"The Women"

 

 

The average American reads about 12 books a year.         

Since Sharon has been retired for nearly 10 years, and I work as a substitute teacher, we read more books than the average American. I normally average about 50 books a year, and Sharon averages about 100.

On occasion, we will stumble on a book that is so compelling, that it is hard to put it down.

“The Women” is one of those books.

I don’t remember what organization recommended the book – but I am glad that they did.

I picked it up at the library on Wednesday afternoon, and I finished reading it Friday afternoon, a decent accomplishment in view of the fact that the large print edition of the book is more than 600 pages.

The main character is a nurse named Frances, and she went to Vietnam in 1967 as an Army nurse. Obviously, she lived through some difficult times, and her return home two years later was not exactly a welcoming experience.

In the late 1960’s, the folks who served their country were not treated with respect, even though they should have been

In the first draft lotter, in 1969, I drew #169, which meant that I would have been drafted in May of 1970. Naturally, I went to every guard unit and reserve unit in the Twin Cities, and joined the first place that called me, which was a National Guard unit in St. Paul, where I eventually spent 6 years of my life, meeting once a month, and 2 weeks every summer at a camp in northern Minnesota.

 

I have been to the Vietnam Veteran wall in D.C. and can attest to the fact that there are people that I knew that have their names etched in to the black marble on the all, including a young man named Thomas Brennan.

 

Gary Sinese has done as much as anyone in  supporting the guys that served, and his book “A Grateful American” is worth reading. You may remember that he played the part of Captain Dan in Forest Gump”.

 

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2023/10/fortunate-son.html

The men and women who serve in the military today are treated much better than the folks who came back home in the 1970’s – but not by everybody.

Any politician who thinks that the people who serve in the military are “suckers and losers” is a complete scumbag, and should not be allowed to hold office, ESPECIALLY as commander-in -chief.

Set some time aside and read the book. You will be glad that you did.

 

 

 

 

How America’s worst president got re-elected

 

More than 150 political analysts have determined that Donald Trump is the worst president in our country’s history:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/historians-voted-trump-worst-president-ever/

In view of that fact, how in the world did he get re-elected?

The answer is simple:

Lies

By now, most people have figured out that you cannot believe anything that Trump says.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/

When The Washington Post Fact Checker team first started cataloguing President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims, they recorded 492 suspect claims in the first 100 days of his presidency. On Nov. 2 alone, the day before the 2020 vote, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection.

 

This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of Trump’s tumultuous reign. By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.

 

What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth.

 

Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year. Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.

 

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/

 If you watched his debate with either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, you may have noticed that he still has an aversion to truth. In addition, if you have been following his rallies, you will notice that that he still has trouble telling the truth.

Having said that, though, how did he get re-elected?

More lies.

This morning, the Washington Post provided more details on his victory:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/15/republican-ads-false-flag/

Although it is worth reading in its entirely, here are a few of the key points:

Muslims in Michigan began seeing pro-Israel ads this fall praising Vice President Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing the Jewish state. Jews in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, saw ads from the same group with the opposite message: Harris wanted to stop U.S. arms shipments to Israel.

Another group promoted “Kamala’s bold progressive agenda” to conservative-leaning Donald Trump voters, while a third filled the phones of young liberals with videos about how Harris had abandoned the progressive dream.

 Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats wanted to take away their menthol cigarettes, while working-class White men in the Midwest were warned that Harris would support quotas for minorities and deny them Zyn nicotine pouches.

 What voters had no way of knowing at the time was that all of the ads were part of a single, $45 million effort created by political advisers to Tesla founder Elon Musk who had previously worked on the presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), according to a presentation about the group’s efforts obtained by The Washington Post.

 Have you noticed that Elon Muck is suddenly “best buds” wit Trump?

Ads tested better if Muslims felt they were seeing a message meant for Zionists, “Bernie bros” felt they were hearing from the far left, and “Zyn bros” felt they were hearing from activists who wanted “a world without gas-powered vehicles,” a ban on fracking and affordable housing for undocumented Americans — policies Harris did not actually support during her campaign.

 “The worst part is Kamala Harris talks out of both sides of her mouth,” said one of the ads, which was designed by Trump supporters to look as if it was advocating for leftist priorities like “free health care” and a “break on tuition.”

 The entire effort grew out of research by Building America’s Future, a conservative political nonprofit that was founded during the first Trump administration by Republican consultants Generra Peck and Phil Cox. With others at P2 Public Affairs, Peck and Cox, former advisers to DeSantis, were top strategists for a separate effort, America PAC, the super PAC funded by Musk to support Trump. Musk donated to Building America’s Future in 2022, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The group’s leaders have declined to comment on their donors.

Starting in February, Ryan Tyson, a former pollster for DeSantis, began holding a series of about 25 focus groups with specific communities of targeted voters, with most of the research effort focused on likely Democrats who were uncertain about voting. The goal was to figure out how to help Donald Trump win during a campaign in which Democrats were vastly outspending Republicans on digital advertising.

 

“Clearly, you had a White liberal demographic that hated Donald Trump. That was without question. You could see that coalition everywhere. But once you get past White progressives, every other historical demographic stronghold from the Democrats just started to drop off,” Tyson said about the effort. “What did exist was a tremendous amount of voters on the left that were disaffected. And the only persuasion question was whether they could be persuaded to vote.”

 

The effort worked in concert with a separate project by the Trump campaign to depress turnout for Harris — knowing that Trump would be unlikely to drastically expand his vote totals. In 2020, Trump received about 74 million votes to Joe Biden’s 81 million votes. In 2024, Trump received a little less than 76 million votes to Harris’s 72.6 million votes. In other words, Trump’s total went up slightly, while Harris dropped about 8 million votes.

 

“The entire goal of the campaign was to push her numbers down,” said a top Trump campaign adviser, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal strategy.

 

Building America’s Future tried to focus its spending where the Trump campaign’s top advisers publicly signaled an interest, investing heavily in Muslim communities that the campaign was targeting and seeking to magnify the candidate’s appearances on podcasts with significant White male audiences.

 

“We studied the strategy that was put in place by Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita and James Blair very closely,” Peck said. “And we did what outside groups can do. We tried to amplify and support the direction in which they were taking the earned and paid media.”

 

They also deployed multiple brands to place the ads, concealing their common origin — Future Coalition PAC, Duty to America PAC, Americans for Consumer Protection and Progress 2028, according to people involved.

 

Democrats grew alarmed in the final weeks of the campaign as the ads started appearing on Facebook and Google. Priorities USA, a Harris-backing super PAC, made efforts to get spots taken down from both platforms because of their deceptive nature. Google eventually struck at least one spot in which one of the Building America’s Future groups took footage from a Harris ad in Pennsylvania targeting Jews and began targeting it to Muslims with the words “This is a real Kamala Harris ad” superimposed.

Other efforts to get ads taken down were not successful. Facebook, which has pared back its ad restrictions since 2020, declined to act on a number of requests to take down ads from Progress 2028 that praised the Harris agenda while also describing policies she did not support in 2024, like mandatory gun buybacks, universal health care for undocumented immigrants and “the most progressive Green New Deal yet.”

 

“There is plenty of blame to go around for another election cycle riddled with misinformation online,” Priorities USA executive director Danielle Butterfield said in a statement. “Big Tech is still unwilling to hold bad actors accountable, Congress is unwilling to step in and write new rules for the 21st century, and Republicans will continue to slander and lie to voters to make their case. Because of all of this, Democrats lose, and we need to acknowledge this reality and figure out new ways to communicate with voters on today’s internet.”

 

The Harris campaign also responded to the spots being geo-targeted to Dearborn, Michigan, where many Muslims live, by running their own digital ads showing the vice president discussing her concern about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

 

What we have already seen is that Trump has picked numerous people for various cabinet positions. So far, the worst possible candidate is Matt Gaetz, who Trump has nominated to be Attorney General. Unless he gets approved by a recess appointment, he has little chance of being approved by Congress – and that is a good thing. Trump’s other cabinet picks are nearly as bad.

So, what do we do know?

For starters, it would be wise to try to limit your exposure to political news, since all us are currently experiencing “battle fatigue”.

There are actually people who believe that Kamala Harris is a communist.

There are people who voted for Trump because they have ALWAYS voted for Republican, oblivious to the fact that the Republican party no longer exists because is now the party of Trump.

There are people who were unable to vote for a pro-choice candidate, ignoring that women living in states that have strict abortion laws (like Texas) are dying because they could not get the care they needed for things like sepsis as a result of miscarriages, non-viable pregnancies, and Ectopic pregnancies. Ireland now permits abortions because a female doctor named Savita Hallappanaver developed sepsis during a miscarriage, and eventually died.

There is nothing “pro-life” about strict abortion laws.

https://www.irishamerica.com/2022/06/abortion-legal-ireland/

None of the people in the examples listed above is going to change their mind – so don’t try to convince them that they are wrong.

 Avoid them if you can. If they are friends or relatives, try to stay with neutral topics.

 After all, the Superbowl is not that far away – and that is no lie.

 

the places that scare you

 

When I was in basic training in North Carolina in 1970, the highlight of the day was when we got letters from home. Other than the time that was allotted for polishing our boots or cleaning our weapons, it was about the only time of the day when we actually had some free time.

More than 30 years later, I got the same thrill about getting letters from home when I was in China. Although my daughter was with me for part of the year, I spent more than 6 months in 2004 living in China by myself. One of the books that my sister sent to me was “The Places That Scare You”, which was written by a Buddhist nun named Pema Chodron.

Here is the summary that was posted on Amazon:

 

Lifelong guidance for learning to change the way we relate to the scary and difficult moments of our lives, showing us how we can use all of our difficulties and fears as a way to soften our hearts and open us to greater kindness.

We always have a choice in how we react to the circumstances of our lives. We can let them harden us and make us increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and allow our inherent human kindness to shine through. Here Pema Chödrön provides essential tools for dealing with the many difficulties that life throws our way, teaching us how to awaken our basic human goodness and connect deeply with others—to accept ourselves and everything around us complete with faults and imperfections. She shows the strength that comes from staying in touch with what’s happening in our lives right now and helps us unmask the ways in which our egos cause us to resist life as it is. If we go to the places that scare us, Pema suggests, we just might find the boundless life we’ve always dreamed of.

The last place I worked in China was the College of International Studies, which was located well north of the city of Guangzhou. To get there from my apartment in Guangzhou Country Gardens, I needed to walk a few blocks to the bus stop in the complex, where I caught a bus that took me to the White Star Hotel in what amounted to be downtown Guangzhou. From there, I could with take another bus to the main bus terminal on the west side of town, where I could catch another bus to get to the college.

From start to finish, the commute was roughly 3 hours each way. As a result, I took the bus north on Monday afternoon, and stayed at the college on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights. On Thursday afternoon, I reversed the process.

When I got back to the main bus stop, I could either take another bus back to the White Star hotel, or I could ride on the back of a motorcycle, which both Kelly and I had done numerous times.

On one occasion, I felt confident enough that I felt I could negotiate a cheaper price from the dozens or so motorcycles that were parked there, and I eventually achieved what I wanted - which should have been a warning.

When the driver took off, he went a different direction than I thought that he should have, so for a few minutes, I assumed that he was taking a shortcut. As we got further away from the hotel, though, I realized that I had a made a serious mistake by jumping on the back of the cycle, but I was far enough along that jumping off and walking back was not a solution either.

As we meandered further away from where I wanted to go, he made a couple of phone calls when he made stops for a light. Eventually, we wound up in an area that was less inhabited, and he pulled into a lot next to a couple of manufacturing buildings. Almost immediately, one of the buddies that he called on the phone charged out, and quickly took a punch to my face, which split my lip, and caused my glasses to fall off. Inside the back pack that I had been carrying was my dirty laundry for the week, a few papers, and the book that I had finished reading that afternoon, which happened to be “The Places That Scare You”, a bit ironic, since I was now in a place that DID scare me.

They got my phone, my wallet, and my back pack with my dirty laundry, and took off.

After my glasses got knocked off, I could not find them in the dark, so I gave up.

Fortunately, I was close to a busy road, so I walked to it and stuck out my thumb.

Since I looked a bit disheveled, and had blood on my shirt, a passing motorist felt sorry for me, and picked me up. In Chinese, I explained to him that I needed to get back to the White Star hotel, which he did. Since I no longer had my wallet, I explained to the bus driver at the hotel that I had been robbed, so I was able to ride back home at no charge.

I had planning on going to a Toastmaster meeting that night, so as soon as I got home, I called my friend Sayed Hahoub, and told him I would not be attending that night.

Within an hour, Sayed and few other of my friends came to my apartment. They then went with me to the local hospital, where Sayed paid for my treatment and my medicine. To the folks who think all Muslims are killers, they can kiss my ass.

 Since the next day was a Friday, I did not have to go to work, but I DID go in the following Monday, where I explained to the students that I could not see them.

The following weekend, my friend Maggie Woo went with me to the optician so that I could get new glasses, which is that pair that I wore for the next few months. Since the lenses were fairly thick, some of the managers at The Autobarn called me “Mister Magoo” until I could afford to buy more stylish glasses.

If you believe in ironies, you’ll appreciate that fact that on the afternoon that I finished “The Place That Scare You” on the bus that I found my self at a location that DID scare me.

I stayed in China for roughly six months after that, at which point, I returned to the Chicago area. However, for the remainder  to my time in country, I never again rode on the back of a motorcycle.

 Fortunately, our local library has a copy of the book in their shelves, so I put it on hold today. 

It should bring back a lot of memories.