ruling would be appealed to the Supreme Court and we all know what that means.  Nine tenths of the time the Supreme Court will support Trump and Musk even if they hide it a little bit to make things look a little better.  Then the stupid press will suck down on that and talk about how Trump/Musk did not get everything they wanted, even though, of course, they did get everything they wanted.  The DOJ and the FBI will attack any judge or officer who opposes this administration and people will be, in general, intimidated into compliance.  Then of course there will be new laws, and who will fix them or go against them?  Not the Democrats, that is for sure.  Not the Republicans.  Not the courts.   If there is even the slightest protests that can be looked at as violent: say someone blocks a freeway for more than an hour, then Trump will declare a military emergency and call out the national guard.  Besides, it is clear that Americans are too weak and dont really care enough about liberty to do anything.  Not only does that mean that the Federal govt is wildly disabled, but many state governments will be as well.  As I understand it, states like California will be thrown into chaos by a variety of actions that Trump/Musk will do.  Again, who will stop them?

Moving forward, again it is not at all clear who will attempt to fix this catastrophe. Even if there is a clean sweep of Congress and the White House in 4 years most things will not be fixable.  The Democrats dont have the will to  take a stand.  Remember Lejoy at the USPS?  Biden couldnt even get rid of one person, and he had cause.  Sure we can create a new USAID organization, maybe, or restore the NIH, maybe, but those research programs are already dead. The people in the third world are dead.  Ukraine is destroyed.  China will just pick up the slack.  The Iron Dome will not be built, not really, because it is not practical to do so except in very specific geographical areas like Washington and Mar-a-Lago.  It is far easier to destroy and fire people, then to get the budgets and hire people.  By that time, there will be hundreds more Trump lovers on the federal courts, and the Supreme Court will be refreshed with two or three more Alito/Kavanaugh clones.  Which means that any lawsuits will be dismissed.  

So its a fait accompli.  America will be diminished, the rich will get richer, silicon valley will do whatever the heck it wants with AI and so forth.  

Of course, I could be wrong.  The American people could stand up and the Republicans and the Democrats, working together, could remove Trump from office.  Do you think that is a realistic possibility?

Betar US

There is an organization called Betar which seems to be a reboot of an original revisionist Zionist organization that is working to identify those who were attacking universities in this country, supporting Hamas and its efforts to murder Jews.  Their mission, among others no doubt, is to identify those who were here on student visas and deport them.

We support this effort.

This may or may not be a relevant URL:

https://x.com/Betar_USA/status/1843832598742864353?mx=2

A quote from the above web link:

    "If you rape women and then shoot them, My G-d is not your G-d.”

One People, one Country, one Leader!

A work in progress based very loosely on the famous posters of Adolf Hitler.  The slogan in German of course sounds better.  One Volks, One Reich, One Fuhrer! 

A Pig Will Always be a Pig

I dont care what he does, he will always be a pig to me.  Instead of honoring Jimmy Carter for whom the flags were half mast, this dickless wonder has to have the flags raised.  He could have made the respect given Carter a part of his speech and been all the better for it.  But that would show class, and this asshole has none.  

Nothing has changed, he is still an asshole, but all the more dangerous for what he has learned over the last eight years.

If the people who had voted for Joe Biden in 2020 had voted for the Democrat in 2024, even if they were not all that sure about Kamala Harris, this would not be happening.   He could be the best president in the history of the world, and he won't be, and I will still think he is a pig, because he is.

People get the government they deserve, I have heard.  

Image by Midjourney

Karl Sims Opening at the Museum of Mathematics, NYC, 11/7/2024

Karl Sims had an art opening at the Museum of Mathematics in New York City on 11/7/2024.  

Also there was Pattie Maes, Ken Perlin, Trilby Schreiber, Tom Brigham and Jill Fraser.

Italian Whole Orange Cake Recipe

- preheat oven to 350 degrees

- make 3 fake eggs (1 tablespoon ground flax seed and 3 tablespoons water per egg)

- One whole orange, blended, organic, seeds removed

- One package Pane Degli Angeli (or 2.5 tsp backing powder and 1 tsp vanilla extract) 

- 1 1/8 cups sugar

- 1 3/4 cups all purpose flower

- 1/3 cup butter, softened

- 1/3 cup Greek yogurt plain (or sour cream)

- add 3 fake eggs

- possibly add salt, perhaps

- 1/4 oz sugar (why I dont know)

- grease a loaf pan or similar

- bake for 50-60 minutes

- allow to cool

- make orange glaze with powdered sugar, salt, orange zest and orange juice, simmer over low heat stirring constantly and apply to cake while the glaze is still fluid

This is not what the cake looks like, but it is what I could easily get from Midjourney.

Los Angeles Fires 2025

So far I know three people who have lost their houses in the Pacific Palisades fire.  I also know people in Mandeville Canyon, Altadena and Calabasas who have not lost their houses so far.

Image by Midjourney

Thank Goodness 2024 is Over

Wow, what a horrible year.  Just thinking about it makes me want to puke. The wars, the riots, the elections, the betrayals, the incompetence but most of all, the hypocrisy.  

The end of the American Republic.   

But lets look on the bright side of things.  The democrats are history, whatever comes in their place could not be as stupid, at least I hope not.  The Republicans had their brains eaten by Trump and his MAGA idiots, serves them right.   Now we get to all watch and see where the parts land.

Lets recall that when the corrupt Supreme Court installed W. Bush in the White House over the rightful winner of the election in 2000, it resulted in a war in Iraq at a tremendous cost of human misery and treasure.  And that is when Alito & Roberts were elevated to the Supreme Court.  Its "the fuck that keeps on fucking".  The past isnt over, it isnt even past yet.

The elected pig has already threatened Canada, Europe (Denmark/Greenland), Mexico and Panama with war.  

At least on Valerio street we are protected from the elements even if we are surrounded by Republicans.  

Image by Midjourney

2024 Election Postmortem

Since the Republicans won all three houses of the government, and have staffed the judiciary with their operatives, Democrats have engaged in a discussion of why they did so poorly.  Its taken a while for things to become clear, but there is enough evidence to move forward with provisional conclusions.

As an aside, the NY Times revealed today, five weeks after the election, that the Biden administration oversaw the greatest immigration surge in American history.  A little late in the day for a major tool of corporate America to come clean on this issue, dont you think?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/briefing/the-largest-immigration-surge-in-us-history.html

Why did they wait until now to say so?  Why did the Democrats not have a policy on both legal and illegal immigration beyond saying "Hey, we dont want to talk about it?"  Or "the Republicans are freaking out about something that is not a real issue".  But the reality turns out to be that immigration is objectively a very real, historical issue and yet I dont even know what Harris' position on immigration is.  The Republican strategy of blocking the bipartisan bill on this topic was clearly a winning move and the Democrats are, as always, too weak to do anything and the American electorate is not interested in the "We tried" excuse.

The Republicans also ran on the economy.  Here, again, the Democrats seem to have been in some weird reality of their own.  They kept saying "The economy is fine, dont worry" but everyone I know who isnt in the top 20% think that prices have exploded in the last few years.  Which makes the incumbent responsible for the economy no matter whose fault it is.

A third issue is the area of competence, or which party seems to listen and then get things done. It is extremely clear that the Republicans have acted with diligence and obstinacy to achieve their goals, from corrupting the judiciary, defunding the government to supporting any authoritarian dictatorship.  The Democrats, not so much.

There are several other explanations that have been proposed for this election result.  It is said that Biden abdicated too late in the cycle for voters to get to know Harris.  It is said that by the very structure of the situation that Harris was essentially the incumbent and that the electorate was in an anti-incumbent mood.  Both of these seem plausible to me although it is hard for me to gauge how important they were.  Beyond that, however, the democrats were clearly the party of identity politics even when that meant active discrimination against white candidates. So why was there any surprise when white people voted against democrats?    The democrats were the party of hard core transexual rights, even for minors without parental approval.  That seems like a really weird policy to me if you want to get people who are parents to vote for you.

The democrats were the party of abortion rights.  Now I keep reading that this is an important issue, and I think it is but clearly it did not win elections.  In fact between two women's issues: abortion and a woman candidate for president, it does not seem as though women turned out overwhelmingly for democrats.  Maybe I wont have to hear too much about the "women's vote" in the future?  No  I think I will be hearing about this for the rest of my life no matter what the data says.

The American people did not seem to object to a leader who is a pig, a rapist, a convicted felon and so forth. A traitor and a pig.  All that stuff from Republicans about "character" has been BS all along.  This is not a surprise to me, and I hope it is not a surprise to you either.   Nixon seems like a fine, outstanding scholar compared to Trump.

So maybe the Republican positions are egregious and offensive.  Maybe they are pandering to the worst segments of the American people.  Maybe so, but they seem to win elections and while there are lots of flaws in the American Republic, and voter suppression, and weirdnesses in the way red states organize and vote in order to keep the people from being able to affect their government, nevertheless they seem to have won, in the aggregate, this last election.

Like all good proto-fascist societies, America seems to be in that phase where only power matters.  That is what the Republicans have proven time and time again since November 2000 and the Democrats never seem to learn.  The democrats will not listen to Bernie Sanders, or to AOC, nor will they fight Trump and all his works.  The Democrats had a chance to make judicial term limits a reality but they could not be bothered.  They do not have the courage of their convictions.

So why bother to elect a democrat?  Whats the point?  They want to rule in some sort of fantasy past where America was semi-bi-partisan, a world very different from today.  So electing a democrat seems to me to have no raison d'etre.

Image courtesy of Midjourney

All the Ways the Democrats Failed

One benefit of the Trump victory is that it may finally put an end to the Democratic party.  I have been tired of these people for a long time now.  Here are just a few data points.

- It was Bill Clinton who started off the whole globalization thing with NAFTA

- The Democrats did nothing to prevent the right-to-work bullshit.

- When McConnell stole the supreme court slot of Merrick Garland, the Democrats did nothing.

- It was Obama who bailed out the financial system in a way that rewarded the rich and left the poor hanging.

- When Hilary ran, it was clear that she was only interested in helping her rich friends on Wall Street.  

- The only reason I voted for her was because Bernie Sanders, the independent I supported, asked all his supporters to vote for her.

- When subsidies and tax breaks destroyed the domestic visual effects industry, the Democrats did nothing. 

- In the first two years of the Biden Administration, we could have ended the filibuster and added term limits to the supreme court but the democrats could not be bothered.

- When the supreme court installed Bush Jr as president, Al Gore and the Democrats did not complain or in any way fight.  They just rolled over.

- When the Republicans were stuffing the supreme court with obviously unqualified candidates, the Democrats did nothing.

- Most of all, Merrick Garland refused to act to prosecute Donald Trump for his crimes.  

- There are many other issues, including climate change and health care.

The Democrats have proven time and time again they dont have the desire to fight for us.  They should have shut the government down rather than just kicked the can down the road.

Images courtesy of Midjourney