Are you better off today than you were last week or month? Has the world seemed kinder and more joyful than in the past? If you answered no to either of these questions, it is probably because inflation has reduced your spending ability. Of course, inflation is fixable, but not by anyone in the current administration. Yet, the same people who have caused our dollar to become worth a quarter are now asking us to vote them into office for another term so they can fix the problem they caused. Does that make sense? Actually, there are five months remaining in the term of the current Vice President and she has time and the entire federal government at her disposal to fix the problem without bothering the rest of us to vote her out.
Will that happen? Not a chance. The idea of a woman president is so ingrained into the brain of dumbocrats that she will win using Obama’s method of delivering long-winded word salads delivered smoothly and read from a teleprompter.
Of all the women in the world, how did this incompetent one rise to the level of becoming the most powerful leader in the world? What is it that makes her so qualified? I’d like to know how to teach it to my granddaughters. Although, my three beautiful girls are much brighter than the current Vice President. Plus, they all have paying jobs that require hands-on experience to solve problems. So why would I want them to learn what Kamala has? They already possess knowledge that Kamala does not have the intellect to understand or to learn. There are pundits among us that tell us that Kamala used her feminine wiles to sleep her way up the political ladder with her boss who was then the mayor of San Francisco. I guess some women are better at that than others.
It is over. I sent the manuscript to a publisher. Now, I can forget about it. If they accept it and send me money, I will accept it graciously. If they don’t, I will bask in the glory of having completed another goal. As I write this, I wonder which goal I will dive into next.
I think, I will start by turning off Grammarly. It seems, my knowledge of English Grammar is quite different than that of Grammarly. I like my version better. It sounds more like me talking. In the writing arena, I’ll try some short stories. The prospect of living long enough to pound out a regular book-sized story doesn’t appeal to me anymore.
Certainly, I will write for this BLOG more regularly. Most times it will sound like Joe Biden drifting off into a mindless stupor while his mouth is still moving and sound continues to flow.
Speaking of Joe Biden. I made the sad mistake of watching his entire speech at the convention. Was it really him who was speaking? He sounded exactly like when he gave us the State of the Union speech earlier in the year. Was it a robot programmed to move his lips like Joe? Or, was it a Disney holograph of him giving the SU speech? Either way, I can proudly brag that I watched Joe Biden give the last political speech of his long career.
One state I never traveled in was Delaware, and after witnessing Joe’s career I will stay away from all people who might have been dumb enough to vote for this guy so many times. How did he manage to last as long as he did? A better question would be how in the hell did he become president?
I do not look forward to seeing Kamala Harris become president because the few policies she is promoting sound like what we went through in the seventies/eighties when Nixon was trying to fix the inflation that Carter brought upon us. I agree that it is time that a woman become president, but please Lord not Kamala. She will become the new model for dumb blond jokes. Since what she proposes isn’t meant to be funny, it will hurt all of us. Just let her go back to the land of the crazies and give her a puppy or kitten to play with, but please Lord, don’t give her the keys to the atomic bombs.
The view from Mount Olympus is said to be spectacular, but few have ever seen it. Head up past the former homes of long dead movie stars and you can look down from the Hollywood Hills on WeHo’s gay nightlife and Russian restaurants, along with much of the rest of L.A.
With names like Hercules Dr, Zeus Dr, Apollo Dr, Jupiter Dr, and, of course, Mt. Olympus Dr, it’s truly a hangout for any gods with twenty million to spare. Reported celebrity residents and owners of the gated community with 24/7 security include Leonardo DiCaprio, Katy Perry, and Harrison Ford, but even more importantly here is the Ross House, a 13,000 square foot modernist monster, where Hollywood studios hold intimate receptions, screenings and award parties for the small club of those who are famous or can help make them even more famous.
The Ross House of Mt. Olympus is usually a brief entry in industry publications, but it embodies the vast gulf between how people down in L.A. live and how those who decide their fates do.
While Los Angeles has become a crime-ridden hellhole, Mt. Olympus, like many well-off neighborhoods in the area, enjoys private security patrols so that someone is always watching. The celebrities who come and go from private parties at exclusive locations like the Ross House have their own security and studios provide security for their events. In Greek myth, Mt. Olympus may have been difficult for mortals to reach, but the Los Angeles development has a regular commuter class of illegal alien maids, cleaners and gardeners, as well as security.
“The wealthy elite of Mount Olympus are some of the wealthiest and most influential people in all of Los Angeles,” one real estate agent gushes and that may be overstating it, but the 400 or so homes and the 800 or so residents of this Hollywood Hills enclave do live apart from the rest.
As do many of the immortals of the Hollywood Hills where crime is rare and junkies don’t sleep on the streets. And when crime does happen, even the most pro-crime prosecutors are much more responsive to the needs of those on high than to the troubles of those down below.
Every city has its class divides, but the heights of Mt. Olympus and its neighbors in the ‘Hills’ are a divide not only in geographic distance, but topological territory. To pause for a moment at a reception for an Oscar winner at Ross House and cast a brief gaze down below to where street level retail is vanishing and angry hobos roam the streets stabbing people is to be above it all.
Socialism is not an ideology of street-level social reformers, but of aspiring gods who look down and imagine moving people around like so many toys until everything fits perfectly. To be down on the street is to know that there is no perfection and that nothing will ever fit. And that all we have are the imperfect solutions of common sense and whatever character we can wrest from the chaos and technological tricks we can use to stay one step ahead of the entropy horizon.
Hollywood, the people who pretend to tell our stories, play with toys in an industry of them. There are the white roofs of the studios, the large prop rental facilities and a backlot of fake streets on which fake lives will be portrayed and fake lives depicted. And then after playtime is over, the men and women will drive up the narrow winding canyon roads along streets named for old legends, past the Greystone Mansion, where an oil tycoon’s murder-suicide inspired the movie ‘There Will Be Blood’, and where everything from Batman to Star Trek was filmed, to their estates up in the sky. Is it any wonder that they’re socialists? How could they be anything else.
The view from Mt. Olympus is not nearly as glorious as the Alps or the Rockies if what you value in life is natural beauty, but if what you love is power, then the twinkling fairylights of the Los Angeles landscape, the long roads and the endless springtime are ideological ambrosia.
Leftist politics are one part perpetual outrage, two parts magical thinking and four parts pagan godhood. The old days when powerful men could pretend to be gods were dashed by religion and then democracy. Until socialism, wealth bought you only so many privileges. Now it buys you the privilege of looking down and toying with the less well off in the name of social justice.
It doesn’t take much to toy with the really poor, but the genius of leftist politics is that the wildly rich can use it to grind down poorer rivals and aspiring members of the middle class. California’s upward mobility was turned upside down when success was more than just buying a mansion in one of the nicer parts of town, but moving uphill to rain misery on everyone down below.
California’s social justice class is even more effete than in most other places. Gov. Gavin Newsom carries vineyard country wherever he goes. The DSA socialists drive six figure cars when they go to protest for the homeless or Hamas. And their parents benevolently gaze down at them from Mt. Olympus: proud of how much Oliver and Sophia care about the ‘big’ issues.
Radicals are not made out of the molten metal of oppression but poured out of the golden crucible of prosperity. It isn’t the mobs rising up from the streets, but descending down from pricey prep schools like Harvard Westlake where the children of celebrities and their financial planners with few real skills go on to study gender theory at UCLA or USC in between shopping trips to hip boutiques on Rodeo Drive and protests around Grand Park.
The mediocre elites of Mt. Olympus have their McMansion versailles not despite their socialism, but because of it. Stockbrokers call for the redistribution of wealth, doctors demand that medicine be socialized, and celebrities champion the rise of the working man. Up in the sky, idealism seems more real than common sense and reality is for the lesser folks below.
The immortals may have to descend from Mt. Olympus to shop at Trader Joe’s (if they choose not to Instacart their order) where there are bums in the alley and tent encampments under the underpass, but a return to the heights also restores a sense of the rightness of things. In Manhattan, a liberal who had been mugged might become a conservative, but in the nicer parts of Los Angeles County, the liberal drives past the chaos, and escapes that sense of vulnerability by retreating to gated communities and estates policed by heavily armed private security.
It’s vulnerability that makes conservatives out of liberal immortals. Not just a mugging, but mortality in whatever form it comes whether it’s financial reverses, government abuses or just the passage of time. Leftist politics, like casinos and crypto, only work in a cloud of unreality. When reality touches our souls, then the impossible makes way for the realities of life.
What happens to a liberal who never gets mugged? He becomes an idiot immortal, living outside reality, convinced that everyone else could live that way too if only they voted like him.
Southern California is uniquely insulated from those realities. This is where the seasons do not change and time does not pass. Even as the cities decay and the suburbs empty out to Florida and Nevada, the immortals look down from the heights and believe that nothing has changed. Until one day they look down to find that there is nothing left to see underneath the mountain.
Last night I did what I promised myself I would not do. I watched the senior citizen tell me what a great job he is doing. Except he is not. I gave him forty-five minutes of energy before he began to lose it nationwide. I was off by ten minutes. He lasted longer than I predicted. I am four years older than him and I don’t have a lick of political experience to match his fifty years in Washington, but I would do a much better job of running the country than he has done. What I enjoyed the most about his speech occurred when he turned to the Red side of the room and began heckling back and forth with them.
Vice President Kamala Harris gets my nod for her continuous standing ovation. However, she loses to Nancy on the springy stand-up.
Looking at all the tired, old, and wrinkled faces of our government made the biggest impression of the night. Chuck Schummer wins the “most wrinkled face of all” contest beating out a box of Sunsweet’s best prunes. At least Nancy spent a few hours moisturizing her face to a smooth shiny sheen. One of the supremes stood out as one longing for recognition. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stood alone at the end watching the wrinkles pass her by without so much as a hint of recognition. I give the House speaker credit for his ability to match Nancy and her ability to express what she is thinking without uttering a sound.
The only thing I give Biden an atta boy on is his theft of pushing for childcare for young kids of working moms. This is clearly stolen from Ivanka Trump who pushed her father for the same thing. I thought his screaming about making the rich pay more taxes was wasted energy. Obviously he has never been told that the Trump tax cuts helped the country not hurt it. What will we gain by extracting a few billion dollars from the rich and then spending a few trillion to balance the deal?
Waiting an hour for the man to arrive made me feel that his importance overshadowed my time. His speech made me feel like he was angry with me for living and for showing up. After all, the King does not answer to his serfs. We all live to serve him and his stupid policies. DON’T WE??? The answer is a big fat NO, he serves us.
If I were the House Speaker, I wouldn’t have torn the speech in half like Nancy did, I would have set fire to it on the dias.
I predict we won’t see or hear from Joe Biden for the next two weeks because he’ll be on vacation recovering from his effort.
Yesterday, I posted an article critical on Joe Biden and the Special Counsel who released his report on Biden’s handling of “Confidential Material.” I didn’t like that the Counsel let Old Joe off the Hook for breaking the law in a country predicated on the Rule of Law. Counsel Hur reported that Biden broke laws by keeping highly classified materials in his homes in unsecured areas. Still, Hur pansy-assed his way out of indicting the president by accusing Joe of being a tired old man who has a poor memory. How do you think tired old Grumpa Joe would fare if the Secret Service caught him in the act of assassinating poor old Joe? After all, Grumpa Joe is several years older than Joe Biden, and his memory is not as good as it used to be. Hell, just this afternoon he found a bowl of tiny dead fish in the refrigerator and asked his step-grandson what they were called. Grumpa Joe couldn’t remember. The name came to him about thirty minutes later; they are called sardines.
My guess is that Grumpa Joe’s sorry old ass would be arrested immediately and thrown into the Hoosegow indefinitely. There would not be a special counsel looking into his motives and proclaiming that he should not be indicted because he is a tired old man with a poor memory.
I criticize the Special Counsel for not indicting poor old Joe Biden, but I praise him for sticking it to him by telling the world in an official report that his mind is not 100 percent and he shouldn’t be running the country anymore. Then I go back to criticizing the Counsel for sticking it to the American people by paving the way for our useless Vice President Kamala Harris to take over. We are screwed from two directions.
“What a revoltin’ development this is!” (William Bendix from “The LIfe of Riley” radio program.)
