The Dodgers have committed a billion dollars for two players—Ohtani and Yamamoto. The pressure’s on, LA. No excuses now. One might expect that you should win a lot more than you lose.

Is anyone gonna be able to afford coming to a game, though? Like much of everything else, professional sports are going the way of polo and royal parlor games—a real stretch for the average fan.

No biggie—you can get a decent experience watching from the comfort of your living room on a 75” flat screen with a boffo sound system.

At a bare minimum, the headlines themselves are enough to raise blood pressure and trigger a gag response. I don’t really need to read the body of the articles.

The firestorm over the Colorado Supreme Court decision is predictable, but the argument being made for Biden to criticize the decision mystifies me. I guess Fox News hotheads and other critics are taking this route because it seems obvious (to them) that we should all be outraged by this “overreach” or “misread,” i.e. this legitimate reading and interpretation of Article 3 of the 14^th Amendment.

Of course the Right is incensed, but they’re supposed to be. That’s their role here. They’re also blinded by their mindless support for Trump, who clearly incited an insurrection on January 6. The provision in Article 3 applies to him. It has to. He gets no pass because he was President. He has created this situation himself, because he just can’t help himself.

If anything, the statute or rule or provision should apply to Trump in a more forthright way because of the position he held—he was entrusted with the highest office in the land. He promised to uphold the Constitution and he clearly decided not to do that.

And furthermore, a majority of us know he’s an incompetent blowhard, a puppet who had no business being POTUS the first time, never mind running for the office again!

1200

  

I guess I’m a glass-half-empty guy most of the time. It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s just that I see what’s happening in the world and find myself less than optimistic about outcomes and trends.

History has taught me that bad players often enough get their way, if only for a time. They get to have their moment, even if eventually they are stopped or stop themselves when they see the walls closing in. They get to wreak the damage and the suffering they seem so keen on dispensing, their warped ideologies carrying the day for too long, reluctantly embraced by people too afraid or too desperate to question the propriety of it all.

The internal resistance is there, but it is easily controlled because it’s deprived of the tools that would make it a force to be reckoned with. Of course I’m talking about people like Vladimir Putin and maybe Xi Jinping, but especially Putin. It seems he has mastered the strategy of crushing dissent before it has a chance to spread too far and deep. He has mobilized the military to fight Ukraine and eventually prevail, emboldened to set his sights on the next target, maybe a NATO member.

I’ve been looking at everything differently lately—the minutes and moments in my daily life that I cherish and have mostly taken for granted. The interactions with family, the simple pleasures of electricity and internet and running water and food availability and all the creature comforts that contribute to making this life bearable and even enjoyable.

The insidious and maddening and frightening part comes when I realize that someone like Putin and his cohorts would love nothing more than to take away all those things, sabotaging them, fomenting panic, turning us against each other and creating chaos. We know that Putin and people like him hate us with a burning and blinding passion. He will stop at nothing to destroy us. This is what bothers me every day—that there is someone out there with the growing means to destroy our way of life, someone who dreams of doing exactly that.

It’s both rage-inducing and troubling, that we find ourselves needing to address this threat, distracted from tending to other needs that one might think should be more important.

The Colorado Supreme Court took the bold step, the one the lower court judge couldn’t take for fear of reprisals? I hope the precedent has been set and others follow.

There is no earthly reason for Trump to have gotten as far as he has—other than certain Constitutional provisions and political assumptions which are now, finally, being questioned; also the aforementioned fear, and legal processes that can be slowed to a snail’s pace by appeals and creative jurisprudence—i.e., lawyers pulling out all the stops, doing and saying whatever it takes to keep their troubled client happy and one step ahead of the jailer.

Chances are better than 50-50 that Trump has never read Mein Kampf, or any other tome with a dictatorial essence. I’ve never been convinced that the slurry emanating from his pie hole at a rally has originated in his own brain.

When he’s reading from a teleprompter, he’s reading someone else’s venomous sludge, happy to say it out loud only because he likes the sound of it. Trump believes, or at least speaks, whatever he thinks will land and stick with his diehard and woefully misguided fans. As Rachel Maddow reiterated the other night, he says stuff and assumes a persona simply because it keeps working for him. There are still plenty of easy targets out there who keep responding to the dog whistle, and Trump is only too happy to oblige them. He’s like a fifth grader who gets egged on by his classmates.

On the other hand, have you ever listened closely to the reaction of the audience when he offers up one of his outlandish proclamations? It’s often less than whole-hearted. So, maybe there are people in attendance who just come for the spectacle, and who end up uttering, more than once, “Wait, what did he just say?”

Time to weigh in on TayTrav, or whatever the cutesy shorthand is.

Good for them, if they’ve found something in each other! I just hope Taylor isn’t headed for another song about another heartbreak. If that happens, then it’s not all bad news for her—she’ll cash in a couple times with an original release and then a remake, maybe even develop another whole movie about this latest not-so-private romance.

Sorry for the snark—it’s hard not to have had enough of the mindless stargazing and spectacle and saturated coverage. Enough is enough when it comes to Taylor Swift, but at least we’ve been treated to a fluffy diversion to the rest of the news.

And the curmudgeon signs off.

Vladimir Putin and people like him are useless in the world. Not exactly model citizens, but instead power-hungry relics, motivated by old, stale visions of greatness. They talk in riddles and not-so-veiled threats. They don’t value the lives of the people they govern, but see them only as servants, as available bodies, unworthy or incapable of making decisions for themselves. They can’t envision a world in which nations at least try to get along. They are suspicious, bent on calling the shots, intoxicated by the thought of staying in power until they die.

Putin in particular appears to have a bone to pick with the U.S., but get in line, buddy. And of course he’s now making threats toward Finland, since they are close by and have become part of NATO.

The concessions we’re forced to consider. I wonder if the leadership of Finland really wanted to become a part of NATO. But what choice did they have, really?

It’s a shame things have developed the way they have, nations not trusting each other, always spending outlandishly and unforgivably on defense and armaments and implements of war, having to make decisions not based on growing an economy or providing for the flourishing of its citizens, but more often influenced by what needs to be in place in case the shit hits the fan.

Speaking of spending outlandishly and unforgivably, North Korea is in the news again, because it fired its latest long-range missile, as a warning, I guess, after talks between the U.S and South Korea. Heavy sigh.

What is their deal, anyway? What is their purpose on earth, besides being a weapons depot for China in case things go south in that neck of the woods? What is the argument for spending a substantial amount of its money on war preparations? Or is it just a puppet regime at China’s beck and call, without commerce or trade?

What is North Korea known for besides another wannabe dictator and world player and a growing nuclear arsenal? What’s left for the population, for the North Korean citizenry itself? Are they all automatons, just scraping by so its leaders can focus on “more important” things, like nuclear warheads and such?

Wow, we humans are fucked up.

I feel no compunction to multi-task, and I don’t necessarily see it as a virtue.

I focus on one thing at a time. If I’m cooking a meal, I don’t have any urge to go do a load of laundry or catch up on reading or neaten up the living room. I am perfectly OK with tending to the task at hand.

I don’t know why this is. Maybe I’m not easily bored, maybe it’s how I’m built and wired. Maybe it’s because I see others around me who can’t sit still for more than five minutes and who always need to feel like they’re accomplishing something, using every available minute to its max, and this only hardens my resolve to just not be that way.

There probably is a time and place for being that way, but those days are over for me.

There’s no rewinding of the tape, no taking any of it back. No do-overs. It happened and it can’t be undone. Three hostages killed by friendly fire, in the fog of war, by fellow countrymen. I wonder if there’s more to learn about this story. Probably just more details that will render it an even more hideous and tragic event.

Who couldn’t have seen this coming?

Follow-up re COP28—I guess it’s considered progress when the finished documents and press releases dare to actually mention “fossil fuels” by name– and these as needing to be phased out!

Baby steps and feet-dragging are all we can expect, I guess, especially since the President for the event was the UAE oil chief. Ya, that sounds about right.

Talk about turning the Titanic around.