The R. F. Lairds — Part 3

 

Now we can see the rest. How Old Am I?

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Things Fall Apart

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Take a minute to look at the opener here. We all know this is pretty much how things are nowadays. Everything chaotic, backwards and upside down, as if some law of nature had been violated. Which it has.  Early in this this century, wishful thinkers believed in a mirage called Hope and Change that turned out to be shallow, insincere, and small-minded. We survived that, sort of, but the ones who felt most betrayed, about 30 percent of the nation, believed they deserved more than the eight years of delusion which had been their sacrifice given in exchange for the real prize. In compensation, they wanted to elect a very bad woman to the Presidency of the United States. They were denied that wrongheaded but deeply felt desire. Since that bitter disappointment they have become obsessed with becoming as mean and hateful and ruthless as it took to wreak their revenge on the man who defeated them and the people who helped him do it. The bad woman led the legions of those smashing everythin...
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TEMU Mary’s in MAGA clothing

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Who’s in charge of building the American ‘woman’ of the future? Everyone knows what TEMU is, right? Even I know what TEMU is, and I don’t have anything to do with TikTok. How can that be? I don’t even associate with the CCP-friendly mass media. But I do know and I’ll explain why. For those a little bit farther behind the curve, this is TEMU: Companies like TEMU are the reason why Trump is taking a harder line against China than every other treacherous trading partner of the United States. The Wall Street media crowd is actively hoping for a recession to cool Trump’s jets on the tariff thing. They can’t afford to lose the enormous subsidy their publications receive from Chinese advertisers. Anything is preferable to losing those big big bucks in a period when the suckers are no longer willing to read libels against themselves by paying to see behind a pay wall. The crisis of the Trump tariff policy (that’s “Trade War” in NYTspeak) is hitting TEMU too.. Oh. Right. The crisis is higher pr...
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Bad Max as a challenging lesson

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  Mad Max as you’re supposed to want her Having finished my Mad Max post yesterday, I realized I had confined my discussion of the ‘Instant Gratification’ problem to the MAGA fainthearts. Their inability to look far enough forward to envision consequences is far less than that of the whole half country full of  Democrat apologists and Trump haters. Shouldn’t I address that fact in some comparable terms to what I just wrote? I guess so. The easy answer is referencing the two recent Mad Max sequels provided to us by Woke Hollywood. But I haven’t seen them. I had no interest in paying to see them in a theater. At one point I did put one of them, Furiosa I think, on my IMDB watch list. I received a notification that it would be briefly available on one of the streaming services and I did tune in to watch. Lost interest about 15 minutes in, by which time the old rules had it a good movie should have you hooked. I was not hooked. It was just the same cinematic backdrop as the Road W...
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Why did it have to be snakes?

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  AI is independently objective? Not politically biased?  Not a powerful hidden censor? Guess again. This post isn’t about AI. But AI is now part of an increasingly ominous context in which the fate of western civilization is being played as both low comedy and high tragedy. I use an AI app as a satirical tool. It enables you to make still photos of faces say things from a long list of snappy quotes and music clips. A lot of the quotes are themselves satirical, with voices altered from the original speaker or singer, to make them funny in some other mouth. But they don’t like it when you use their little app to make certain sacred cows look stupid or dishonest. Any Every time the name Trump appears in a headline over a photo featuring one of his thousands of enemies, the Revive app is certain to flag your work in process as NSFW, as in not safe for work in the politically correct Progressive media environment. You’re not allowed. If you try to appease by moderating headlines o...
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CHYOS Club — The Oxford Connection

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Promise you, I’ll be fiddling with this one for a while. It’s too big for one go. Bear with me. CHYOS Club I’m going to show you a thundering herd of links. In a very deep sense, Oxford University is the compleat brain of the United Kingdom. If you’re to understand this post, you’re going to have to read, to look at long lists and deep piles of evidence. Their impact is simply too big to summarize in a neat way. Oxford is the intellectual culture of Britain, and its impact on the United States is not calculable so much as huge and inevitable. Oxford 1920, as depicted by Chariots of Fire. England 2020. 100  years later. How to  get  from there to here. So very simple. Oxford U. Evelyn Waugh, the greatest Brit writer of the 20th century, explained it all to the rest from his own Oxford throne;  https://affirmationsmodern.com/articles/71/ : FTA: <<In 1946 the English novelist Evelyn Waugh infamously proclaimed that he did not write satire. Satire, Waugh wrote, “pr...
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History in Hindsight

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This post is a pick-up from an entry at another website of mine from Good Friday, a couple days ago. Originally, I didn’t see it as having an audience here because I don’t want to overdo the archaeology of my own work and past personal experience. But looking back is part of the process of using insights past in new ways that illuminate the present and the challenges of the future. So I rethought the placement and offer it here without apologies. The one day a year devoted entirely to death. Got to wondering, what’s the single deadest thing in our culture right now? Deader even than journalism, the fine arts, literature, music in every genre, and the scientific method. My own answer is history. I’ve read and studied a lot of history, both in school and as an avocation. As an elementary school kid, I saved a Sunday supplement that put color pics of all 35 Presidents on one sheet of newsprint and I memorized the order. Before college I got AP credit in both American and European history....
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GoFundPence 2.0

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  Make America Moral Again (Rockies caps are available super-cheap about now..) Epstein is the trigger. Mike Pence is the man to pull it. Time is of the essence here. Opportunities like this must be seized quickly or they go away just as quickly. The good news is I did some work on this back in the ‘24 Campaign, but there just wasn’t enough time to pull things together. Now I’m prepared to pass on the concepts and deliverables I developed before, spiff them up a bit for the new situation, and let all the brave new reformers use them to change the tide for the better. Yes, I’m talking about giving all you sudden moral stickler MAGA dropouts a head start on the ‘28 Campaign, which, believe me, the pollsters are already making serious money on. Still don’t get it? I’m giving you the basics for Mike Pence for President 2.0. I had already collected materials and some copy notes for a Kindle book called, simply enough, Pence for President. Here’s the cover I designed at the time. The co...
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A Big Missing Piece

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Not quite true… Not quite true that I don’t care about you. Don’t care about whatever judgments you lay on me, but that’s different. Also not quite true that the big piece I’m referring to in the title is missing. It’s all there, more or less intact, but it’s missing to me. Why Facebook wants to sell it to me for just under $3,000. I’m not bitching about that. It’s the contract we accept when we join the network. Frustrated? Yeah. That’s the right word. Here at IPR, I refer to Facebook as something else I do in addition to this and my other website projects. Since 2019 (with one petulant year off), I have added posts here pretty steadily. They now add up to just under 700 posts in total. At an average of 1,500 words, that amounts to more than a million words of text and who knows how many graphics. At 400 words per printed page, excluding graphics, that’s about 2,800 pages. That’s a lot. I’ve never been able to guesstimate much hard data about Facebook. A little over 10 years of postin...
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Don’t like Trump? Get over it.

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Another has-been life ruined beyond repair. Trump Curse writ large. Rosie O’Donnell still can’t get over the fact that Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 by blowing off Megyn Kelly’s gotcha question about his mean tweets to women, using her as the completely understandable punchline.   Millions of men, and even some women, said to themselves, “I would do that too.” She’s a sad case. But this latest outburst got me to thinking. Maybe I’ve been unfair to The Donald myself over the years. With my wife and others, I’ve taken the position that I admire Trump as a President and would-be savior of the Republic. I’ve also said I wouldn’t have him in my house for dinner. Or, less pompously, that I have never had any desire to meet him in person. I have fought strenuously for his political life and fortunes. No one can deny that. But I also fought for George W and Mitt Romney (as I had done for McCain, whom I genuinely despised) when they were running. Didn’t want to meet them...
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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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