HOW THE INTERNET CAUGHT COVID!

Everything went down at our city house for five days: no Internet, no phone, no TV, no anything, due to a broken FIOS box at our house. Our home network was still operational, but not much useful could be done with it. Alexa didn’t work, Ring doorbells were out, thermostats weren’t transmitting, etc. etc. Then it really hit me. Why the hell are we so dependent on the Internet for all this stuff? Why can’t it work locally and give us  control over what is functional in our own homes?

The lame excuse is that using the web enables you to control things outside of the home, but which would you rather have- personal local control or the convenience of turning up your thermostat remotely from your car? I’m not going to speculate about motives as to why things are the way they are, but right now it clearly gives large companies a huge amount of access to your information, how you live, what you do, etc.  and, more disturbingly, they can control things the same way you do. There is no reason why things should be this way. 

Before all these protocols became established I thought of rigging my house up with a character named Max, who spoke like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He would have resided in the home and would have taken care of things locally like a sort of virtual valet. Then Alexa came along and I became an early user. But at this pont  I would rather have my Max processing my information than Amazon.  It should be possible for all of these devices to work locally, independent of the Internet. There is absolutely no reason why you at least can’t have both options.

More ominously, suppose that the big boys started sharing the information in concert, or even worse, with the government. As things stand all of them are currently on the same page in sweet harmony (with the potential exception of Apple) and it is not unreasonable to be concerned about the possibilities without getting paranoid. Whatever the case this kind of power concentration ought to be unacceptable, and the time has come to liberate Americans from this electronic yoke. 

*   *   *

Anyway we were still able to do some things via our cell phones by establishing a Hotspot, so we could, to some extent, access the Internet, but none of the other stuff since it is on a different network. Now the fun part arose when we contacted Verizon for service. They responded right away and scheduled a repairman within a reasonable length of time. But at the appointed hour no one showed up, so I called to find out why. The response was that we hadn’t answered a Covid question properly and they wouldn’t send a repairman unless we answered a couple of questions confirming that we weren’t Covid positive and agreed to wear a mask in our own home! 

Now unbeknownst to me my wife had actually spoken to someone at tech support and had answered all the questions appropriately, so that should have sufficed. But somehow they decided to cancel because someone supposedly responded “Yes” instead of “No” to a text message with the same stupid questions. Neither of us ever got it, and although I don’t pay much attention to text since my phone is constantly flooded with Trump messages ever since the NRCC gave it out to everyone. I certainly never answered “Yes” to anything, so it is possible the boys just wanted to goof off. In any case they came two days later after we carefully answered the questions; twice, and yet again just before they would enter the house. So we compliantly masked up when they finally came and quickly replaced some sort of broken doodad. 

Things have really gone completely jabberwocky over Covid. It is the height of absurdity to make an urgent repair dependent on answering a couple of text messages, (and text messages only) confirming that no one in the house has a disease and that everyone is masked. This is just the pinnacle of paranoia in a city where you have to carry a card confirming you’ve been vaccinated just to eat in a restaurant, which is yet another burden on an industry that already has been decimated by government regulations. If all of this isn’t overkill I don’t know what is. Our lives are being run by screwballs and if we don’t revolt soon we are going to be transformed into corporate state run automatons.

THE ENDLESS COVID CRISIS

 No wonder people in Covidland  are confused by ever shifting pronouncements on the pandemic. A few weeks ago when I went to a supermarket on Long Island virtually no one was wearing a mask. Today everyone was sporting one, so I had to go back to the car to search for a mask. There is no point in rocking the boat about this sort of thing. 

A few weeks ago I also had Covid despite having been vaccinated three times. I was sick for a few days and then it went away, but to be on the safe side I quarantined at my country house in order to avoid infecting anyone else. My latest bloodwork now shows I have the antibody. It is quite possible that had I not been so vaccinated it could have been far worse, and I might have wound up in the hospital, or on my way to the Covid underworld.

The Omicron variant is apparently quite contagious, and some sort of response is required. The question is whether extreme regulations are necessary, while also upending various rights. There is no easy answer to this, but clearly this administration is clueless and its vacillation and shifting positions have both confused and alienated the public. If this continues, if you know the Greek alphabet we will soon be nearing Ωmega, or the end, period. 

They came into office blaming the previous administration for the number of apparent Covid deaths, notwithstanding the fact that vaccines were developed in record time and travel restrictions put in place. Yet at the same time they were imposing heavy controls on Americans, in terms of testing, vaccines, and protections, they have allowed a continuing flow of illegal immigrants to enter the country without testing any of them. This is insanity. They claimed they would get control of the epidemic and mitigate its impact, yet last year under their watch the number of deaths exceeded the previous year. 

But the numbers may be exaggerated by other conditions at the time of death, and its attribution to Covid may have something to do with reporting incentives. No one really knows. What the people do know at this point is that very few “leaders” and “experts” really  know what they are talking about, and no one trusts the government any more. 

The severe disruption of many lives due to government policies is incalculable. But few of the people making and supporting these decisions are affected by them.  Those who work for the government, in academia, the media, big corporations, finance, etc. haven’t paid any price. The burden has been born by the working people and industries they are employed in, which have born the brunt of all the attempts to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic. These are mostly small businesses such as restaurants, as well as the hospitality and travel industries. Meanwhile some big businesses have actually benefited. Clearly the effects have been uneven.

In a rational world the government would have targeted expenditures to those actually hurt by the pandemic, like the ones mentioned above. They had real costs and losses due to government policies that were designed to stem the spread of the disease. Instead the government passed out money to everyone, over and over, at far, far greater cost than an intelligent approach would have required. The consequences of this mindless beneficence will be heavy going forward. 

Yet simultaneously this same regime went out of its way to punish people who refuse to comply with its mandates. Not only have a vast number of people lost their jobs as a result, they have even been denied unemployment insurance! Meanwhile the regime’s client teachers union member have continued to be paid in many areas without doing any work.  Different standards for different people; and don’t forget our pampered illegal aliens. This is obscene and is indicative of an administrative state out of control. 

There are some states that have managed to maintain the constitutional freedoms we have inherited, but the federal government is hopelessly incompetent, arbitrary, inconsistent, wasteful, and destructive. 

There is much to be undone here and entire agencies that must be upended and reconstructed, and people needlessly punished must be compensated. That is certainly just and only the beginning steps necessary to restore legitimacy and confidence in this government. Too many of the ruling circles are clueless as to the revolutionary situation they are fomenting on the ground, while at the same time sending out an army of agents to monitor and harass “domestic terrorists” like parents and veterans. 

The people have lost confidence in all our institutions across the board, so what is left? The upcoming election tsunami will be the last chance to address these conditions and urgently implement reforms, for if they fail again this time, life as we have known it in this great republic will be over. 

WHAT REALLY MATTERS ABOUT JANUARY 6, 2021

When Biden and Harris spoke this morning my jaw dropped in disbelief. It is apparent that the Democrats are going to use the riot of last Jan.6 as a new holiday of sorts to obscure their utter and complete failure on every single problem this country faces. No doubt it stirred emotion among Democratic partisans and the gullible, and anger among Republicans, but it all seems blind to the most significant to occurrence that day, which to me seemed obvious at the time, and still resonates, which was the failure to maintain security at the Capitol. So we need to look at the facts and get past the emotion.

Joe Biden gave a terrible divisive speech devoted largely to attacking Donald Trump, who, it must be said, provides a target-rich environment, mostly consisting of remarks he should have addressed a year ago. Apparently someone woke him up, wound him up, and sent him out to the podium to deliver a bitterly partisan speech, largely beating a dead horse in attacking Donald Trump, instead of uttering a single unifying word. That is why it was completely disingenuous, at best designed to motivate Democrats, and at worst to confirm him as absolutely the worst president in the history of the USA.

To be clear, I do not for a minute believe the overall presidential election last year was stolen. I find that suggestion to be untenable, and Donald Trump’s behavior since the election bizarre and sadly self-destructive, following a highly successful term of accomplishment against daunting odds. But any honest assessment of the past few years will find the most  egregious “threat to democracy” to have occurred during and after the Obama administration when the security services of the county were compromised and debased into partisan weapons against the incoming administration; (never mind the endless and worse “big lie” that the Russians were really in control, ultimately found to have emanated from the Hillary Clinton campaign and buried by the dishonest media). This was substantively far worse than a disorganized mob milling around the Capitol that was shockingly and poorly secured. It was a passing event, as opposed to deep and lasting damage to the state that has not only compromised  its legitimacy but only gotten worse, as we see these now comical security services unleashed against parents concerned about the poisonous ideology being imposed upon school children, or chasing phantom white racists while adversaries around the world are laughingly eating our lunch. 

There have been other instances in the past where “sacred” government facilities have be debased. When Andrew Jackson was elected president a mob was invited into the White House that became unruly and caused a great deal of damage. As far as January 6th goes, if there in fact had been any controlling conspiracy (yet to be found) to seize the Capitol it would have succeeded given how abysmally poor the security was. Now who actually had controlling responsibility over the Capitol police? None other than Speaker Nancy Pelosi herself. Yes, what became a mob was fed a lot of misinformation, and a handful actually destructively breached the facility (which allowed most to just wander around aimlessly taking selfies) but the lesson to take away from this is not the grave “threat to democracy” that occurred but the astonishingly unprepared, clueless security that day, which was just  inexcusable. It could easily have been a more organized attack by foreign enemies of the country, domestic radicals, or any bad player you can think of. 

Thus, it is false and misleading nonsense to suggest that foreign adversaries saw democracy as unworkable and under siege, when what actually registered with them was how bad the security was and how easy it was to breach. What they are still seeing is a bumbling, disorganized, dysfunctional security apparatus that can be penetrated compromised in a myriad of ways, thanks to the idiots in charge. They just don’t take this government seriously any more with its penchant for “stern warnings,” and “serious consequences” that never materialize. 

For Joe Biden to stand there and obfuscate the situation with canned rhetoric and dark fantasies about the terrible and apparently ongoing threat to democracy is preposterous, and worse a lame and devious attempt cover over the disastrous incompetence and failure of his administration across the board. It will no doubt stir the blood of partisans and pompous, gullible, and just plain stupid media mavens, who solemnly will continue the performance, and dutifully carry water for the Big Fool, but the real truth is that this country is in deep trouble, and hopefully enough people will be smart enough to see through the ruse, and respond accordingly at the ballot box. 

THE ENDLESS COVID PANDEMIC

 I've been pretty sick since a little before the end of last year. Once I stopped throwing up and got my temperature down I was able to function, though very lethargically. I am better now but I've been isolating myself at my summer house because it is almost certainly COVID,  and one of my doctors is ordering the antibody test to confirm. 

I was vaccinated three times, and it is possible it was either not so effective or it prevented me from coming down with something far worse. I don't know, and I think nobody really knows. That is a big problem. This whole thing has degenerated into a disastrous situation where trust has been further lost and clumsy attempts to stop the free flow of information have only made it worse. We need to see things in the light of day with verifiable facts in order to make an informed judgement. But that judgement is, and should be our own and not dictated by some higher authority, especially when it is one we do not have full confidence is. Everyone is an individual with different physiologies and accordingly must be addressed as a unique individual human, not via a heavy handed, dictatorial directive putting everyone in the same box, and worse sanctioning them if they do not comply with the order. There is no possible justification for throwing healthy people out of work, and worse denying them unemployment. 

It is going to be years before anyone can sort out the truth on this due to all of the obfuscation. Are hospital death counts accurate, or is more being attributed to COVID than is warranted? What is the definitive utility of masks? Of vaccinations? Of treatments? The administration has botched the distribution of tests so that demand now exceeds supply, and has done very little on what is probably the more important element here, namely cures for people that have come down with it instead of just ordering vaccinations. This is just incomprehensible. The application of cures has been largely left to individuals, doctors, hospitals and states, and has resulted in an unnecessary ball of confusion rolling through social media. Furthermore, it is now increasingly obvious that the vaccine is not enough, nor totally effective so the present crisis is the people who re currently suffering, which mean prioritizing cures.

I still think it is prudent for older folks to be vaccinated, given the inevitability of declining health, but there is no reason whatsoever to force it on small children and others, where there is no evidence that requires, perhaps outside of nonscientific demands from the Teachers Unions. 

Meanwhile China has paid no price for infecting the whole world unnecessarily, and I mean a substantive price, not lame gestures like boycotting the Olympics, which should never be done under any circumstances. It is unfair to the athletes, and contrary to the Olympic spirit, which involves bringing everyone, especially enemies together. No there must be a stiffer price, and we should begin to act in concert with our allies to develop one. I tend to suspect that this was in fact created and leaked from a lab. It has spread and mutated like nothing we have ever seen before. 

The real question is intent. Was it some sort of accident or did the Communists deliberately spread it. On the one hand it is highly unlikely that they would first inflict this on their own people. But we are talking about hard-line communists in power now, who see everything in collective terms and care nothing about individual lives. Any sacrifice is fine in order to build communism, which is why over 100 million people were killed in the last century. For that matter, given their indifference to human life it is not beyond the realm of possibility that they would, by the same lights, launch a nuclear war or greater plague on the assumption that given their huge population enough will survive to build the golden era of communism while eliminating all their enemies. After all, on a lighter note Reagan once asked for people to be free to leave China and come to America if they wished. So Chou En-Lai replied, how many Chinese do you want? 10 million, 20 million, 30 million, or something to that effect. 

We must get to the bottom of this one way or another. The West now faces a ruthless adversary intent on pushing us all aside any way they can. They steal our secrets, compromise our sports, Hollywood, and corporations that no longer have any loyalty to the USA, and for this there must be, there will be a reckoning. 

MORE FUNNY MONEY

The government is going to be sending out another round of "stimulus" checks to some, but no all people that will be exceedingly generous. I'm not miffed because I'm not eligible to get anything, but because there is no rational basis whatsoever for this action at this time. This money, or should I say "funny money" is either created out of thin air by printing it, which means that the money you have is worth less (i.e. inflation), or it will be based on yet more debt that coming generations will have to pay, or out of higher taxes for those that can still pay. This Covid bonus is illegitimate and ill conceived. It should have been targeted only to those who have actually been hurt by government policies, i.e. the restaurant industry, at a far lower cost. The future of this country is being squandered by an incredibly wasteful array of ill-conceived spending, and this really tops it off. The spoils may be shared broadly but the cost will be born narrowly.

Furthermore this is a terrible precedent we are now, apparently getting used to. It does nothing but encourage dependency with a nod from your friendly Democratic Party representative. More and more the message from the Biden administration is clear: do what we tell you to do and we will take care of you. It is clearly a case of trying to entrap more people into dependency, and therefore into Democrat voters. It is a brilliantly insidious maneuver. Who is going to say no to free money?

The problem is that free money becomes funny money and the inflation we are seeing now will only get worse until the whole system collapses, unless we reverse course, which is going to be harder and harder to do. This kind of spending will only usher in 1970s level inflation, and nobody wants that.  

THE WORST COMPANY IN THE WORLD

Facebook, excuse me, "Meta" is the worst company in the world. I was putting this together when I found that I was hardly alone in this opinion as Facebook came out on top as the worst entity in a Yahoo Finance survey as well, so this judgement is widespread. How then has it managed to so dominate social media?

 A lot was simply luck, but even more, the missteps of potential competitors. Let’s start with MySpace, which should have been in this position, given its early start, and the fact that it had far more customers initially than Facebook. It had the field to itself initially but blew it by having slow loading pages, blasting music on each one, along with much too heavy individual graphics and multimedia. Still people might have stuck with it except for the painfully slow loading. Fox blew $250 million purchasing  it without realizing what the problem was, so there was plenty of room for Facebook to grow, given its very plain, simple, and consistent interface that loaded right away and focused more on personal connection. But that was really all. 

The real, puzzling might-have-been is AOL, which had a better setup over twenty years ago than Facebook does today. They could and should have dominated this field but failed to adjust. Emerging from the earliest days of the Internet most users went by handles, rather than their real names, and their personal information remained as private as they wanted it to, which in retrospect may have been a plus given the state of privacy these days. But their search mechanism was far better in terms of finding people, they didn’t control who and what you could see, and they didn’t bombard you with ads, but also failed to monetize the service properly. Others, notably Google and Yahoo also tried, but it was too late and they simply abandoned their half-hearted efforts.

So that left Facebook by default, which now owns the field simply because it has the critical mass, which is to say you can assume everyone is here so you basically have to be here to reach them, notwithstanding the fact that you have very little control of who you can actually reach. You can have thousands of friends but only few of them see your posts and vice versa, and you don’t even have any control over what you do see; instead they do based on what their algorithms tell them you want to see. Still the result has been that people have drifted away from sites like Classmates to their equivalent on Facebook because everything now winds up here.

But these algorithms are inexact to say the least. They basically have virtually had a license to print money to the extent that they can micro-target ads to you by tracking your web surfing. But again it is far from perfect and sometimes laughable insofar as you often see ads for something you already just purchased which makes them obviously useless and a complete waste for the advertisers. Only recently have people begun to resist being tracked, and at least one major company, Apple, now makes privacy a priority, making it more difficult for Facebook to follow you without your permission. 

Worse they don’t even screen their advertisers so that people are getting burned by bogus vendors, with, i.e. storage devices with impossibly large memory that simply don’t work. So greedy and warped are they that they ignore crooked vendors but regulate users with a heavy hand. But they have also failed even functionally and aesthetically. Given all that power and control they could have done so much better than they have, but somehow it still feels like black and white in a world of color, there being remarkably few features available. 

But worst of all is the arrogant, almost complete indifference to users. It is just outrageous that a company of this size has no real customer support. If you need help with something you are out of luck. There is simply no one there. There is no number you can call nor even an email address you can write to. You are left with very limited and often useless help pages, or forums of other Users that costs them nothing. I, personally have been struggling for months to fix the link to my personal Home page that neither I, nor anyone else can now see or get to since they zapped the link to it when I set up a public page to post some writings, and switched it to the new page. So far my efforts have been in vain. 

So there’s no staff available to do anything useful so you have to wonder just what all the people working there do. Basically a lot of them just monitor and spy on you, and will interfere with your communications if they don’t like what you’re saying. So we have a situation where some kid is sitting there deciding what you can and cannot say. As if that weren’t bad enough, they are doubling down on it by adding yet more staff to do this sort of thing while still neglecting the basics of customer service that every other company provides. As a result you see more and more “corrections,” advisories, and labels covering your posts that you, of course have no ability to rebut. 

The icing on the cake is the blatant political bias and the concerted attempt to suppress not kooks, but ordinary conservatives from expressing themselves freely. They have censored people, they have blocked people, or arbitrarily completely shut down people, most notably a President of the United States in a breathtaking abuse of power. Even if you loathe the man, the very fact that they have the power to censor even a sitting President ought to be troubling to everyone. The end result is that in this private, not-so-little world, there is effectively no free speech and an inordinate amount of control over what you can do. 

As a private company they have the right to do so, but the result is that people are increasingly chafing under their yoke, and vast numbers of people have become disenchanted, to say the least, with their skulduggery. So although now nobody likes them, users are basically trapped to the extent that if they leave the service they are cut off from all the connections they have accrued and interacted with. No surprise then that they have turned themselves into the most hated company in the world, and I mean that literally because they have also alienated countries everywhere.

But worse for them, soon there are going to be consequences. You don’t screw around with people like this and get away without paying a price. I predict that price will be heavy as sentiment and power increasingly shift in this country. As that power begins to manifest itself they may pay dearly for their transgressions, and it is quite possible that the company will collapse over the next few years. As much as he may try, this time Zuckerberg is not going to be able to buy his way out of the situation he has created. Not only is the public disenchanted, for those likely to assume power are genuinely infuriated with these shenanigans. But if they fail to do anything in spite of all of this abuse, they too will be culpable and the time for revolution then may really have arrived. 

 

FUNNY MONEY

Anyone who was around in the 1970s will recall how awful inflation was at the time, with high double-digit interest rates, constantly rising prices, and a stagnant economy, or what was then called “stagflation.” Unfortunately we may be on the cusp of a recurrence of these conditions as the Producer Price Index is now approaching a 10% rate of increase. We are now being told that it will probably taper down to 2% by the end of next year, but I don’t believe it for a second. Unless the principles of economics have somehow been miraculously transformed we may be headed towards really troubled waters, with very little maneuvering room left thanks to irresponsible government profligacy.

Even if it eventually passes some of the damage remains. Prior to that period interest rates on things like credit cards were nowhere near their current high double-digit rates, so even though inflation eventually dissipated the rates never went down. The Federal Reserve has incessantly been printing money, while keeping interest rates artificially low, thereby hurting savers and forcing more money into speculative markets, while the congress continues to spend money we don’t have. “Trillions” has now become part of the lexicon, replacing billions, about which Sen. Dirksen of Illinois once said “a billion here, a billion there, and sooner or later you’re talking about real money.” 

When the pandemic first emerged the government response was to flood the economy with money it didn’t have, sending funds to everyone who didn’t need it, and encouraging people not to work instead of targeting those who were most directly hurt by restrictive government policies, i.e. the restaurant industry. A well-thought out carefully implemented, targeted plan would have cost a fraction of what we have spent, but there is no evidence of any capacity for considered, forward thinking policies in this country, so we have now been adding trillions to the deficit, yet this administration and congress now want to run up trillions more in spending that there is no pressing need for, which is just totally insane. If they get away with this the situation may soon transition from perilous to hopeless. 

Someone is going to have to pay for this and that burden is now going to be born by younger people and future generations. Those who support the people responsible for this are simply cutting their own throats. Even if the government continues to print and spend money we don’t have, the only possible result is a lower standard of living and a debased currency that is worth less and less while goods and services cost more and more. Anyone should be able to understand this. If you borrow money today to indulge yourself, going forward when you have to pay it back, you will have that much less to get by on. But individually we can’t do what the government does, i.e. print money and raise taxes, so inflation is the only possible outcome. 

Meanwhile the administration has immeasurably contributed to further inflation for a range of policies, the most egregious of which is a war on the petroleum industry. Stopping pipelines that are nearly done, discouraging domestic production, and ruining the energy independence we had achieved as the largest producer in the world. Then when people chafe under rising gas and heating prices and finding themselves that much poorer  they try desperately to get middle-eastern countries to increase the kind of production they have sabotaged. 

This is all based upon a fantasy, that somehow we are going to precipitously get off of fossil fuels with nothing but fuzzy alternatives in place. The reality is that oil production continues to be the lifeblood of the world economy. It powers everything- vehicles that transport all the goods we consume, shipping, not to mention heating our homes, powering our automobiles, and dozens of other basic necessities. Nothing contributes more to higher prices overall than rising fuel costs. But they remain oblivious, or worse indifferent to the damage they are causing in the service of a murky progressive “green” ideology while those who can least afford it are bearing the burden of these rising costs. 

I truly hope that I am wrong, and that somehow inflation is miraculously going to disappear without having to make serious changes, but if I am right we are all screwed.

 

DANGER ABROAD, INCOMPETENCE AT HOME

My greatest fear about this weak, incompetent, and feckless administration is increasingly  that is there is a good chance that they may stumble into a major war that we are not prepared for as a result of these attributes. Adversaries are clearly signaling their contempt for this regime and events are unfolding that never would have happened under Trump. For all his supposed aggressiveness and unpredictability there was not a single serious foreign policy crisis under his presidency, and even some significant achievements like the Abraham Accords. 

Who wants to go to war under this Commander-in-Chief? This administration has managed to purloin the one institution left in this society that still was held in near-universal high regard by politicizing it, imposing crazy race theories on the troops, hunting down Trump supporters and non-existent white nationalists while leaving it underfunded. As the disaster they created in Afghanistan showed, we are saddled with a bunch of incompetent military top brass, and if events continue to spin out of control, it is our troops on the ground that are going to suffer. The reality is that we are no longer prepared for war, we have been immeasurably weakened and compromised by these fools, and our adversaries know this. As a result they find themselves with conditions too favorable to their goals to be ignored.

The “stern warnings” of this administration are laughable. No one takes them seriously. It is one thing to ruin the country domestically and something else to greatly increase the chances of a cataclysm abroad. Sadly, too often we have failed to consider all the consequences that might unfold as a result of our policy. It is critical to think things all the way through and consider possible worst-case outcomes. The media and the left-wing government are focused on nonexistent racism above everything else while the Russians are moving on the Ukraine, and most people remain blissfully ignorant of the danger we now face along with the even worse situation with the Chinese Communists in the east. But at this time we simply are not in a position to play with brinksmanship or take chances on the consequences of an escalating situation. 

The unnecessary and continued phony Russia-Russia-Russia obsession of the left has poisoned the well on what otherwise might have potentially  been good relations. You don’t have to approve of the Russian government or be a fan of Vladimir Putin to know that we need to deal with the realities in the world, not ideology. Whatever shortcomings there are, the fact is that the Russians are no longer Communists and that makes a world of difference. Russia’s natural home is in the West. Indeed they have nowhere else to go, because in the long run the threats to that country all lie along its southern and eastern borders, not from the West. But rather than drawing them in we have pushed them away. The argument that they are chronic authoritarians just doesn’t hold up alongside of global strategic considerations. If they solidify an alternative alliance with China, even though it is not in the long-term interests we will be facing a formidable foe. The real long-term threat now is China, and there can be no more important objective in our foreign policy now than discouraging a Russian alliance with China while hopefully enticing them back to the West.

The reality is that between a government run by a group of incompetents, and European allies given to burying their heads in the sand, we are in no position to warn, threaten, and certainly not go to war with anyone right now. Even in the absence of those weaknesses we face a real dilemma. Just how far are we willing to go vis a vis other countries who perceive their core, vital interests at stake when ours are not? As much as we may sympathize with the plight of the Ukraine and their democratic aspirations our vital interests are simply not involved there, where the Russians unavoidably are. Under those circumstances, were things to continuously escalate there is little doubt as to who would have the final word. We have no border anywhere nearby, we are oblivious to the historical interaction and dynamic and play here, and it is utter madness to suggest bringing Ukraine into NATO. There could be no greater signal that NATO is clearly a hostile, anti-Russian alliance to anyone sitting in the Kremlin. A more enlightened policy would be to try in the long run to cement both countries with the West. 

Unfortunately we are in a no-win situation now that has been exasperated by the incompetence of the Biden administration. Who would not take advantage of such obvious weakness? It is a miracle it hasn’t happened yet. So again we need to ask ourselves just how far are we prepared to go against the Russians or Chinese with regard to matters that are close to their home but not ours, at a time when our military has been thrown into disarray. Assuming we manage to get through the next few years without another foreign policy disaster there is only one thing to do, and that is to rebuild our forces, amplify our deterrents, strengthen our alliances, update our weapons technology and hopefully have a leadership in power strong enough to manage any contingency. 

THE CHRONIC CAMPAIGN, ENDLESS EMAILS, AND MONEY ALL THE TIME

 I am absolutely furious with the people running the Republican campaign organizations and the annoying WinRed that does the charges.  My mailbox is perpetually flooded with email several times a day. There are literally a dozen or more from Donald Trump alone. Then there is everyone else running for office because the congressional campaign committees gave out my email.  

I of course I  finally took steps to stop this by telling them remove me from their lists but then they simply shifted over to another mailing list and were back again. This goes on continuously even though the next election is still almost a year away, due to the permanent campaign we have to endure. Worse, some of the wording is downright offensive for failing to respond. They have also cried wolf too many times, always falsely claiming they are behind in fundraising. 

As a result I sometimes miss important mail like notices and bills, etc. because of the nonstop flood. What I am going to have to do is make a new mailbox just for bills and other important things. Mind you it’s no secret I have been a lifelong conservative, but I have had it with this. I just don’t know what they think they are accomplishing by annoying people this way. 

I’m even getting mail from the Democrats now due to a publication giving out my address! A good part of the reason for all of this is tunnel vision, that is more and more ubiquitous across the board in today’s society. By that I mean the organizations are now so laser-focused on particular objectives that the staff pull out all the stops to try and achieve them without any consideration of collateral consequences. The campaign people want to raise as much money as they can and nothing else much matters. 

The larger problem, of course, is money and the endless quest for it. Politicians spend an inordinate amount of time fundraising, and most of them hate it. Yet even those who most fervently claim to want campaign finance reform alway make sure to leave loopholes for themselves in any legislation that passes. The reality is it is almost impossible to get money out of the process as everyone is in on it, i.e. the pious media certainly does not want to lose all the money they collect in advertising. 

But what we can do, and what we desperately need to bring about is election reform. A good part of the problem would be mitigated if we limited the amount of time that campaigns can occur in, which would certainly spare us a lot of the cacophony of the endless campaign. Furthermore we need to get rid of primaries, which simply inordinately increase the resources needed to run for office. The idea that they are somehow more “democratic” is a delusion, given that few people vote in them, and those who do tend to be activists which simply pulls the parties to the extremes. The truth is the “party” is really comprised of the elected officials identifying with it, and they are the ones who should be nominating candidates. (I’ve written on this before with regard to the presidency but the idea hasn’t gotten any traction yet).

It does not, however, completely resolve the problem of money. It is not so much that it gives advantage to “the rich” since they are as varied in outlook as the rest of the population and the notion that they form a cohesive “class” is simply not reflected in reality. But there are wealthy individuals who, on a personal level, do get more access than they deserve because politicians are generally easily impressed by big money. So they get to hang around and mostly feed each others’ egos, go to Epstein’s island, etc. Then when it sometimes blows up they have to scramble to disassociate themselves from people they were intimately associated with. 

I will never forget how, years ago, I did a lot of work for a candidate for a top executive position because I took him seriously in his commitment to principle.  At the same time, from the opposite side, a billionaire I had some acquaintance with was doing everything possible to defeat this candidate, organizing and pouring funds into the incumbent’s campaign. My candidate won. But I cannot overstate the shock I felt when barely a few weeks into his term he had dinner with the same billionaire who had just worked against him so strongly. I have never trusted any of them since then and it wasn’t long before I completely walked away from all of that. Money trumps principle, and just about everything else, and these people are never going to change. Thus the only thing to do is to eliminate as much of the need for funds as possible starting with what I have outlined above. 

NEW YORK ISN'T DEAD, YET

 NEW YORK ISN’T DEAD YET

Eric Adams, the Mayor-elect of New York City, is ludicrously being assailed by the left for planning to reimpose some policing measures they consider to be “racist,” never mind that he himself is black. He correctly points out that the now-discredited BLM is just a fringe group, and encouragingly is standing his ground instead caving, the way liberals always do, to the radical left. The reality is that his election was the least racially-tinged election in the history of the city, having been chosen by a majority of both black, white and every other middle and working class constituencies in the city. But the left continues to perceive everything through a racial lens, primarIly because it is composed mostly of self-hating white people. 

If Adams continues to resist the prevailing positions of the dominant elite, who otherwise don’t represent anyone, the prospects for a NYC recovery have brightened considerably after the terrible diBlasio administration. I believe that will likely be true in the state as well with prospect that Lee Zeldin will become our next Governor. Like many I have considered leaving, but having lived here all my life I’ve decided I’m not going to abandon my homeland without a fight, and these prospects indicate there is at least one last chance of turning things around after years of corrupt, dysfunctional government. The challenge is still daunting but it may just come about, despite the still-dominant rotten elite. 

For it has never been true that New York is especially “liberal,” and certainly not “left.” It has little in common with some of the loonier places on the west coast. That is a myth that basically ends at the borders of Manhattan and a few other shore points facing it. Most of the city consists of a myriad of vibrant, fairly conservative residential neighborhoods. It is worth noting that Manhattan was the only place Adams didn't carry in the Democratic Party primary, which simply indicates the extent to which the elite who dominate Manhattan are not only out of touch with the country, but the rest of the city as well. It is only monotonous control of the media that creates that impression.

But even there exceptions exist, like the oldest newspaper in America- the New York Post, founded by Alexander Hamilton 220 years ago. For despite pages of frivolous “celebrity” nonsense, it is much more than a feisty tabloid and has arguably become the leading, and often lone, voice pursuing the truth and exposing scandals that the rest of the media ignores or suppresses outright for ideological reasons, like the Hunter Biden story they censored during the last election campaign or the Cuomo nursing home catastrophe. But they won’t get Pulitzers, which nowadays are just prizes liberals like to give themselves, along with so many other once-prestigious awards, (and we really need to start delegitimizing them as such). 

Many years ago, during a disastrous NYC newspaper strike that many never recovered from, Eric Sevareid, then a nightly commentator on the CBS Evening News, worried that the strike might take down the New York Times, which he pompously declared was our “nation’s most necessary newspaper,” which was laughable even then. But today there is a paper that does fit that description, one of the few that has kept the notion of a free and independent press alive, and which virtually alone did not bury the truth but exposed it, the New York Post. 

No one knows what the fate of city it covers will be, and things could still get worse from external factors even if the state is finally well-governed again, nor am I even predicting a certain turnaround, but now there is at least a chance that abysmal mismanagement will no longer be a leading cause of decline.