Locator: 48751ARCHIVES.
71 days.
I hope every Republican politician in the federal government has this hanging on his/her wall:
From Yahoo!Finance, and this is just the tip of the iceberg, as they say:
January 27, 2017 - February 21, 2020, the first three years of Trump's presidency, from inauguration to just before the Covid lockdown:
- DJIA: 44% appreciation
- S&P 500: 49% appreciation
- NASDAQ: 72% appreciation
Whew! At least once a day since November 5th, I've felt a sense of relief knowing that Kamala Harris won't be the next president. It's not so much politics one way or the other -- it's her lack of gravitas. And her inability to express a thought in the active tense.
Yellow River. Link here. Les années bonheur. The happy years. I'm still convinced I'm right about this song, regardless of what has been publicly said. LOL. I bet my father-in-law (RIP) would have agreed. The back story. Written in Leeds, England. I've spent a lot of time in Leeds. Again, more memories. Another beautiful woman.
Riots: the fact that there was not one riot in any blue city this past week speaks volumes. Especially when the blue cities have defunded their police departments.
Jesse Watters: link here.
Also must watch: Biden and Harris congratulating "Hitler." And inviting "Hitler" to the White House. LOL. CTHAGOD called out. The uneducated meme. Turns out reproductive rights was not the #1 issue.
Also note from which "network" Megyn Kelly is broadcasting. If I were a long-haul trucker I would "subscribe" to that "network."
$1 billion campaign, 107 days, $20 million in debt at the end.
Think about that. There's no way anyone could audit / follow $1 billion
in small bills over 107 days. A lot of cash was skimmed off the top. If
you donated $100 or less to the Harris campaign, you can assume some
grifter used it for a three-martini lunch. And most of those grifters
were slime balls. And now you're on some Democratic mailing list.
Cabinet: everyone is following contenders for the cabinet. Trump is not waiting. He will have six department czars and 100 executive orders on January 21, 2025. The czars and executive orders will be the real story. My hunch: at some point, JD Vance will take the Cabinet meetings for Trump.
Tulsi Gabbard: time to re-read the wiki entry.
Kari Lake:
if there's any possibility of a stolen election (and, of course, there
isn't), Donald Trump can make it "right" in a NY minute. Make her the
"Voting Czar." And pay her big bucks to do the job right. If not, that
speaks volumes.
Big losers with this election:
- EU (particularly Germany), China, Taiwan, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, Mexico (see below); Rachel Maddow; undocumented visitors with a parking ticket or worse; faux environmentalists, John Podesta;
- counterintuitively, NATO could see new lease on life. Musk / Trump have a great idea and it just might float.
- my hunch: Trump / Musk will give the EU, NATO, and Zelensky an ultimatum
- I'll be disappointed if he doesn't
- note that within hours of Trump's victory
- Biden's administration rushing to send embargoed arms to Zelensky; and,
- Zelensky launches largest drone attack on Moscow to date; forces Moscow to shut down two airports.
- in the balance? Putin. I think he will be a loser following this US election but I am likely going to be proven wrong.
- biggest winners: Israel, the US., neocons (?);
Mexico, Musk, Trump, and all that jazz: link here.
Migration: starting this weekend, every undocumented immigrant with a parking ticker or a court date is headed for a sanctuary city.
East of the Mississippi they're headed for NYC; west of the Mississippi they're headed for Denver, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. As for those in Texas, they can't get out of state fast enough. Heck, they will buy their own bus tickets and not wait for bus transportation paid for by the state. LOL.
Sotomayor is not going anywhere: The WSJ. But now "they "want Biden to step down for his last two months, making Kamala Harris the first woman president of the United States. Like Dr Jill Biden will let that happen. LOL.
Wow, most sexist SNL monologue ever? Link here. This was the advice from a Democratic strategist:
“All right, ladies [Hillary and Kamala] you’re 0 and 2 against this guy [Trump].
Ladies, enough with the pantsuit, OK? It’s not working. Stop trying to have respect for yourselves. You don’t win the office on policy. You got to whore it up a little. I’m not saying go full Hooters, but find the happy medium between Applebee’s and ‘your dad didn’t stick around.
You all know how to get a free drink. I know a lot of ugly women — feminists, I mean — don’t want to hear this message. But just tease them a little bit. Make a farmer feel he’s got a shot. Swing a state over a little bit.”
Yes, not taken out of context. Re-printed just as The New York Times reported it. And The New York Times loved it.
Investing. New York State Teachers' Retirement System -- link here to Barron's:
- in: Palantir, Dell
- trimmed: Walmart, T-Mobile
- Walmart: has gained 54% in the five nine months of 2024; so far in the 4th quarter, WMT is up 5%.
And then look at this:
T-Mobile reported strong earnings in its latest quarter. T-Mobile will partner with OpenAI to build an artificial-intelligence platform, called IntentCX.
The platform will harvest data on customer interactions from subscribers who use T-Mobile’s T-Life app, which combines services such as bill management, and smartwatch integration.
"Harvest data" -- new euphemism for "spy on." LOL.
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The Book Page
Released November 5, 2024. At only 336 pages it's a big light. I'll check it out at Barnes and Noble later today.
Biography of Johnny Carson. I'm not at all interested but it needs to be noted.
The big three at the time: Johnny Carson, Hugh Hefner, and Frank Sinatra.
I'm glad I've seen the Amazon Prime documentary on Hugh Hefner -- if it's not the best documentary of Hefner, I would like to know what others consider better. Wikipedia.
I was fortunate enough to spend my coming of age years in Los Angeles and much of that time in/near West Hollywood. I may have been there at the height of Hollywood's success -- maybe a few years late. By the time I got there, southern California had matured, and it was probably a good time for me. Had I been been there ten years earlier (1967 - 1971) I probably would have turned out a whole lot different.
Wow, those four years in South Pasadena were incredible. First store where my southern California roommate took me: Trader Joe's.
Best places for a young man to live in those days: high-end apartment complex with exquisite swimming pools. Most of the time, 90% women and few of them swimming. But I digress. Great memories.
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The Book Page
Richard Dawkins, The Genetic Book of the Dead, 2024. Enjoyable but not great. Nice book for the beach, or on the deck at one of those southern California swimming pools mentioned above. At Amazon. I'm going back through it for the second time. Lots of pearls. One of my favorite sections: turtles and tortoises. Still an enigma for cladists and taxonomy based on phyla. On the continuum, Richard Dawkins is more of a classicist rather than a cladist.
I have fond memories of seeing the Galapagos tortoises -- decades ago; while serving in the US Air Force.
Richard
Dawkins spends a fair amount of time writing about the tortoises in his
new book. One of my more terrifying (?) experiences while on the
Galapagos? Waking up one night to see this crawling across my room. The
one I saw was only about ten inches long.
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The Book Page
I haven't made much headway in Colossus since starting it some weeks ago.
Early notes here. And a brief note here.
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The Book Page
History
of India: reading two books now (completed one; will re-read; in the
middle of the second book on the "Raj." Am considering a third book just
published on the religions of India prior to the Islamic period.
It's amazing how little one really has to read on a brand new subject to be brought up to speed. Two months ago I knew nothing about India; today, I can actually hold my own in a conversation with Indian friends.
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The Sports Page
Philadelphia Eagles at Dallas, late afternoon today.
Not interested in the NASCAR championship today but will probably check in on the race periodically. At Phoenex. Blaney, Byron, Logano, and Reddick, if I recall correctly. Except for Logano (starting among the top five) all the rest are starting mid- to back-of-the-pack.
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The Garden Page
My big-leaf plants are doing great!
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The Sound Page
Soft idling in the background -- love it -- a Harley-Davidson. Soft, quiet, romantic, nostalgic. I remember the first time I ever set foot on a military base -- Air Force -- overseas -- saw many active duty men working on their cars, their motorcycles.
It was then I knew what I wanted to do in life. I followed my dream. And what a life.
Today, on the balcony of my sort-of upscale apartment (my wife would disagree with that description) I'm reliving those memories. I have way more money now than I did then, but I'm having a whole lot less excitement. No complaints. It's interesting. I remember all the good times; don't remember much of the bad times.
I don't recall "working" much. Both medicine and the military are a "calling," not work. Some folks might understand; most won't.
I remember how incredibly anxiety-producing "working" in a military emergency room overseas was.
Every military physician -- regardless of specialty -- had to cover / "work" their emergency room shifts in rotation with all other physicians. I guess, we occasionally let psychiatrists avoid that requirement, but everyone else had their emergency room shifts.
Most hospitals I worked in during my first twenty years in the USAF were smaller hospitals with maybe twenty physicians, meaning we had one or two 24-hour shifts each month. That's the closest I came to calling what I did "work."
But that lasted only about ten minutes. Once I started my shift, it was fine -- and it felt like a "calling." Every ten to fifteen minutes I had a new patient -- and over each or so, the exam rooms and treatment rooms filled up so that I was attending to not less than half a dozen patients, newborns to an occasional senior. Mostly young children and young adults. Wow, it was "hard." Only a few people ever get to experience that kind of challenge. At my age, I would rather be a nurse than a physician now. I think an ER nurse.
St Elsewhere: 1982 - 1988.
1983 - 1986: I was stationed at Bitburg Air Base, Germany.
1986 - 1989: Stationed at RAF Lakenheath / RAF Mildenhall, England.
It was a different time. Reminds me of one of my favorite lines from any movie:
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The Entrepreneur's Page
Sophia paints.
Yesterday she sold $224 worth of her paintings at a local crafts fair. Pure profit. Grammy donated the paints and the canvases over the past year.
Glad to see that this post is currently among the top ten trending blogs!
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A Great Writer
For an aspiring author, one word of advice. Consider four years in the US Marines and then transition to the US Navy for four years, and then four years in the US Air Force. Somewhere along the way you will find your niche.
Britain produced an incredible number of great authors during WWI; the US, a very few that came out of WWII, and even fewer that came out of the Vietnam War. There's a reason for that. Which reminds me, I see that Amazon Prime has Catch-22 in its rotation right now. I did a lot of MASH recordings during my early years in the USAF but felt that was something inappropriate about such filming, so those films have all been lost, purposely thrown away. There's a reason why there are a score of "doctor" shows but only one MASH.
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