Taco Dinner Tonight

Becky put together a nice chicken taco dinner tonight. With rice, guacamole and chips too. Very tasty.

Interesting Perspective - Orange Turd

I saw this interesting perspective on our nation from a rock drummer who happens to know what he is talking about...

"I’ve been watching an absolutely heroic amount of pearl-clutching lately from people who insist that J.D. Vance would somehow be “worse” than Trump once Trump’s inevitable political and biological expiration arrives.
Let’s get something straight: it has never been about Trump, not for one second.
Trump is just the mascot. The real story is the people who finally saw themselves in him and felt validated by what they saw.
I actually believe most of them will drift away when the cult collapses, like embarrassed fans of a one-hit wonder. Many of them will swear they were never really into him at all. The MAGA amnesia is going to be epic.
I used to wonder how it was possible that Trump could have won in 2016 and then again in 2024, given how emotionally toxic, morally vacant, and psychologically mangled he is.
I don’t wonder anymore.
I think he won for that exact reason.
He wasn’t a candidate. He was a mirror.
If you were a racist, you found your guy.
If you were a misogynist, you found your guy.
If money was your only religion, you found your guy.
If your heart was armored shut, you found your guy.
If you mocked disabled people, you found your guy.
If you hated intelligent people, you found your guy.
If you were a rapist, you found your guy.
If you enjoyed golden showers with Russian sex workers, you found your guy.
If you’d done absolutely nothing to confront your emotional wreckage, you found your guy.
If you were a serial cheater, you found your guy.
If you were a perpetual bankrupt, you found your guy.
If you stiffed honest workers, you found your guy.
If you were a conman, you found your guy.
If you mocked people’s appearances, you found your guy.
If you longed for a toxic Daddy, you found your guy.
If you were dissociated and disembodied, you found your guy.
If you were unconscionable in every economic dealing, you found your guy.
If you lied as naturally as breathing, you found your guy.
If you’d never eaten a green vegetable, you found your guy.
If you were a white supremacist, you found your guy.
If your ego contained a hole so large not even the presidency could fill it, you found your guy.
If you were a sociopath who cared not one molecule about other humans, you found your guy.
If he had only two of these traits, he never would have won. He won because he had hundreds of them, and millions of people recognized themselves in at least one.
This has never been about Trump. It has always been about the people who finally had their worst instincts validated.
Trump didn’t create the cruelty, he licensed it. He handed out permission slips for hate.
He is merely a symptom of a far deeper disease: collective toxicity.
If there is one sentence that explains Trump’s power, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.”
That’s the part that should chill the spine.
Who knew that tens of millions of Americans were thinking such unconscionable things about their fellow citizens? Who knew how many white men felt so threatened by women and challenged by minorities that they were ready to torch democracy to feel big again? Who knew that after decades of apparent progress on race and gender, so many people were living in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to legitimize their worst selves and convert their bitterness into political power?
Perhaps we were living in a fool’s paradise.
We aren’t anymore."
– Michael Jochum,
Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.

And he also said this... 

Donald Trump has finally done it, he has crossed the last remaining line between republic and empire, invading a sovereign nation, detonating its cities, kidnapping its elected head of state and his wife, dragging them onto an American warship like trophies, and announcing it all on cable television with the tone of a casino owner bragging about a lucky weekend, this is not foreign policy, it is the behavior of a strongman who believes the world is his private board game, and anyone with a molecule of intelligence understands what this is really about, oil, not democracy, not justice, not cartels, not freedom, Venezuela holds the largest proven oil reserves on Earth and that single fact explains every missile, every drone, every corpse now lying in the streets of Caracas, Miranda, Aragua, and La Guaira, Trump did not liberate Venezuela, he colonized it at gunpoint, while Venezuelan families flee burning neighborhoods and count their dead, Trump celebrates from Mar-a-Lago, calling the operation brilliant, as if human lives were just numbers on a campaign scoreboard, no congressional authorization, no international mandate, no moral legitimacy, just raw power and naked greed, and then he said the quiet part out loud, when asked whether this was a warning to Mexico he replied that something is going to have to be done, which is not diplomacy, it is a threat, the language of empire, comply or you are next, and let us not pretend Trump did this alone, because he did not, not even close, every sycophant in Congress, every rubber-stamp opportunist in the cabinet, every hollow-spined propagandist on cable news, and every flag-waving careerist who knows better but stays silent, has given him their full, enthusiastic blessing for what is, by any honest reading of the Constitution, an illegal act of war, launched without congressional authorization, without international mandate, without even the pretense of lawful process, a breathtaking abuse of executive power that transforms the presidency into a one-man war machine, while the people entrusted to uphold the law applaud like trained seals, terrified of his base, addicted to their seats, and morally vacant enough to sacrifice the Constitution on the altar of his ego, because in Trump’s Washington, loyalty to the man now outweighs loyalty to the republic, and complicity has become the operating system of government, this is not leadership, this is not strength, this is not America, it is imperial madness, wrapped in a flag, soaked in oil, and sold to a cult that confuses cruelty with courage, history will not remember this as brilliant, it will remember it as the moment the mask finally fell, when the United States, under Donald Trump, chose empire over democracy, plunder over principle, and spectacle over humanity, and once you normalize kidnapping presidents and bombing nations for their resources, there is no end to the blood that follows, no end.

-Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.