Michael Caine and Johnny Cash

Why would I confuse these two? One a southern redneck and one a cool, calm, and collected Cockney. Good call. Bad call. Wait to the end to see.












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Birthday Fun

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The last group photo I’m a part of that’s still in my possession. My sister’s  wedding in the late1990’s, with me and my mother in attendance, here in Salem. I don’t get out much anymore. Haven’t for a long time. If I didn’t take pictures of myself, nobody would, or could, anymore. I don’t give them the chance. Why in recent years I’ve made a point of doing an official birthday selfie, to keep track of the wear and tear of the years and see if the falling apart process is gaining speed. This year was not a good year for hair. That much I’ll tell you. But here’s the Official 74th Birthday Selfie I took on Friday. Not as young as I used to be. I hadn’t really shown this pic to anyone, but imagine my surprise when I received a gift yesterday by parcel delivery from a young lady I helped raise who will always be close to my heart. She and I hadn’t spoken about the Rolling Stones in years, but somehow she must have divined I’d been thinking of them, because here’s what she ordered sent ...
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The Real Sword of Damocles Hanging Over Western Civilization

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This is what I call an omnibus post. That is, it will contain many links to what I have published here and elsewhere previously. Not going to apologize for that. I don’t mind asking you to read a variety of approaches to the same gigantic topic. It’s a tooic so big we’ve all become accustomed (or trained ourselves) to deal with it only in pieces. But the pieces are all part of a larger whole that has grave consequences for the cukture as a whole. A great many people aren’t going to like what I have to say here, but it’s time it was said. I won’t be mincing words. If you feel like contending with specific points I am making, you’re well advised to read what’s at the links before you cut yourself the easy break of dismissing this post as irrational or wrongheaded or over-generalized. It isn’t. It just won’t be popular. A word about the word ‘general’ as it used in vernacular expressions like ”in general” or “generally speaking.” We all do generalize, mostly without acknowledging that whe...
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Trump 2.0 — A Movie We’ve Seen Before

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If you’ve never seen an Asylum production of their “Saving the World from Imminent Destruction” series, you’re excused from this post. The rest of us already know the basics. A once prominent, now disgraced scientist (often Sam Baldwin, but not always) is minding his own business making a living income and trying to mend his struggling family life when he notices that something is seriously amiss in the cosmos. Gravity isn’t working quite right. Or all the birds seem to be migrating at the same time. Or some local pond suddenly ejaculates a pillar of lava. You know. The warning knell of an extinction-level catastrophe. Meanwhile, where are the kids? They were supposed to be home by now. He calls his ex-wife. She doesn’t know where they are. He calls an old colleague at the agency in DC where nobody else will take his calls anymore. In a whisper, the colleague tells him the experts in charge haven’t noticed anything to worry about cosmologically speaking. This far in, we already know wh...
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What the TDS’ers Got Right

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Invocation of Nemesis by the Summoners   Click on Rosie. Thought I’d get this part out of the way right up front. I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s famous quip about the upper class British sport of fox hunting: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.” As it happens, I’m working on two different posts at the same time this morning. This one and another one about the sad PR plight by the unfortunate middle child of the three worst First Ladies in American history. .  What the posts have in common is that the dominating element of both stories is a function of female psychology and can only be understood in those terms. There’s also the irony that Wilde’s jibe can be applied with some justice to both predator and prey in the two posts. Because I’m going to admit at the outset what most of the MAGA faithful won’t. You are right that Donald Trump is responsible for much of the imminent danger we are facing as a nation. Without his arrival on the political scene 11 years ago, the...
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Concerning the 250th Anniversary of Our Nation

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Happy Independence Day No. 250!  I’m planning to do my part for the year-long celebration of the still remarkable birth of the United States of America. Just starting to realize that the number of us who remember the last big anniversary in 1976 is getting smaller every day. Why I have some special ideas about focusing on the moment of transition, that is the tick of the clock last night when the 249th year became the 250th. A kind of time capsule that may be buried now but dug up later to see who were way back when you were still as young as you think you are now. My credentials for the job. Quite a few actually, but the most important one today is that I was a working participant in the official Bicentennial celebrations back when I was still young. I wrote a post about it almost 10 years ago, ancient history in today’s 24/7 chronometer dial.  In honor of the ones no longer with us from that time, I dug up the old post from the Wayback Machine and put it back together here a...
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My Ghost Prevention Plan

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  The Valley of the Jerseyikes When you’ve decided to your own satisfaction that life doesn’t end with physical death, what have you got to worry about? That probably depends on where you come down on the age-old questions about ghosts. Do they exist? Are they a possible fate of troubled souls after they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil or been yanked out of it too suddenly? What if you expire peacefully and find yourself waking up in the attic of your own house, somehow tethered to it with no watch you can trust to keep track of time? I know I’ve stopped wearing a watch at all, like almost all of you out there. Are we taking some kind of risk that we’ll miss the departure signal for the trip to the other side? One side effect of getting old and not liking most of what’s on teevee is that you wind up watching too many paranormal shows, which have the virtue of no politics, no gratuitous sex scenes, and extended stretches of restful watching with almost nothing happening on screen. ...
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Death of the Republic

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Marc Antony:  “ Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious: If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it. Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest– For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men– Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral. He was my friend, faithful and just to me: But Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man.”     [Worth noting, Gaius Julius Caesar was not an emperor; the successors who fought for absolute power and took his name as a title were emperors and brought about the death of the several hundred years of Roman Republic.]      The American Republic is now at an end. We had a good run. He will be forced to concede, because Trump will not declare martial law....
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With my fortuneteller hat on…

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  The big historical questions of “What will happen?” are usually best settled in hindsight. The biggest questions generally concern whether or not some historical catastrophe was inevitable or not. The American Civil War. World War I. World War II. Meticulous historians, back when we had them, have given us answers to those three in particular. Yes, yes, and yes. The one that bears the strongest resemblance to our current turning point is our own American Civil War.  The young constitutional republic had been born with a deadly contradiction at the heart of its founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The reason for the contradiction was political compromise needed to secure sufficient nationwide support for the adoption of the Constitution. Slavery was a ticking time bomb from 1789 on. Eventually there would have to be a reckoning.  Was actual warfare inevitable though? Yes. North and South were unified by their shar...
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The Treason Layer of Elite Rulers of the United State

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The CHYOS Club  (Pronounced kīos, abbreviated ‘kos, meaning MR ) American Illuminati? We’ve all heard the legends of secret societies. The Renaissance story of the ‘Illuminati’ who rule the world as gray eminences behind the scenes is a legend unsupported by facts or, at any rate, evidence. We also know of outright hoaxes widely believed in, like the Priory of Sion made famous by admittedly fictitious Dan Brown novels and movies. But we also know that there are secret societies at every level of elite life. Who hasn’t heard dark whispers of Yale’s Skull & Bones, numbering the Bushes and John Kerry as members? At the international level, the Freemasons are a proven fact, even if their Illuminati-like influence is only widely believed in the UK, with its historical paranoia about Scotland, where freemasonry re-emerges as a follow-on to the Knights Templar. Great fun, mostly. Who doesn’t thrill to news about Bill schmoozing in the dark at the Bilderberger Group? Conspiracy? All t...
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