I have for years.
And, yes, I know how to golf.
Trump is making it worse. Sure, somebody will accuse me of having Trump Derangement Syndrome, but golf has always sort of suffered from having an effete, upper middle class, wealthy class, atmosphere to it. The sort of game that people who are afraid of the real outdoors might take up.
My view is, I fully know, completely unfair.
And Trump's making my attitude worse.
The Terminator.
I don't know if it will, but that's the prediction being made by those working on it.
And within ten years.
Frankly, I think AI is wholly negative and that we'd be better off it it was impossible to develop. But it isn't, and we've never been able to restrain anything we've developed. What I think the likely consequences are, however, is that it proves so destructive it may end up undoing much of the computer development that's come to date, as a defense to it.
Trump assures us that whatever comes out of it will be "mostly good".
Nothing good will come out of it whatsoever.
Boo
Ted Cruz was so loudly booed that he could hardly be heard in an ESPN interview from Austin.
Cruz deserves to be booed. He's one of worst examples of Republican toadyism in Congress today.
Big statute
Donald Trump, who was in Ireland when I last checked, has proposed that a 30-foot “Washington Colossus” be built to replace a modernist sculpture outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. He's ordering the institution to put on a Washington exhibition in advance of the late President's 300th birthday.
It's interesting that Trump is interested in Washington. Washington would not have been keen on Trump.
Trump doesn't like the piece of modernist art that's in front of the Smithsonian. It doesn't do much for me either, but I don't hate it.
The odd interesting thing here is that Trump spends so much time messing with the architecture of Washington D. C. A big statute of George Washington wouldn't necessarily be bad, as long as it wasn't gilded, but Trump's taste in things is generally complete crap.
Trump golfs in Ireland. M'eh
Tá Trump ag imirt gailf in Éirinn. B’fhéidir go mbeidh an t-ádh linn agus go bhfanfaidh sé ann.
An opinion that nobody cares about.
Trump ventured an opinion that Ireland should be united, by which he meant that Northern Ireland should be incorporated into the Irish republic.
That immediately brought rebuke from Na hUltaigh, who didn't appreciate the US President making the comment. Southern Irish, who have protested his presence in their country, most likely just ignored it.
At any rate, this isn't something that a US President has any business commenting on in the first place.
And, speaking of comments. . .
Open the North Sea
A reporter asked Trump when petroleum prices were going to go down, which was a veiled way to basically saying when is your stupid war going to end, Donald.
Trump replied that oil prices in Ireland would go down as soon as the Irish opened the North Sea.
Wha?
In terms of water depth, while the North Sea is deep, it is shallow enough to be exploited and the seabed is associated with the continental landmass, which is why there are petroleum deposits there.
And the plan is. . .?
FWIW, the North Sea is reaching its terminal production date pretty quick. Most of the petroleum has already been extracted, at least from the British areas. BP is pulling out.
On this, it was North Sea petroleum that made Norway rich. Norway is expanding its production, but the time is coming.
It's coming for Wyoming too.
The plan?
Well, there isn't one. Screaming at the news seems to be the plan.
Shutting down the supply
It's not only the case that King Donald has not managed to restore pre war shipping conditions to the Persian Gulf, over the past week new hazardous conditions were created in Red Sea by the Houthis, Iranian allies and clients, who further caused Saudi Arabia to shut down a transarabian pipeline. All petroleum is back up over $100/bbl.
And in spite of what the Trump administration would have people believe, Venezuelan oil will take at least four years to hit the market in significant quantities to matter, if not ten.
Inflation
Inflation is clearly decelerating even with this slight uptick.
Keven Hassett.
Um. . .okay.
Chickens.
Chuck Gray and Harriet Hageman are refusing to debate their opponents.
That fact alone should mean that they forfeit any votes in the upcoming election.
Their refusal is arrogant at best.
It's noteworthy that neither one of them is any good at debating under stress, and debates this time would be stressful. Both of them tend to just go hostile when pressed.
Voters shouldn't let either of them get away with this.
Last edition:
Maria Bartiromo was given the boot at Fox.
That's really remarkable.
Bartiromo managed to go from being a credible mainstream reporter to a Trump talking head after leaving going to Fox in 2014. Her departure would indicate that we've entered the "Hunt for the Golden Pheasants" stage of the Trump regime in which there's localized uprising. The recent resignation of the Secretary of the Army fits into that as well.
I seriously thought that by this point the 25th Amendment would have been invoked and we'd have a President J. D. Vance trying to cut his own path. People like Hegseth would be gone. There'd be no Iran war and the tariff experiment would be over. What didn't count on wa the administration being made up of radical right wing Confederates and Seven Mountain adherents, as well as members of the Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the SS Charlemagne that have no place to go. So it appears my prediction was incorrect, although there's still hope. Having said that, those who plan on surviving the regime are beginning to make their exit, or are being tossed overboard.
Well, Bye Felicia.
Trying to sell.
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum announced that the Trump Admin will begin a further vandalization project this upcoming week and very clearly he knows nobody wants it, and therefore is trying really, really, hard to sell it. He took to Twitter trying to show that Presidents have so dearly wanted an arch Witness:
Secretary Doug Burgum@SecretaryBurgum
We are pleased to announce that after a very long wait (over 125 years!), we are preparing to start, over the next two-week period, the excavation work necessary for the Great Triumphal Arch and Military Observation Deck, at Memorial Circle on Columbia Island between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. This will be one of the Great Pieces of American Architecture, honoring the history and significance of Arlington Cemetery and befitting the most powerful Capital in the World.
For over 125 years, Congress and various congressionally chartered commissions decreed that a monumental work should adorn Columbia Island. In 1902, the U.S. Senate’s “McMillan Commission” called for “a concourse suited to memorial treatment be established” on the westerly terminus of the Memorial Bridge.
In 1924, the congressional chartered Arlington Memorial Bridge Commission stated, “[Columbia Island] was always considered as a suitable site for formal park treatment, a fitting end for the Memorial Bridge, as well as an important feature in itself.” Specifically, the Commission called for “a plaza with fitting architectural adornment in a measure supplemental to the Lincoln Memorial across the river.”
Despite Congress’s intent, the site became and remains today a barren traffic circle lacking any monumental treatment and significant historic value. In fact, the passage extending from Arlington Memorial Bridge to Arlington National Cemetery was meant to serve as an Avenue of Heroes.
In the years after World War II, Ulysses S. Grant III— who was the grandson of the former president and Union general Ulysses S. Grant, executive officer of the Arlington Memorial Bridge Commission, and member of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission—decried the state of Columbia Island as a “temporary road with an informal circle.” He lamented that “the central plaza on Columbia Island had never been undertaken and seems to be absolutely essential to link together the two parts of the project, namely the main bridge itself and the entrance to Arlington Cemetery.”
Over 70 major cities/capitals around the world, from London, Paris and Rome to Madrid, Athens and New Delhi, all showcase beautiful arches. Interestingly, Washington, DC, is the only major Western capital without an arch. Now after 125 years of waiting, the most powerful capital in the world will be home of the most spectacular and beautiful arch of them all!
M'eh.
Nobody wants it except for King Donny. The irony of building a triumphal arch while losing a war is really rich for one thing, and this is a huge monstrosity.
Maybe if they were going to put something there, they could put up a small monument (not gilded) to Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. He could serve as an example to these guys.
Anything one government builds, another can rip down.
Anyhow, at last there's a really growing movement to rip this crap, including the ballroom, down as soon as Trump is out of office.
This from Senator Ted Lieu:
Here is my prediction: the Democratic presidential candidate who promises to restore the White House to what it looked like pre-trump will win the primary and the Presidency.
I"m seeing a lot of that now.
Just ripping it down might be illegal. But then the Supreme Court has already established that you can get away with building this crap even if it is illegal, and ripping stuff down takes a lot less time than putting it up.
On the White House, by the way, the wings were added in 1902. With one already gone, they ought to take the other out in my opinion and just restore the building to its original architectural integrity. The wings don't look great to start with and the ballroom looks absurd.
A trip down Trump's memory lane.
The Trump administration has announced its renovating the bowling alley in the White House as well.
The bowling alley story really brings into focus the way that the Trump administration, captured by the decaying mind of Donald Trump, is sort of a monument to an imaginary 1950s where everyone was urban, white, middle class, or maybe upper middle class.
I realize that people still bowl, but bowling reached the apex of its popularity in the 50s and 60s when automatic pin setters came in. Golfing peaked later, in the 90s and 2000s, but the mental image of golfing in a lot of ways, in terms of its popular image, is from an earlier era. Ballroom dancing was biggest in the mid 20th Century, basically from when the American population started to rapidly become urban and music, first jazz, and then later big band, dominated.
A popular study of the decline of American culture in some ways is titled "Bowling Alone". A person can look at this in a lot of ways, but the cultural evolution of the country, which has been negative in many, maybe most, ways has hit all of this stuff. One big factor, and yes here we go again, is that the demographic rabbit in the snake of the Baby Boomers changed all of this. Bowling, as noted, is still sort of a big deal, and its charmingly portrayed in The Big Lebowski, but even when I was young most young people didn't bowl, and regarded it as, well, square. Big halls where you had to rent shoes and dispirited older blue collar workers hung out, drank Budweiser, and smoked cigarettes lacked appeal. If you talked to our parents generation, however, you'd see that isn't how they viewed bowling when they were young at all.
Golf had a real reputation as an upper middle class sport when I was young. The sort of sport that lawyers and doctors engaged in and talked shop. I still sort of regard it that way, although that time has passed too, and now I think of it as a sport that is played by old lawyers and doctors. I know that's not really fair, but there's an element of truth to it.
Ballroom dancing is something that was dead as a doornail by the time I was old enough to hit any kind of a dancefloor, by which I mean a high school gym. The 60s had killed it. Indeed, this was illustrated recently by a video going viral of elderly people dancing to AC/DC at a nursing home. I've wondered if that would occur. For years, if you went to a nursing home at certain times of the day, you'd hear The Lawrence Welk Show blaring.
I'll be that's not the case anymore.
Well, for somebody like Trump, who is old, wealthy and likes to golf, and is old, and has big structures, and is old, all this probably seems a lot like taking a trip back to the past, like watching American Graffiti. One thing about the really wealthy is that they hang on to certain social aspects of the past more than other classes, so a wealthy hotelier like Trump probably did grow up thinking ballrooms were cool, and probably still does.
Going back to the past is a pretty strong desire for the old, and particularly strong for the demented old. I'm told that my dying grandmother on my mother's side, as her dying words, noted that my grandfather "sure can play tennis" no doubt recalling what he'd been like when they were young. Trump's now fixated on his reputation and on building. He's building like crazy, and building his way back to the past.
Of course, most old people can't command the entire resources of the nation to attempt to reconstruct an imaginary past.
Sic transit gloria mundi
Trump's monuments in stone will only last as long as Americans tolerate their presence. They shouldn't tolerate them for more than one second after he's gone. The next administration should tear them all down on the very first day of the next adminsitration.
It's necessary.
Last edition:
When I become President, every golf course in the United States will be grazing land.
Same thing with shopping malls.
National Park Service Uprooted on the National Mall
I know how to play golf, but I don't golf. It's boring and sanitized. The kind of sport for people who want to go outside, but fear the outside, or are hopelessly urban. Granted, that's not the fault of all of the hopelessly urban, and that's the place for golf.
Golf is one of those sports that underwent an evolution in my mind when I was quite young. I won't say that is rational or correct.
My mother was a first rate golfer. My father didn't golf at all. None of the men I knew when very young golfed, and when I came to know some that did, as I aged, they were men who didn't do the things, or didn't do them to the same extent, as the men I knew. Golfing men didn't hunt much, they didn't fish much, they weren't going to be found at brandings. They all tended to be from the upper upper middle class, or the lower wealthy. In my mind, they were effeminized as they were playing what seemed to me to be an effeminate sport.
That view of golf hasn't changed much for me and indeed its been reenforced as I've grown older. I know that there are some really manly men that golf, but I don't know very many. Of guy's guys that I know that golf, there's one really nice guy I know who does, and that somehow fits him. He's a computer guy. And there's one that's just too out of shape to do anything else, and you can be pretty out of shape and play golf if you use a cart. Neither of them are effeminate.
I don't think, actually, that these feelings are as unique as a person might think. At one point in time lawyers were associated with golf (not anymore) and some golfed as they felt they had to. This was particularly the case with new lawyers. I've known at least two new lawyers who golfed as they thought that's what lawyers did. Interestingly, of those two lawyers, I know a third person, a woman, who insists that one of them is "gay" just by her observations of him, even though he's been a married man for years. Maybe the golfing was too effeminizing.
In a weird sort of way, Donald Trump emphasized this a couple of years ago when he simply gushed over his probably totally fictional observations of the size of Arnold Palmer's penis.
Seriously?
Oddly enough, golf was definitely associated with lesbianism at one time. This was the case for decades, and in some ways it cuts against what I'm noting here. As a sport, it was a sport that women could participate in and do very well as professionals, and so perhaps, maybe, women who were sort of masculine in their internal inclinations participated at a higher rate that would have simply existed in the general population.
Oddly, golf at one time was highly segregated in every imaginable way. Blacks flat out weren't allowed on private golf courses, but often women weren't either. Lawsuits were required to end that. Wealth played a role to play on private courses, and still does. Indeed wealth played a role in keeping women off of golf courses, as business deals were conducted on them from which they were omitted, and that helped bring about the lawsuits later on.
All that probably offends my Irish egalitarianism.
I can't say much for golf.
Golf also seems to me to be the ultimate boring urban upper middle class excuse for a sport, at least at one time. Manly men might shoot hoops, or go play flag football, or something, but at one time towns and real estate developers put in golf courses as it was the default sport for aging white people.
Tennis is the other urban sport, or was. It's joined by basketball and pickle ball in that category, the latter being a newer sport whose existence I don't understand. The thing is, however, that to play any of those sports well, you really need to be in shape. The same kind of guy that can really drive a tennis ball over the net can drive a baseball right down the field at lethal speed.
Supposedly golf has declined in popularity in recent decades, and its notable that at the same time the demographics of the country are changing. Golf was heavily racist at one time and indeed it was more recently than a person might imagine, although there have been some really notable Hispanic and Black golfers. Golf is apparently of Scottish origin, where it would have been pretty darned manly, so its an import of the British Isles. People from other cultures don't really have any roots in it, and for that matter, lots of European Americans don't. Shooting was the sport for Germans, and competitive shooting, like polo, was a major military sport. Shooting was, and in fact is, a major civilian sport in many parts of the country. Basketball is an American sport, as is baseball, and both were played by rural and lower middle class demographics at first. Basketball is particularly interesting this way as it comes from farming country with bitter winters, so its a good indoor sport for a lot of pretty athletic people.
Football is actually of British origin, but the origin is from the British lower class and it reflects that origin to this day. Hunting is a male human universal, which recent anthropology suggest had more female participation in antiquity than previously imagined.
Gardening, hunting, shooting, walking, running and nearly anything just seems to have more merit that golf. But it hangs on in the minds of the elderly, a game of privilege from their youth.
So that a bloated old man with money would choose to wreck things for golf, makes sense. People tend to hang on to the era in which they were young, and the wealthy have more of an ability to do that than other people. The super wealthy have the ability to afflict that on everyone else.
It was a Saturday.
Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business.
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Last edition:
Walter P. Chrysler incorporated the company that bears his name.
The Great Syrian Revolt against the French started when representatives of the Jabal Druze State were treated poorly by the French administrator. Syrian rejection of French rule, however, had been smouldering since the end of World War One.
Indeed, this ties right into the events we've been otherwise cataloging regarding France at the end of World War One. Syria and Lebanon had been granted near independence during the war, which France tried to renege on as soon as the Germans were defeated. Only British intervention, which nearly resulted in fighting between the French and British, stopped that from occurring and assured rapid Syrian and Lebanese independence. French insistence on occupying the same territory at the end of the Great War nearly resulted in fighting between the same two European powers then and France had never been welcome by most of the regions inhabitants.
French attachment to the region is hard to really explain, but it is in part cultural and goes all the way back to the Kingdom of Jerusalem,1099–1187, 1192-1291, the long running "Crusader Kingdom" in the same region. Lasting almost two hundred years, the kingdom, which was mostly governed by French Crusaders, formed a strong cultural attachment to the region with the French.
The Saturday magazines hit the stands.
Last edition:
President Ford requested Congress to provide South Vietnam: $722 million in military aid and $250 million for economic aid, an absolutely massive amount in 1975 dollars. He also asked for the lifting of Case-Church restrictions in the event U.S. military intervention became necessary to help American citizens in Vietnam. He asked for a response by April 17. . Congress declined and expressed doubt that the aid could arrive in time to be useful, which, quite frankly, absent direct American intervention, was probably correct.
His appeal reinforced by recent successes by the ARVN at Xuan Loc and in IV CORPS. Units of the ARVN were fighting well.
We also start today with a surprising recollection by the Department of Defense recalling events that commenced on this day in 1975.
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The legislature of the Kingdom of Sikkim voted to become part of India.
Lee Elder became the first African American to play in the Masters.
The Masters must be played surprisingly early in the year.
Last edition:
The Distillery Bandits, who were apprehended after a gun battle, were all veterans of the U.S. Army's cavalry branch.
William Jennings's Bryan's motion that the Presbyterian General Assembly cut off financial support for any Presbyterian body teaching evolution was voted down.
The Mark dropped enormously.
The President played in a newspaper golf tournament.
It was Saturday on this date in 1922, and the Saturday Evening Post went to press with a female golfer, an odd choice for a time of year that's nearly winter in much of the country.
The Naval Academy formed up its midshipmen for a portrait.
While a huge tragedy was unfolding in Turkey, a smaller tragedy struck closer to home.
I know the Bolton Creek Road well, but I know of know oilfields on it, although I can think of a fwe abandoned wells. Bear Creek enters the North Platte near where Bolton Creek does, but I don't know of any place that the Bolton Creek Road crosses it. Having said that, there is a good modern bridge across Bear Creek, which is normally dry, on an improved road which just recently was the subject of controversy when the current owners of that ranch, the Martons, attempted to sell it to the Federal Government only to encounter the objection of the State. Hopefully that will be worked out soon.
Anyhow, that would seem to be the probable location of this accident.
Georgetown and Bucknell played a football game.
Radio met football on this day when KDKA broadcast the West Virginia v. University of Pittsburgh game.
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