Last week I became an official “senior citizen” with the mostly, but not all, dubious “perks” that come with it:
I’ve received several unsolicited offers for Medicare plans from private companies which I tossed in the trash, since I have no plans to retire until I am eligible for “100 percent” benefits at 67--which only means than if you retire earlier than the current “age inflation,” you get less money. Naturally there are other things to worry about, like if these guys who told us that they were not going to touch Social Security or Medicare before the election were fibbing; for some people, lying is as natural as breathing.
WhiteHouse.gov still keeps claiming that no one is going to touch either, but someone forgot to tell self-appointed dictator Elon Musk that, who like his DOGE pals are making unproven claims of “rampant” fraud based on assumptions about people with certain names of a certain “ethnicity.” Trump of course likes to bully those he feels either “superior” to or are easy to victimize in the current "anti-DEI" political climate; but with Musk, he just cowers in the corner and says “Yes, daddy” as he had experience doing with his real “daddy.”
It is bit surprising, but while I certainly am cognizant of advancing age—nerve pinches, foggy eyesight and memory (it’s “funny” how I seem to remember “details” from the long ago past better than I do what I did 10 minutes ago), or have trouble picking the “right words”—a person I work with surprised me when I told her about the age I just turned; she thought I looked 35.
I don’t think so myself, but then again it explains why some assholes I encounter on the street who have stereotypical ideas about people who I “look like” think I have drugs to sell (“Hey man, do you have any ‘cream,’” which I had to google to find out what that was), or trying to break into their car (beep, beep--beep).
On the other hand, I see people who say they are my age who can barely walk without a cane, or younger people laying out on the sidewalks or standing on corners shouting at nobody. I think to myself what happened to those people somewhere along the line? I’ve had it tough too, but I’ve never been out of work for more than two weeks since my schooling ended; I moved from Sacramento to Seattle with $600 in my wallet and my old Army duffel bag on my back over the Fourth of July holiday of 1991, slept in a park for a few days, then convinced the manager of a run-down apartment on Capitol Hill to rent me a room for $220 a month, and the security deposit took almost everything I had left.
The second order of business was finding any kind of income; it’s kind of “funny,” but there are people who seem to think that robbing or conning people out of their money is an “easy” way if making money, but I never thought that way. If the Army taught me anything, making enough money to live on the “legal” way is “easy”; I'm just not "clever" enough to do it a different way.
So I saw something in the Seattle Times classified pages that listed something that you could just walk in and you'd have a job someplace the next day (OK, security guard), and I lived on hotdogs and water for a month until I could afford, say, the buns and maybe ketchup too. Since then I acquired quite a job “resume,” none of it that had anything to do with my college degree—unless what I am doing “write now” is a “job,” albeit one that uses up most of my "free" hours and has never paid a cent.
People may say, damn, if they had done this or not have done that, life would be different, as if it is the difference between being rich and famous or in jail and/or dead. Of course you can do something that can cause both those scenarios to occur, but it really comes down to personality, education or actual talent. If Trump had not inherited his father’s real estate empire, do you really think that anyone would like, let alone trust, someone like him to give him a job? Trump, as noted before, was said by one college professor to be the “dumbest” student he ever had, and his numerous bankruptcies and business failures testify to the fact that he really is not that bright, and his current "wealth" is grotesquely inflated by his intellectually worthless social media holdings. As this guy suggests…
…Trump’s cognizant decline is stunning. One wonders if he is on a cocktail of drugs when he appears on television interviews spouting those simple-minded clichés that people are supposed to interpret as “common sense.”
If Biden was similarly in “decline,” at the very least we can say that he and the people working for him did not possess evil intentions as does Trump and the egomaniacs whose activities either Trump seems completely clueless about, or is just glad that they are doing his “speaking” for him. One thing I am “thankful” about is that I at least won’t have a chance to end my days “working” to go down in the history books as the worst and most despicable man to ever to pollute the office of President of these United States.
I suppose that when I was a teenager in those long ago days some people thought I was one of those "lost" people who was going to end up dead or in jail. So it wasn't surprising that when I ran away from home at the age of 14 (for all of 12 hours) nobody asked why. What did I find so "bad" that I couldn't take living at home? Nobody wanted to know my "opinion," or thought I had any motivation other than one that I was just a "bad" kid.
But then again, I
was an "accident" that wasn't supposed to happen, nothing like my
half-siblings who were obviously "white" like everyone else in the clan. I was
the "oldest," but that didn't mean any special "privileges," like doing all the "chores" without receiving an allowance (and don't ask for a quarter to buy soda on a hot summer day while being forced to go pedaling your brother's bike in his "competition" with some other kid to add to its "mileage"), or be the only one to not have braces installed to straighten out your teeth like the "others" had to make themselves more "perfect."
I was just this “animal” that those white kids held on the ground and stuffed grass in my mouth. Yeah, those were the "good old days." I was always the odd person out in any social situation, nobody wanted to know why I was so “quiet” and seemed afraid to do anything when people were “looking,” and eventually had to find other ways to fill even the simplest of needs, like eating or reading books.
I never “hung out” with the “wrong” people, or did drugs, drank alcohol or even smoked cigarettes. But that didn't matter; I might have been “living” in a place someone else was paying the bills for, but it wasn’t a place I felt “safe” to do anything except eat when I was told to, and go to bed when I allowed back in house. All the “bad” things I learned, and how society functioned along “white nationalist” lines was ingrained in my psyche at an early age and it fueled a distrust and cynicism about the world ever since.
My family was “Christian” of the right-wing variety and that was enough to form my political and social view against it. While I did for a time exchange letters with Dad, which mainly involved sharing opposing political views 2, that ended when I admitted that I had grown tired of these “discussions” that were pointless; it was way too late to convince me that what is wrong is “right.”
Seeking refuge in books, at first about animals and then history, was something that should have been viewed as “good” behavior and encouraged. But even that could be a “bad” thing subject to punishment, like when I drew pictures of animals inside the books that I thought should be included, or if I chose to “expand” my “horizons.” One day I came home from school and mother had gotten the idea (practically every day) that I had done something “bad” that had to be "rectified," and during this particular search she found a paperback novel in the crate in the mudroom by Irving Wallace called The Seven Minutes, which I recall was something about “freedom of expression.”
But then again you made me watch Bonny and Clyde when I was 7-years-old on a drive-in movie screen; I felt like I was right there with that guy getting shot in the eyeball (actually two people were shot in the eyeball, the store owner and Clyde’s brother) and all that blood flying around at the end in slow motion. But as they say, in this country “sex” is baaad, but violence is the “American Way,” even the kind perpetrated on the truth, democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law.
Sometimes you look back and wonder what you could have done differently; at least I can say that there was one thing that did cause a change for the better, and that wasn’t getting a college degree (save as a way to “shock” people who thought I would end-up dead or in jail). When people talk about the effect of “environment,” that was certainly true in my case; in basic training the U.S. Army treated us like dogs regardless of race, color or creed in exchange for “three hots and a cot,” and even was paid for doing what you were told.
But no more was this "drama" or imposition of a constant state of fear that had the opposite effect on what was "intended." I was actually a “somebody” or at least a “body” doing something “important” while the first "Cold War" was still a "thing."
But the thing is that my “personality”
never changed; people around me joked that I was “everybody’s friend” when of course I
just kept to myself as I always did since I could remember. I can’t help the
way I am, and I was never desperate enough to "break out" of my "shell." Besides, I experienced enough
“drama” when I was a "kid" to last a lifetime, and I’m not into that kind of thing now, ever.
Speaking of "drama," back in the day there was no "cancel culture" or "MeToo" movement. If you were accused of an actual "crime" and it had any merit, due process took its course. Back then, it was still "innocent" until proven "guilty." Look at what happened to Johnny Depp when he
got involved with Amber Heard. You can see when he gives interviews he
sometimes struggles to find the right words for his thoughts, while as we saw
with Heard during that trial, she’s always “right” even when obvious lies flow right out of her mouth like a burst dam, such as about those "donations."
Their therapist said Heard spoke in a “jackhammer” fashion, not allowing Depp to get in a word, and that “Amber used to keep Johnny in fights. I know she led on more than one occasion and started it to keep him with her because abandonment and having him leave was her worst nightmare. The second one is what she reported to me, which is if he was going to leave her to deescalate from the fight, she would strike him to keep him there.” Of course when I was a kid I didn’t have any alternative but to “stay.”
By the way, while the media complains about how female celebrities are "attacked" for how they look or making political comments about Gaza, they seem to forget that those same put-upon female celebrities also have the power to destroy lives with possibly false accusations because they know the media likes a good "story" that fits into the current political agenda. It's "funny," but this abuse of power is occurring in the same environment that Trump benefits from.
One of those YouTubers that I followed during the Depp-Heard case, Colonel Kurtz, is back on another case, this time taking on Blake Lively who is making accusations against Justin Baldoni in order to make her fake portrayal in her self-promoting political film, It Ends With Us, that he directed and co-starred in, be “real.” Here the Colonel got her wish and has finally gone “viral” with her one-person protest against Lively here…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmuQCfZsyyM&t=14s
…and she even got herself some “national” exposure on Meghan McCain’s (daughter of John and a “Republican who is liberal on social issues”) YouTube channel talking about the event. I suppose you have to admire the "guts" it took to do that. The Colonel was even able to obtain the evidence of supposedly “lost” audio from a radio show in which some Hollywood talent mogul name Ari Emanuel admitted his agency no longer represented Baldoni because it was “ride or die” with Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds, and what he did was merely to make them “happy.”
According to Yahoo Entertainment from a story first published by the Daily Mail (the publication which, by the way, helped turn the tide against Heard by exposing who she really was to the world with the release of those audios in 2020), at least one individual claims Lively was—rather than the “good person” her enablers claim she is—was “horrendous” to work with:
Rossella Rago, an actress turned host of the popular YouTube Italian food series "Cooking with Nonna," made the accusations in a TikTok post where she claimed Lively also displayed a condescending attitude towards her colleagues."She would burp and fart in the middle of the set – and act like we were lucky to be smelling her farts," Rago said in her TikTok post, adding, "She was very unpleasant to work with. I just don't know how else to say it."
The chef also slammed Lively's husband, Ryan Reynolds, for enabling her, claiming that he'd "bow down at her feet" when they started dating after her brief fling with Leonardo Di Caprio in 2011. "She is used to being adored, and when she is not, sh-t gets real, and Baldoni has found out how real it gets," Rago noted.
Obviously a true A-list star like Di Caprio wasn’t going to put-up with “shit” from a B-lister as Depp did for a few years. But isn’t it amazing how such allegations can have such traction in the entertainment and private business world, but with when you are Trump and anyone he regards as “indispensable” to his agenda, suddenly this is “fake news”? Trump and his stooges accuse immigrants of rape, but what about Trump and Hegseth?
Now back to the real world. One thing about
being my age is that there is history to remember. And what I remember is that
the political party that held the presidency that was embroiled in unlawful behavior were
the Republicans: Nixon in Watergate; Reagan with Iran-Contra and
the bribery convictions of those so-called “EPA administrators”; George H.W. Bush taking military "action" against two dictators that the U.S. had enabled for years and who "mistakenly" thought they were "acting" in the "interest" of the U.S.; George W. Bush
and his ignoring of intelligence warnings that 9-11 was about to happen, followed by the fake WMDs and Al-Qaeda links justifying the deaths of 5,000 service
members in Iraq; and now this idiot trying to destroy the Constitution and
establish a de facto dictatorship in this country.
I don’t know if I am really all that “happy” to have lived long enough to see this. But thank you Google AI for getting this "right": "Yes, the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees citizenship to those born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction, applies to all individuals, including undocumented immigrants, who are physically present within the country."
What that means is that The Heritage Foundation with its Project 2025 is clueless and Trump's executive order rescinding birth-right citizenship is unconstitutional under any "definition," because even "illegal" immigrants (unlike foreign diplomats) are subject to the laws and jurisdiction of this country.
However, such "niceties" are for some people easily set-aside when you have this case about the Rachel Morin murder, which is a terrible story, but it is only getting “special attention” because the alleged perpetrator is one of the few “worst of the worst” that the Trump administration and the media has found to trot out to condemn a whole people.
Of course if you want, we can talk about Jeffery Dahmer and Gary Ridgway, both of whom were treated as virtual “celebrities” for their crimes. Here 3 is one of my earliest posts from 2010 in which I talked about the Ridgway case which some people might find interesting, insofar as how Dave Reichert road his questionable involvement in “solving” the Green River Killer case to a House seat.
But as long as we are talking about one death, why not talk about potentially a whole lot of them? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Jay Bhattacharya, neither of whom have any real expertise in health care, are one pair whose conspiracy and alternate universe theories, and applying cuts to health care programs and labor, are endangering the lives of potentially many thousands if not millions of people in this country. And Republicans seeking to gut Medicaid, and DOGE with its knives out for Medicare? Why are these people not being held to account for potential deaths, because their actions resulting in deaths would be de facto homicide?
Meanwhile, people are supposedly concerned about the economy, with Trump delivering his version of "shock treatment" with tariffs all over the world, and the effected countries awaiting the fallout. Yet they paradoxically support mass deportation; they don’t understand that there are 8.3 million “illegal” workers in the U.S. (according to the “guestimates”) and deporting even a large number of them will have a dangerous impact on the economy because they are filling jobs needed to keep the economy growing, when there is apparently not enough “native” workers to fill them.
Does Trump--or rather his "advisors"--believe that the economy will crumble to the point where there will only be jobs for the "natives," who will just have to suck-it-up and do those jobs that they feel are "beneath" their "dignity"? If employers can’t "find" such workers, they either will lower production, raise prices, or go out of business, causing more reduction in related jobs, and reducing economic growth even more, probably into the negative.
And let’s get “real” about this: Until the 1965 immigration law, Latin Americans, since they were considered part of “America” and its people having a shared history and European culture, were not subjected to immigration “quotas” and the Bracero program for legal seasonal work was in place. Illegal immigration was low and “manageable” if on occasion subject to “drama,” and Hispanics were generally treated—at least in film and television—as ordinary people like everyone else, save that they had different views of family and their place in American society.
But things have changed dramatically since then, and it is the fault of policy-makers in this country. I’ve already talked about the disastrous effect of the end of the Bracero program and how it led to increased illegal immigration, and how the “fixes” by policy-makers only made the problem worse by making it even more difficult to lawfully immigrate to or work in this country because, apparently, this country is responsive to underlying racist attitudes that for a time were not admitted (too) publicly. “Experts” today (or those with no knowledge of history) say the “problem” is “understandable” by just mentioning “illegal immigration” without talking about why we have this “problem” in the first place.
I mean, why would anyone "understand"? Look at a couple of films recently. West Side Story was a huge hit and Oscar-winner in 1961 (admittedly it didn’t “hurt” that there were few actual Hispanic actors in it), while Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake was a critical winner and box office bomb. What had “changed” since then? Hispanics are no longer considered a mostly harmless cultural curiosity but now “heinous monsters, criminals, gangsters, violent murderers and rapists.”
While I don’t think much of the new Snow White film, and it appears that it is being review-bombed on IMDB by people who all they know about the film is what they "heard" about it, Rachel Zegler is easily the best thing in the film (I mean, she can even sing), and to be fair, her earlier comments about her character was in relation to the “updated” revision of the story by the feminist-minded screenwriter, whose “vision” Zegler obviously felt compelled to defend. But is that the real reason this film has flopped at the box office? No, because given the current political climate, if there is anything a white audience would hate more than a black actress playing Snow White, it is a not "real American" Hispanic actress playing the part.
So it is that today non-Hispanic Americans couldn't care less about what Hispanics think about the world they live in that they are pigeon-holed in due to stereotyping and prejudice. Many Hispanic voters were under the false impression that if they voted for Trump, he would show “appreciation” for their support by not lumping them all into the same fetid stew from which most people today seem to be gulping down by the shovel-full.
You hear these stories about local law enforcement in red states complain that the Hispanic community doesn't trust them and won't report crime; or at least that is what they think. But even if true, the community knows that this is a "cover" to conceal law enforcement cooperation with ICE not only in the deportation of those arrested for reported crimes, but the "collaterals" who may even be the ones who reported a crime.
I don’t know if I am really all that “happy” to have lived long enough to see anti-Hispanic racism break out into the atmosphere covering the whole country, since I am made to feel it personally. But alas, here I am to see it and talk about it.
And at least I have lived long enough to see the hypocrisy in this world come full circle, or more truthfully, between a rock and a hard place. There is a culture of prejudice against Hispanics at Metro and in city employment and service in general; this is how just one black Metro bus driver was treating me until I sent this image to Metro’s complaint department…
…and some new guy (also black) at the mailing store that I’ve been paying rent for a box for 26 years apparently believes people who look “Mexican” to him are not human enough to attend to. But that is the way of our world today.
I don’t know how much longer I have on this planet, but on the "good" side is that these bigoted fools and Generation Zs who voted for Trump will have to pay for their mistake on their own. And you know what? While I wait for that day I can play all those “Have a Nice Day” songs from the Seventies I have stored in MP3 format on my phone if I need to “get away” from this sick world we live in now for a few minutes at a time, songs that allow you to wish how the world was like, but mostly isn't and maybe never will be.
I feel sorry (well, not really) for those people who have chosen narcissism and nihilism (or if you like rap and hip-hop, vulgarity and crime) as their musical “inspiration” today. I’ve said enough about Taylor Swift’s “greatness,” but I have room for those who think country singer Morgan Wallen’s stuff is “great.” I chose not to "assume" anything and listened to all his songs that made the top-10 on Billboard’s mainstream Hot-100 chart.
My "verdict"? Although I was “impressed” that at least the production appeared to employ actual musical instruments, I found that not only did his particularly twangy voice penetrate my ear canal like someone had just poured a bottle of hot sauce into them, but worse, nearly all of his songs were just as forgettable, and didn't inspire any "hope" for the future, as Swift’s didn't. Wallen can go back and stay in his hypocritical “God’s Country” for all I care (from his social media after his recent SNL appearance):
Back in the day, there was stiff competition for charting songs that were “catchier” than the other guy’s stuff; today, it’s all “relative” with no musical “evolution” in sight.
Since I really don’t like the "real" world we live in today, I watch movies like Adam Sandler's Punch-Drunk Love that suggests that there is still "hope" for relationship losers, and take heart in the fact I can save a little more money now with that “senior” bus pass (from $5.50 to and from work to just $1 good for 24 hours).
And of course I still have my memories about how the world used to be; sure there was plenty of bad things going on, but at least back then, people knew they were bad things. George Wallace, for example, eventually asked for “forgiveness” for his racist past. Unlike Trump, he saw the attempt on his life while running for president in 1972 as a “message” from God that he needed to change; Trump, of course, merely tripled-down on his racist rhetoric and actions, despite the fact that the shooter was white.
And so we see NPR interviewing Boston College law professor Daniel Kanstroom, who tells us that a neo-Nazi like Tom Homan enjoys acting with “needless cruelty.” Deporting people “can be done in an orderly way. They can be done with respect for human dignity and with respect for the law — and they're not being done that way now.” Big "surprise." He goes on to say that
It would be basically impossible to round up and deport 10 to 15 million people without establishing a massive and extremely expensive and extremely brutal police state. You would have to have massive raids, you would have to be stopping people all over on the streets. I mean, that sort of enforcement is exceptionally difficult, in large part, because people don’t come with their immigration status stamped on their foreheads.
Yet people just don't care, because all that matters is getting rid of all these "ugly" brown-skinned people who are not really "human" anyways. I’m just waiting for those neo-Nazis in DHS to make that fatal “mistake” that brings front-and-center the unmistakable evil of their agenda. And yes, Karoline Leavitt, there is a “spiritual” struggle in this country between “good” and “evil,” and it is natural that those perpetrating that evil choose to be blind to it. Now, if a former "blue wall" state can manage to see that they made an horrendous mistake and try to atone for it...
...and decisively vote for a "liberal" to the state supreme court, then that is a tiny step in the "right" direction. Funny how the word "right" can seem so perverse in this day and age.
