Time to Stop Playing

  Some of my earliest aspirations in life were pretty easy to name: either a soldier or a policeman. Both seemed awfully community-minded, even though I had no idea what those words meant. I did know soldiers used rifles and bombs and tanks, while policemen drove cars with lights and sirens. What could be better than that?

Cowboys and Indians before political correctness

After school time was spent pretending to be both – at different times, of course – with the neighborhood kids who toted plastic guns, fake hand grenades, and sporting army helmets, while meandering through nearby woods. When not playing soldier, we played a variation called ‘cops and robbers,’ or yet another, ‘cowboys and Indians.’

We were divided into teams – good guys vs. bad guys – and the good guys usually “won” any foray-du jour. But I digress.

No matter the fantasy we were playing, we realized we were not real soldiers or real policemen; it was fun time for our creative, inquisitive minds.

Eventually we outgrew these activities, graduating to board games – inasmuch as video games had yet to be invented – which kept us busy until we discovered something called ‘girls.’

The rest of that girls thing is fodder for another story at another time.

But we knew the difference between pretending to be something and the real thing. I recall occasions when our parents would take us aside to explain that The Three Stooges, as well as Superman, were fake, and we could get hurt clobbering each other on the head with a hammer, or jumping out a window while wearing a tablecloth.

None of use were that stupid, although evidently our parents thought otherwise.

Still, we had fun because we were kids and we were grounded in semi-reality.

Not unlike early television’s Big Time Wrestling in days of yore, when grown men would toss half-dressed opponents through the air onto the mat in order to evoke cheers from the crowd, most of us knew there were likely some shenanigans going on with these black & white TV athletes of the time.

Recalling our parent’s warnings about Superman, we avoided diving off the back porch onto our next door buddy to replicate a move we saw Pat O’Connor or Killer Kowalski effect; we were young, but not necessarily dumb.

Pretending back then was fun, keeping in mind it was not real. Today’s kids, however, have appeared to gravitate away from playing soldier, while keeping the cops & robbers thing alive. Unfortunately, today’s kids are different; they now use stolen real guns, and shoot to kill to steal cars, money, drugs, and even to settle a perceived disrespectful glance from a stranger.

“Crazy!” you say? Sure, but it’s real. Today that fantasy portion of kids' lives has vanished, and kids are no longer kids. Rather, they are now products of emotional manipulation by activist teachers and politicians who have been grooming and coddling this new crop of miscreants to wreak havoc on society.

It seems as though children in our modern world are being pushed – rather shoved – toward futures not of their liking. Just as I am in my twilight years, I look in the rear-view mirror of life and don’t see a soldier or police career looking back. Yet I am proud of my mediocre life choices, and fondly recall my youth.

Kids today, though, are being mentally abused into believing they are not what or who they think they are. Some schools have even introduced litter boxes in classrooms for kids who think they are, or want to be, cats. No lie.

Teachers/educators are avidly instructing and encouraging children to secretly change their sex. Going as far as to claim preventing life-altering sex-change operations for adolescents is actually child abuse and cruelty, teachers have clearly joined the battle against family and sanity.

“What???” you say. Yes, you read that right.

Eight-year-old children are being encouraged to change their sex if they ever felt as though they might have been born “with the wrong body.”

So as not to upset the parents or stop this irreversible surgical procedure, the children are sworn to secrecy, keeping any thoughts or conversions from their mommies and daddies.

To normalize this sick, sordid “transition,” Madison Avenue-types have boarded the Sleazy Train, along with a handful of suicidal corporations.

A few weeks ago, Budweiser found a transsexual whose only claim-to-fame is that he/she became a sex change individual. ‘It’ kinda looks like a woman, while kinda looking like a man. Icky.

Budweiser’s infinite wisdom incorporated this now freak-of-nature to proudly represent their Bud Light line of beer. Unfortunately for Budweiser, their Bud Light sales fell faster and farther than Wile E. Coyote off a desert cliff. In fact, the female genius behind this ad campaign was summarily placed on “extended leave” status. I’m guessing that’s another way to say ‘punishment for screwing up.’

While all this made headline news, clothier Calvin Klein, who apparently is unfamiliar with a newspaper, thought it would be a great idea to put a bearded black man wearing a woman’s swimsuit, in their latest ads. Perhaps they are also unfamiliar with competitive swimmer Lia Thomas. Perhaps.

Not to be left out of these bone-headed ideas, a little-known retailer named Target proudly rearranged their store displays to place female swimwear front and center in their stores. Included therein are bathing suits with sewn-in ‘hammocks’ for guy parts, aka.: family jewels. These gay-oriented swimsuits are made with unmistakable rainbow patterns, clearly identifying users as a guvment-protected class member.

Outgrowing pretending child-age fantasies is a natural progression in life. Everyone cannot be, or wants to be, or winds up being what they wanted to be, later in life. Regardless of what the anointed on the Left say, those children – all children – belong to their parents. And it’s the parent’s responsibility to assure their place in child-rearing.

Don’t allow Leftists to dictate their wishes over your obligation as a parent.

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Fork It Over

   

A long, long time ago, during my formative years, I, as nearly everyone else, learned something called “life skills.” Being a young child of perhaps three-years of age, I recall my parents instilling those life skills into my little brain of mush.

I already conquered walking upright, the bathroom drill, mastering shapes and colors, manners for being in the proximity of others, speaking distinctively, and reading. Now I was working on even more important things such as household behavior.

Whether at home or in a home belonging to someone else, I was taught a different, additional set of skills that answer many questions about you of outsiders and strangers, alike.

Picking up anything you dropped, being seen but not heard, not making a fuss, no shouting, acting like a miniature adult, plus using words such as “please” and “thank you” and a polite address such as Mrs. and Mr.; adults were not merely big kids – they were altogether different.

To calm and distract me, I recall my Mother reaching into her purse to retrieve a small handful of ‘green army men.’ Green army men, in case you’re unaware, were little plastic soldiers that came in a variety of different poses. And, they were green.

There were no flesh color differences, but they carried an array of weapons to include rifles, machine guns, mortars, and hand grenades, all very necessary to complete whatever task a three-year old was battling on the floor at the time. What a great distraction from boring stranger talk. But I digress.

In any case, these life skills continued to expand and evolve into more voluminous, as well as complex, abilities not readily discernible at that time.

Bear in mind, way back when, America wasn’t dealing with teachers trying to change the sex of children, getting blacks to hate whites, getting whites to hate blacks, obtaining free intravenous drugs from the government, wearing useless N-95 masks under threat of prison, contending with violent street thugs, carjackings, random robberies and shootings by savages, and threat of a nuclear war. I was still learning new skills.

Our small family didn’t come from money; we earned every penny we spent while valuing what we owned instead of lusting for what we didn’t have.

Because we were less-than-wealthy we didn’t eat out much. Whatever was available in a restaurant was equally available at home. But before I was allowed to join my parents in a restaurant, I needed another life skill.

Watching television lately has been quite eye-opening for me. I have noticed that not everyone in America possesses the same life skills I have. Madison Avenue has long-been known as America’s advertising hub. Powerful “ad men” have been guiding us – often unwittingly – through our daily routines with clever advertising touting products ‘we can’t live without.’

Sport utility vehicles, swimming pools, craft beers, the latest fashions, cigarettes, vacation cruises, as well as pharmaceuticals, are all available for consumption, compliments of Madison Avenue, to encourage us to buy stuff we can’t live without.

Many of those Madison Avenue products involve food; not just any food, but food that requires tools.

Short of being a feral animal, everyone should know how to use these eating tools which include spoons, forks, and knives. Wealth didn’t matter, nor did optics, during my formative years. Using eating utensils, on the other hand, did.

This etiquette speed bump precluded me – and a few years later, my younger sister – from being seen in public, eating.

The impetus for this essay was my seeing food product ads on television for cereal, soup, and other nutritious edibles, with actors using flatware in an amateurish way. Being groomed to fit neatly into civilized society, I thought the ad men involved would be more attentive to their product presentation.

Clearly I was mistaken. An interweb search of “proper way to hold a fork” returned an amazing number of results – something I was not expecting.

There are pictures, story lines, videos, among the volumes of instructive writings and explanations of proper ways to introduce sustenance to ones mouth.

Terms such as “shovel” and “cave man” appear quite often when referring to moving the dinner or salad fork from the plate.

An example of the inappropriate "shovel hold"

A big deal? In a word, YES. Evidently, roughly 40% of America’s population are unaware of the correct use of a tool we use several times every day, throughout our lives. That isn’t necessarily important, but when Madison Avenue-types regularly show ape-man style shoveling of food to consumers, we can deduce at least a few ad men fall into that 40%. And that’s critical.

My search for validation didn’t end there. It seems as though just as important as forks – everything from salad, dinner, dessert, seafood, asparagus, bread, cheese, carving, serving, and fish forks, can all be viewed there while appropriate grips are also available for scrutiny, FYI.

But also contained therein are references to the operation of an accompanying table knife. For those readers in Canada who are terrified of any weapon, hence the elimination of dangerous firearms, a table knife is a utensil that normally accompanies dinner forks at the table.

And those deadly weapons of war – cleverly hidden in the form of butter knives, according to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – may have all been confiscated for public safety, by now. Once again, I digress.

The world is currently chock full o’ influencers who attempt to do just that: influence. They urge followers to wear, eat, vacation, drive, apply makeup, exercise, vote, even sleep, certain ways, all for the benefit of clicks and likes.

I believe it is time to encourage Americans to properly hold forks while dining. They may think they’re smart, however they prove otherwise once they begin a meal. Chew on that.

Way Too Much

 Last week’s story, Spending Lots, detailed how much money is drifting around not only Washington, D.C., but the entire world.

This week has produced another exposé on how much cash is frittered away by the Washington elite on the backs of hard working Americans.

Before the fellow elected to the Office of the President of the United States, Joseph Robinette Biden, decided to run for that office, a man named Donald J. Trump served in that capacity from 2016 through 2020; that is only one term.

Quickly approaching yet another quadrennial presidential election, is a proverbial Congressional wallet that is empty. It is empty because President Biden spent his few short years on the job speding money like no one else in history.

Biden, who was elected with the absolute largest number of votes in United States history, a controversy created by his not leaving his basement during the election, garnering an amazing number of mail-in votes, and doing nothing but complaining about his opponent while on his campaign bus, raised many an eyebrow.

Yes, after 45-years in guvment service, Biden pulled-off the single greatest coup in the history of America. This stunning amount of approval has been generating multi-million dollar voting-related lawsuits and Congressional investigations at near-record levels, too.

Already prepping for the 2024 presidential election, Biden has been attacking his presumed opponent – the aforementioned Donald Trump – non-stop in a concerted effort with the mainstream media (MSM) to stack the deck by repeatedly invoking the contrived phrase, “MAGA Republicans.”

According to White House administration officials, MAGA Republicans are devotees of Donald Trump who created and ran on the slogan “Make America Great Again,” during his initial political run – and what a successful run it was.

Dealing with a slew of problems inherited from the Obama/Biden administration – the immediate previous politicians responsible for ruining America’s racial harmony, total failure of the national infrastructure, and global animosity – Trump, as President, began a crusade of mending and healing our fractured nation to improve life for everyone.

With the MSM’s thumb on the scale of objectivity, along with the intelligence and counterintelligence communities largely working together covertly to present a media case for punishing Trump for fixing what the Democrats intentionally broke.

One major issue was the influx of foreigners from Central and South America pouring across our Southern Border. Trump attempted to stifle this invasion of largely troubled individuals who are: unvaccinated, non-English speaking and reading, unskilled, undisciplined, lawless, and unhirable.

This earnest effort led to a solution grounded in building a physical wall composed of steel, and reaching between 18 and 30 feet in height. To achieve this goal, Trump attempted to contract the materials and labor out from the then-Democratically-controlled Congress.

He needed an estimated $5,000,000,000, to complete this barrier to ensure our nation would be safe from invasion, not to mention illegal drug flow. Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Leader Chuck Schumer, both denied President Trump funding for this ambitious project.

As an end-around play, Trump then attempted to use the U.S. Military to build the wall, only to be summarily stopped by the anti-American Congress at that time.

Legal gymnastics imposed by frivolous annoying lawsuits hampered any and all means to secure our citizens from most preventable dangers. In this instance, it’s unfortunate that Congress controls the purse, thereby preventing the President from spending guvment money on his pet project(s).

Homeland Security was given a reallocated $600,000,000 from a Treasury Department forfeiture fund for continuation of this much-needed border wall, a project that continued until Inauguration Day of Joseph Biden in 2021. That’s when Biden signed an Executive Order eliminating the continued building of the national lifesaver.

This clear dereliction of duty on Biden’s behalf has resulted in a disastrous display of foreign migrants flooding the Southern Border to receive their just desserts: free housing, free food, free debit cards, free cellular phones, free school, free medical care, free college, free medications, free driver’s licenses and finally, the ability to vote.

Since his inauguration, an estimated 5,000,000 aliens crossed the border, most of whom had no paperwork, no identification, no vaccines for anything from polio and smallpox to COVID-19; many of whom – although entry is virtually guaranteed – still slithered across the border surreptitiously.

But it’s the $200,000,000 border wall funding that is important in this story. Alejandro Mayorkas is the Homeland Security Secretary in the Biden Administration. Mayorkas, who always publicly speaks as though he is inebriated, has been called before Congress on several occasions to explain how 5,000,000 aliens were able to cross the border without resistance.

Hapless Alejandro Mayorkas once again
insisting, "The border is closed."

On each appearance, Mayorkas has simply said, “The border is closed,” in his best defense. Recognizing a lack of candor, Congress has demanded Mayorkas reappear to field more questions about his handling of our sieve-like protection.

According to Stephen Dinan of The Washington Times, “Some $200,000,000 in wall money will expire at the end of this fiscal year in September [2023], said House Appropriations Committee Chair Kay Granger, Texas Republican. Another $2.6 billion more will expire in coming years, she said”

“The question was repeated over and over, but the secretary wouldn’t give a straight answer,” Dinan’s article continues.

“I can assure you that we will comply with all our legal obligations,” Mayorkas said.

Well, that’s refreshing! The Homeland Security Secretary assures us he will comply with all his legal obligations. It doesn’t appear to matter that that is his job. And letting billions of already allocated monies go unused, collecting dust, while Biden is adamant he will not interact with the Republican Congress to avoid the upcoming default on our National Debt loan, borders on criminal.

It’s about time to rid America of Mayorkas, and the Biden Organized Crime Family. How about a nice impeachment? And while Congress is at it, throw Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in, for good measure.

Spending Lots

 

 Let’s begin with some ‘fun with numbers.’ Numbers are those things that so many Americans dislike because they never, ever end.

There are only 26-letters in the English language, but there are literally endless numbers; those can very quickly become overwhelming, which leads to terror.

Growing up, the really big number we bandied about was “million.”

If, years ago, someone appeared affluent, they were referred to as a millionaire. A million dollars is genuinely a lot of money. For example, imagine you had a million dollars, and spent a dollar a day from the day Christ was born – that’s 2023 years ago – you would not have yet spent a million dollars.

Today, however, is a bit different. Over the years, things got a lot more expensive due to many things including inflation and globalization. Our next rung in the numbers ladder is a billion. A billion is actually pretty easy to determine size because a billion is a thousand million. That’s a lot, too.

Here’s an example of how much a billion is in terms of volume. My last job lasted 31-years before I retired. Now for some fun facts: there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day. All that equates to 86,400 seconds in one day.

Spending a dollar every second, without days off for medical appointments, sleeping, vacations, or traveling, you would need more than 31 years to spend a billion dollars.

But just a few years ago, the Barack Hussein Obama era ushered in something called “trillion.” A trillion is a thousand billion. According to my calculator, in order to spend a trillion dollars, you would need to live more than 31,000 years to spend this mother lode. That’s a nose-bleed number for almost anyone – except Joe Biden, that is.

Our current president, Joe “Ol’ Plugs” Biden, is working especially hard to reach a new record for spending money, and has proved himself genuinely adept. He, since he’s been in office for the last 2½ years, has pushed our National Debt to over $31,707,407,800,310, as of the time of this writing. Now’s a great time to review the last four paragraphs.

Click here for the actual 👉  National Debt Clock

The National Debt should not be confused, though, with the National Deficit. The Debt is what the guvment owes after borrowing the monies it so desperately needed because it overspent like a bunch of drunken sailors – my apology to drunken sailors.

The Deficit, on the other hand, is the shortcoming of money requested from Congress. Imagine you want a new bicycle that costs $200. Unfortunately, you only have $125 in your bank account; you’ll either wait and save the extra 75 bucks, or borrow the $75. The guvment loves borrowing, hence the Debt. That’s the way the average consumer works.

However, if the guvment wants more money, they merely raise taxes. And that’s irresponsible.

Of course, the Debt is fluid due to the ever-increasing interest rate on the borrowed money.

Adults should know about the perils of borrowing simply because of the perpetual hole being dug every second that debt goes unreconciled. It’s too bad our political leaders don’t have a clue about from where money comes.

Alas, they really do know where it comes from: you. Yes, you and your taxes are what feed any guvment behemoth, and it’s now rarely done covertly, unlike in the past. Years ago, politicians would fain public safety for increasing taxes on such things as cigarettes, gasoline, and even rain!

Ol' Plugs enjoys repeating the lame phrase, “Make the rich pay their fair share.” While catchy, there aren’t enough billionaires in America to even get our Debt down $1,000,000,000,000.

But with the advent of the internet and select television channels such as local government operations and CSPAN, information has been traveling far and wide, quickly. Now, parents, concerned residents, businessmen, as well as school children, are able to watch and comment to legislating bodies for the benefit of all.

Today we find ourselves facing another guvment mugging in the form of a surprised President Biden who, while dealing with a self-induced recession, and subsequent soaring product prices and interest rates, has been blaming “MAGA Republicans” for all his woes.

Its’ not as though Ol’ Plugs Biden had no idea how much the guvment surplus is, he has intentionally driven the economy, along with his out-of-control spending, quickly flying toward the recession mountain, only to now blame this financial mess on anyone but the guy in the mirror.

Months away from a new budget, Plugs has finally drawn a line in the sand with GOP Representatives who have the ability to accommodate Biden’s administration with even more cash to prevent a default on the Debt loan. Fingers crossed, the Biden administration is doing gyrations to raise the “debt ceiling.” His luck may be running out, though.

This game of chicken is not going to end well. But it should be mentioned again, that Plugs and his fellow Democrats voted for one trillion dollar spending bill after another.

Although Biden has been in the guvment in one position or another for nearly a half-century, he is still unclear on how to accept responsibility his reckless actions and sleight-of-hand in introducing his misnamed bills to fool the taxpayers into supporting his rash spending.

Biden has now reached a crossroads where he must either wait or continue spending on credit. Personally, I’m much too broke from our horribly disastrous economy to be able to afford a tax increase just like most of the rest of the country.

Mr. Biden: show some restraint and pity on the country.