The title of an op/ed in Wednesday’s NYTimes caught my eye: The Billionaires Have Gone Full Louis XV. It was as good a discussion as to where we are vis a vis the oligarchy as any I’ve read to date.
This whole sorry business of the Cluckian regime will be behind us sooner or later, at least partially because its members are such a group of incompetents and fools to a degree that would be laughable if it weren’t for the misery and dislocation they are bringing daily to so many people here at home and around the world. But the billionaires … they will still be there when he and his gang are gone, using their immense stores of treasure to advance their interests, which on almost no point are coincident with ours. That reckoning will be the one to follow closely.
The op/ed I mentioned above claims that we are at a point where nearly three-quarters of our population believe that there should be a wealth tax, and if it happens the process of reducing the fortunes of the very very rich will likely be a painful period. Perhaps not as bad as that which followed the opulent reign of Louis XV, a little dust-up called The French Revolution).
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… billionaires can’t grasp how the real world is convulsing outside their well-secured gates.
And convulsing it is. According to the most recent edition of an annual Harris Poll, for the first time, a majority of Americans believe billionaires are a threat to democracy. A remarkable 71 percent believe there should be a wealth tax. A majority believe there should be a cap on how much wealth a person can accumulate.
Like I said. Bumpy roads coming. Girding loins and all that.
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As long as we’re reading articles and commenting on them, which is so much easier than coming up with content of my own, let’s move on to a piece from CNN with the overly long title: Your grocery store is a bewildering sea of overly processed food. Here’s why and what to do. The article is a discussion, a harangue, an exposé, a depressing recitation … all of these and more. Kid
When the rubber hits the road what it means is that just possibly my favorite food of all time is not food at all, but something which started as a slurry and was then treated with a plethora of chemicals that made it colorful, indestructible, and irresistible to people like myself.
My downfall, and the reason that I will never make it to the age of 120 years. The poster child of ultra processed foods, Cheetos.
Rip open a bag of these in front of me and you are taking the chance of being mauled by an octogenarian, which is a sorry spectacle at best. I was thinking that one practical guideline for avoiding ultraprocessed foods is to never eat anything that stains your fingers yellow-orange, but then I remember that the flaw in this reasoning is turmeric. Everything that this spice touches is stained yellow-orange.
In my past there are many things that I would rather not remember, but one of them is that I have on occasion eaten Cheetos until I was nauseous and I still wanted more. At those moments I would raise my orange-tinted hands to God and pray for deliverance, having hit yet one more spiritual, moral, and nutritional bottom. Pathetic, I mumbled to myself, while wiping away the crumbs.
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Living hundreds of miles from many of our loved ones has turned Christmas around in one important way. The rituals of wrapping presents are largely things of the past. Shipping costs are such that it is not hard to spend more on getting a gift to a son or daughter than the gift cost in the first place. So we go online and send off a package we have never actually seen or held.
Most often the process today is this: purchase gift online > ship directly to recipient. The present arrives at its destination in a plain cardboard box or brown paper package. Open either one of them and there it is. Naked. No mystery. No eager anticipation. No admiration for the art of the wrapping papers. No colors under the tree. Gift-giving reduced to its barest essentials.
The new ways are sensible, but there is something missing, at least for me. Wrapping gifts used to be a pain in the behind, and getting that perfect and seamless result eluded me 100% of the time. But I would take it back, with all its heacaches and frustrations, if I could reasonably do so.
And Santa … where is he in this brave new world of Christmas commerce? Why, friends, he has abandoned the sleigh and reindeer and now drives a UPS truck. The red outfit exchanged for the brown one.
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Here is a live, high-energy version of the classic Dire Straits tune. If, dear readers, you know of a better guitarist than Mark Knopfler, please send their name along to me that I might check them out.
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This morning I was musing … I think that I muse more often than I used to. In fact, there is a portion of nearly every day devoted to this craft, often prompted by something as small as a dust mote floating in a beam of sunlight heading for the coffee table. Since I realize full well that the temptation for older people is increasingly to look back in time, I have made it an issue for myself to avoid this trap.
But this year … my mental guard must be down because I find that I am more often filling idle moments with thoughts of the long line of Christmases of which I have been a part. And of the people who once sang and played in them as well, but have moved along to wherever that next cosmic stop is. I’ve reached the station in life where everyone in the generation before me has left the building.
Muse on this: the word muse comes from the Anglo-French verb muser, meaning “to gape, to idle, to muse.” The image evoked is one of a thinker so absorbed in thought as to be unconsciously open-mouthed.
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
Notice the word “gape” in the definition above. I certainly hope that I have not started gaping. Someday when I have the courage I will ask Robin if she notices me doing it. In the meantime I will see if I can come up with an anti-gaping preventive strategy. Surely there must be such a thing.
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Watching the daily parade of loathsome behavior that is our present national government, there is one thing that is very striking. They don’t care that we know what they are up to. They believe that they can do whatever they want without consequence. Our country is being made into some sort of medieval fortress with the rest of the world on the outside, and us prisoners within.
This regime promotes a lie so gigantic that its adherents have to bend their minds into pretzels in order to accept it – that we don’t need anybody else. The lie is that we can run a country completely independently from the rest of the world.This idea, and the plans and programs developed from it are so removed from reality as to collectively represent a national psychosis. At present, the United States is more of an insane asylum, and the inmates are in charge.
Those out there who still think that they can sit on their hands and the delirium will pass of its own accord are misleading themselves. They are letting others do their work for them, take their risks for them. It is past time for this. If they are not active in resisting the assaults on the Constitution, the constant stream of authoritarian and illegal actions, and the miasmic cloud of immorality that has settled over us … they must be considered a part of the problem. The middle ground has been taken away by events. There is still time to choose what sort of political system one wants to live under. But they should make no mistake, inactivity is choosing chaos.
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Music played at the end of the movie Brokeback Mountain. A beautiful coda to the film.
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Little Home In The Valley 