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Joe Rogan wants to add Mexico to the Trump land grab which made me laugh because well isn’t this the same Mexico that Trump is building a wall for the specific purpose of keeping Mexicans out of the USA. Talk about your crossed wires here. Doesn’t this defeat the purpose of building the wall in the first place? It would be easier to let the Mexicans that want in to the USA in and leave the rest of them in peace.

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For those still wondering why Trump got elected, look no further than the news that a lab leak was the likely cause of COVID19. Liberals and Democrats greeted this seemingly bombshell revelation with a sang froid that borders on indifference.

Now things would be different for me if the government scientists, at the time, were open to the possibility of lab leak being a possible explanation but they weren’t. They vehemently denied the possibility of a lab leak and accused any one who suggested it of being a racist. There is a big difference between an I don’t know and a they are wrong and shouldn’t be spreading such nonsense.

It is a big problem and the Left is ignoring it as if it never happened. Like if we don’t talk about it, it will somehow go away. Why would Trump and his buddies drop such a good example of government malfeasance? These people are not idiots. They also seem to have their pulse on a large segment of the American people. So I guess underestimating Trump and the wreckers will go on for the foreseeable future.

This is the only conclusion you can have when you consider:

  1. Trump was right about something very important. He claims that Dr. Fauci and the government scientists were lying about COVID and, it turns out, he was correct, at least about the lab leak theory. Yes there is still a low confidence that a lab leak is the culprit but it is now considered the most likely explanation of all the known possibilities. This isn’t what the government was saying in 2020. They were saying a Lab leak couldn’t be responsible and people who claim that a lab leak was responsible are racists. Trump has every right to gloat.
  2. It gives credence to every new crackpot theory that comes down the pike. All the crackpot has to say is well they lied about the lab leak theory. How do your respond to that? They are correct which is really bad news because too many people already listen to these crackpots. Now the voters have evidence that the crackpots are right. This is why the truth is important when dealing with people in a democracy. How does it help your cause to lie today when people will eventually discover you are in fact a liar?
  3. Belief in Government is already painfully low. This admission confirms every bad thing that the anti-government types claim our government does. If the Government wanted to momentarily placate the Chinese government while they got more information, I get it. This is a completely reasonable position. Withholding information, however, is different from a lie. The government could have said, and rightfully so, that they just don’t have enough information to determine the source of COVID and they are keeping an open mind. I can live with that. But no they aggressively denied any possibility of a lab leak. This turned into an overkill involving character assassination and dissembling. This was wrong especially since many of these scientists knew that a lab leak was the likely cause.
  4. Finally, it is an incredibly stupid lie to tell. If many scientists believed that a lab leak was responsible for COVID then this information was destined for revelation. Someone eventually was going to spill the beans. This should have been obvious as soon as scientists began sharing their suspicions with other scientists. So why lie in the first place? To keep the Chinese happy? Why? The Chinese stopped co-operating with UN officials fairly early in the crisis. Once this occurred what possible benefit could come from keeping the Chinese happy? But everybody in the know just kept their mouths shut. They may know a lot about biology but they are crap at public relations. They have damaged their reputation for being trustworthy. Why would the world believe these people when they announce the next pandemic?

This bothers me personally. I put my trust in these people because I saw no reason for them to lie and they knew more about viruses. Boy was I wrong. It is an unforced error that has done great harm to Liberalism, Science and Government — pillars of our democracy that are already under siege.

And, yes, I hold people on the Left to a higher standard which makes this so much more disappointing. I think democracy and liberalism are the best route to take for a better world. It hurts when my own side fucks up so royally. The good news is that you can’t say you don’t understand why some people voted for Trump. They believed they were being lied to and it turns out, in this case, they were right.

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“Architect” from Frighten Rabbit and Manchester Orchestra is my favorite depressing song right now. You know the song. The one you play when you are feeling blue and listening to this song connects somehow with your sadness and maybe if you play it, your sadness will quickly be purged and you get back to normal. And it usually does the trick better than a therapy session with a psychiatrist. You know the song. Well, this is my quick fix depressing song right now.

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Bobby Darin’s Mack the Knife was my parent’s favorite song. I have heard this from both of them at one time or another. Although my mother was more emphatic about it, it didn’t take much thinking on my father’s part to agree.

This makes me laugh every time I hear Mack the Knife. The song is about a paid killer dispatching his victim’s body into the river. No two hearts beating as one or you light up my life or any such romantic nonsense for my Mom and Dad. No, my parents hearts went all squishing when hearing about a murder victim bleeding to death in an alley.

So, if you are ever wondering why I turned out this way, this might be your first clue. This should tell you a lot about my upbringing.

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I tried to write about music and I have published a few (Sunset pigs, Peggy Lee and Marie) but I sometimes think I sound like a really bad Rolling Stone album review. “Great guitar playing.” Like I know anything about guitar playing. Seriously. I haven’t a clue about the difference between good and mediocre guitar playing.

All I really wanted to do was pass on music that I liked and a very brief explanation on what I liked. It might just be a line or two but then this is a blog and it is meant to be brief and to the point. And you can also see why it takes me so long to publish anything. I have a tendency to overthink.

This means I am giving up on deep thoughtful reviews and just going to muse hence the title Musical Musings. Snazsy name, right. about music. So get ready, I am about to unload about music.

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Elon Musk clarified something that has been bothering me for some time. I was always wonder how Hitler could kill so many people. I mean he was just one man. It seemed highly unlikely, at least to me, that Hitler could dispatch six million Jews all by himself. But, then, Elon Musk comes along to explain that actually Hitler didn’t kill anyone, it was civil servants that did the actual killing.

WTF. Really, like this somehow absolves him. I do have to give him some credit for looping in the true evil here — civil servants. Not Hitler, but civil servants. Hitler is a misunderstood genius much like Elon Musk while civil servants, if left to their own devices, are likely to commit genocide.

This is why when people try to explain that Musk is a genius, I flinch. A smart man would see the problem here. People keep calling me a Nazi. Every time I start talking about Nazis I get unflattering headlines. Maybe I should stop making any comments about Nazis and, in this way, I will stop getting so much bad press.

That he fails to understand this problem and continues to step in it belies his genius status.

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Whenever I think of Donald Trump, I remember that Americans actually admire swindlers. How do you explain vacation time shares? Or must try diets? Or Alex Jones vitamins? Amway? Telephone Sales? Trump University? Swindlers, grifters and telesales people, whatever you want to call them prevade the American landscape.

The problem for Americans is the victims of the grifter. They are an annoying lot. Whining about being taken advantage of when they simply should have just been smarter. Or more suspicious. Or more assertive. Or something better than they were in order to stop themselves from being taken advantage of. Americans may pretend to take a dim view of the grifter but really they are more upset with the mark.

Think about a story where someone takes advantage of someone. Invariably you will hear: how could someone be so stupid as to fall for a story like that. The grifter is just doing what grifters do but the victim, now there is where the trouble is. They let their guard down. How could they do something so stupid?

There is an admiration for the grifter for coming up with such an ingenious grift. But the mark. There is no sympathy for the mark.

Think of the society we have created. We tolerate grifter behavior, even say it is the grifter’s right to grift. They can phone us, email us, text us and even, if they are old fashioned enough, knock on our doors. If you don’t want what they are selling, all you have to do is say no. Some of us are so good as to be actually polite to these assholes trying to sell us things we don’t need or want.

The poor grifter is just trying to earn a living. Yeah, right, off of the gullible. More troubling is that grifting is a rich person’s crime. Time shares. Crypto coins. Life Insurance and any number of suspicious business practices are initiated by the rich to take even more money from the poor and the gullible.

This is where our real estate developer president comes in. He is a known grifter. He was convicted of being a grifter in regards to Trump university. He provided his students with a college degree that was meaningless. He also has a history of stiffing trades people right at the point when a non-payment becomes a misdemeanor instead of a felony. Misdemeanors are handled in small claims courts and are rarely worth the money you have to spend to get the money owed. Ka-ching. This practice by the rich has become so pervasive that trade’s people are now marking their prices up in order to recoup what they are rightfully owed. The lesson here is you have to grift in order to deal with grifters.

Since Trump is know to be such a talented grifter, people might think that here is the man to deal with our corrupt system. Yes he is grifter but, then, so is everyone else. Who better to handle the other grifters than a fellow grifter. The problem, as with all marks, is that people have a tendency to think that they can spot the grift and will save themselves from the grifter. That, is, of course, what all marks think.

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Sometimes the choice you have is between two bad options. Neither option is particularly desirable but a choice has to be made nonethless. I am afraid this is the position Chuck Schumer was in when he decided to go forward with the Continuing Budget Resolution. One option is to shut down the government, which is what many Republicans want in the first place, or continuing funding a government which Trump and company are trying to dismantle.

Fighting the funding seems like a losing battle with possibly worse results than just continuing with the present chaos. What exactly Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez expected Schumer to do is unclear. Fighting for a better bill, particularly when large segments of the Republican party would love to shut down government permanently, seems like a losing battle with the stakes being even greater chaos than we are presently experiencing. Primary him if you must but Schumer is making much more sense to me than Ocasio-Cortez.

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There is nothing more annoying than a white man whining about how badly white men are treated. So I don’t encourage reading Matt Walsh’s cri de coeur about how people should be thanking white men for all the good that they have brought to the world. But, if you must, the rundown can be found below:

” I am proud to be a white man. I think that if anyone’s writing an article singling out white men, it should be to thank us. After all, as I said recently, this country could not exist without white men.”

“The vast majority of the greatest pioneers, inventors, thinkers, leaders in the history of Western civilization have been white men.”

Isn’t that a mouthful of bullshit? There are so many juicy targets here, I don’t know where to begin. His basic premise is both wrong. All you have to do is google inventions by Blacks, then change Blacks to Asian, then change Asian to women, and you will find significant inventions from members of all these groups. So what exactly does he mean when he writes “Nearly every good thing you have in your life — everything that makes your life safer, more comfortable, more enjoyable — was given to you by a white man.” Walsh has written a tricky sentence here both allowing him to acknowledge that non-white men may have contributed something to civilization while, also, allowing him to repeat his false assertion of “everything.”

Then there is White Men tend to tell stories that make White Men the heroes. So, when he talks, for instance, of the pioneers he is failing to acknowledge that these White Men followed paths that the Native American population already travelled and, in some cases, they were assisted by a Native American guide. This changes the story significantly. Lewis and Clark didn’t just wander into the woods and find Oregon. Non-Whites told them where to go. But Lewis and Clark got to tell their story in a way that it looks very much like White Men found the pathway across the continent when they were traveling paths used for centuries by non-Whites.

Most importantly, since White Men have been the most powerful people these past few centuries, it also stands to reason that they are responsible for every bad thing that has happened too — like industrial pollution, World War I, World War II, Racial Prejudice, and the subordination of Women. When you are in charge you have to take the good with the bad. Walsh wants you to thank white men for the good while ignoring the bad. It is a much more complicated legacy than Walsh would have you believe.

Which makes his whining so irritating. Poor White Men. No one appreciates them. Get out your handkerchiefs.

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Donald Trump is trying to position himself as the realist in the ongoing dispute between Putin and Zelenskyy. He wants Zelenskyy to come to terms with his inability to win the war. OK. Fair enough. But Putin is in exactly the same position. Putin can not win it either. So why is he only applying pressure on Zelenskyy? And why is only one side making concessions in this great deal that Trump is working on.

Furthermore, why is Zelenskyy getting the blame for trying to start World War III? Putin invaded the Ukraine. Doesn’t Putin deserve just a little bit of the blame then. If nothing else, for being impatient. What kind of shit sandwich is Trump expecting Zelenskyy to eat?Surrendering more land to Putin is all I am hearing, so and, wait I forgot, wait there is some promise from Putin that he will never never invade again.

What a deal. I am sure that it sounds pretty empty to Zelenskyy whose county has been invaded twice in the last 10 years. I keep thinking I am missing something. If not, it seems like an incredibly bad deal with Zelenskyy conceding land for nothing. And, I can’t believe this one, Trump wants Zelenskyy to thank him for his help.

My mind is blown. What a nakedly apparent betrayal and humiliation of Zelenskyy. And Trump is loving every minute of it. He is taking revenge on the world with no concern for tomorrow. He has absolutely nothing to lose now.

Since he is a lost cause it would be helpful for the wise men in the Republican Party to step up. There comes a point when getting reelected seems secondary to the world and to the future. But I guess not. Silence. Mostly just silence. And some of these guys have nothing to lose. Senator Grassley is 91 years old. What is the risk? What a bunch of cowards. Lots and lots of cowards.