Racine, Wisconsin: Mitchell School under construction during a graupel storm at dawn.

October 15, 2024: Mitchell School in Racine, Wisconsin under construction during a graupel storm at dawn.

Another Week: Number 95

by | October 20, 2024

There has finally been a break in our extended summer. We had rain on and off Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday — and even a burst of graupel — with temperatures in the 40s. But the sun and warmth returned by the end of the week.

On Sunday, I overdosed on the televised NFL. I can pay a reasonable amount of attention to one game, but three becomes torture. The action stops so often for “further review,” injuries, two-minute “warnings,” and regular commercials that you continually lose the plot and any momentum. I did go on a store run wearing my (previously Amy‘s) Chicago Bears T-shirt and was kind of tickled to get some dirty looks.

Juncos are back for the winter.

Spectrum, my internet provider, is now running ads promising “life unlimited,” which seems similar to “life everlasting”. I have put up with two of their hours-long outages in the past two months.

On Monday, former president Donald J. Trump gave up on answering questions at a “town hall” event in Oaks, Pennsylvania, and decided to sway to oldies from his eclectic campaign playlist instead.

On Thursday, news broke that Israeli Defense Forces had stumbled upon Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and shot him in the head, and TV analysts predicted that this either would or would not bring the year-long agony in Gaza to a conclusion.

I got out of the house a little bit this week. I had a meeting with a local nonprofit on Wednesday, and helped Wendy straighten out her laptop some on Thursday.

On Friday, I walked 3.49 miles around Kenosha’s downtown and lakeshore.

 

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Trump proposes military action against political opposition

On Sunday, in an interview with Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business, former president Donald J. Trump identified “the enemy within” as a ”bigger problem” than his usual boogeyman, migrant criminals:

I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the — and it should be very easily handled by — if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.

So who does Trump identify as “the enemy from within?” Well, congresspersons Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi. The former president wants to use the military against two members of Congress who had the nerve to impeach him for crimes he committed in office.

Then, discussing this during their interview on Fox News, Brett Baier tried to gaslight Vice President Kamala Harris and his entire viewing audience by omitting the first 30 seconds of the answer Trump gave earlier the same day on Fox, in which he doubled down on his ”enemies” attack.

As a kid, I loved Hans Christian Anderson’s The Emperor’s New Clothes.

Now, though, I’m living in a twenty-first-century America where half the country sees that our former president is a dark and dangerously demented despot-to-be, and the other half thinks he’s a delightfully uncouth conqueror sent by God.

This is the most ominous October of the sixty-four I have known.

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Trump’s Bloomberg interview in Chicago

On Tuesday, Donald J. Trump sat down at the Economic Club of Chicago and was interviewed by Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief John Micklethwait.

The entire hour was a disturbing display of Trump’s incoherence, hostility, and sheer ignorance — but one moment stood out to me: Trump’s responses to whether Alphabet (Google) should be broken up.

First Trump veered completely off track into his legal case regarding Virginia’s voter purge, which has no relation to Google whatsoever.

Micklethwait finally repeated the question, and then Trump answered:

Look, Google’s got a lot of power. They’re very bad to me, very, very bad to me. I can speak from that standpoint. They only had bad searc— in other words, if I have 20 good stories and 20 bad stories — and everyone’s entitled to that — you’ll only see the 20 bad stories.

And I called the head of Google the other day and I said, “I’m gettin’ a lot of good stories lately, but you don’t find ‘em in Google.”

I think it’s a whole rigged deal. I think Google’s rigged just like our government is rigged all over the place.

Here, in this little retelling of “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” you have the perfect crystallization of Trump’s idiocy.

Alphabet is the second-largest technology company in the world with annual revenues of $307 billion. It employs 181,000 people and affects countless aspects of our daily lives.

Yet Trump’s overriding concern is Google’s effect on his reputation. He is an icon of narcissistic personality disorder.

He doesn’t have the foggiest understanding of how Google works. He has the vocabulary of a dunce, reducing the most complicated issues to either “good” or “bad,” with only “very, very” available for further articulation.

Then he tells a clearly false story about calling “the head of Google the other day” with his grievance about search results — attempting to impress his audience with the way he can throw his weight around. He’s a bigshot.

This answer should be an ad. Want to put a narcissistic pinhead back into the most powerful job in the world? Trump’s your guy.

The question about breaking up Google comes 38 minutes into the video above.

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Lincoln (2012)

My mom is a huge fan of Abraham Lincoln, but she has not seen Steven Spielberg‘s two-and-a-half-hour movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis, so I pressed play at her apartment on Saturday night.

Amy and I saw Lincoln in the theater 12 years ago, but it was worth watching again.

People often say “the big screen” offers the best movie experience, but I remember being somewhat awed by the cinematography, the music, and the costumes and sets. Rewatching the film on Mom’s 50-inch screen allowed me to focus more on the plot, which is basically Lincoln’s arm-twisting of congressmen in order to gather enough votes for the Thirteenth Amendment which constitutionally abolished slavery.

Most of Spielberg’s films leave me about 85% satisfied, this one included. It has many fine aspects. Day-Lewis is very good and Sally Field is excellent as Mary Todd Lincoln.

Mom enjoyed it quite a bit.

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Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers

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