Month: April 2025

in Jurassic Park, “Nature will find a way”.

Yes it will. The Dire Wolf, as most of us have surely heard by now, has been brought back from extinction with two currently 6 month old males and a recent female pup. All that’s needed to create a Dire Wolf pack, and more can be brought back now that they have the science and procedures down.

Dire Wolves are going to be in huge demand at zoos and “safari” type parks, and there will be colonies of them, all properly fenced, of course, in various states, where, eventually and without a shadow of a doubt, at least one will escape and mate with local wolves or dogs and LO, a whole new predatory species will be back in action, just like the old one.

Dire Wolves had natural enemies, like Cave Bears, Cave Lions, giant sloths, and strangely, all these species disappeared about the same time. Or not strangely, since the presence of Man in North America and points south has now been established at at least 23,000 years ago, during which time all our major predator/competitors died out.

Try to imagine a population of deer surviving very long after a pack of Dire Wolves moves into the area. Can you? I can’t.

I can hardly wait until they start bringing back the other big predators. The DNA of dinosaurs lives on in birds, lizards and crocodiles, just as Dire Wolf DNA does in modern wolves. Almost no difference, it’s amazing. Horned toads are so cute, I wonder what one that weighs a few tons would eat, and how close the DNAs of ostriches, emus and the extremely vicious Australian cassowary are to ancient raptors? It sure would be fun to find out, right?

Not with a Death Star but with a movie ban. This is both ridiculous and sublime, and I have to thank China for it. How often do we get to see this rare combination?

China, which puts tariffs of American imports at over 200% and has for decades, is irate at the newly increased tariffs against their goods. They were increased by 10% in February to impel the Chinese to stop the flow of Fentanyl into the US. Instead, the Chinese increased their tariffs against us, as we’ve all heard by now, so Pres. Trump increased ours on them today to about 104%.

Prior to this latest increase taking effect, China threatened to ban all Hollywood productions if it did increase. Old movies, new movies, they may all be banned from being shown, I assume online as well as in theaters.

Since US movies shown in China grossed about $600 million last year for Hollywood, this could put a real dent in the income of all those movie makers and actors. So maybe they should focus on making really good, popular movies instead of pouring millions into Woke trash like the horrible parody of Snow White. You think?

The Chinese may just do us all a huge favor, because all that Woke tripe Hollywood’s been churning out has most of us staying out of the theaters. We love a good movie, it would sure be nice to see one again.

Two MEN have advanced in the Ultimate Pool Pro Series to the final round of its Women’s Pro Series event, and one of these guys who will be the 2025 champion will be a biological male. Their names are Lucy Smith and Harriet Haynes. Yup, they put on dresses and shaved, and that entitles them to unfairly compete against women.

This is a competition in the game of pool, not a swimming competition, just to be clear, and is a commercially sponsored contest. The tournament is one of Ultimate Pool’s efforts at promoting 8-ball pool competitions in the UK, where men used to be men.

Well, actually, they still are, but you can go to prison for calling these freaks men, it’s called “mis-gendering”. There’s no actual laws against it but don’t do it twice or that’s harassment, very nasty, off to prison with you.

We here in the USA were going this same route, with men in lipstick beating hell out of women, in martial arts and boxing fights, swimming meets and other sports, until Pres. Trump signed an Executive Order banning this BS.

The USA and UK have always mirrored each other socially and politically, right up until the start of this year, and now we’re on totally divergent paths. This is just a side note to this post, I can’t help wondering if our change in direction will provide enough pressure to bring the UK around to rationality. Considering all the Muslims and all the Sharia Law stupidity they’ve allowed, I mean, my god, a Muslim mayor of London? It may have been too late years ago. Hopefully it’s not for the USA.

A while back I mentioned that it was just the really bad illegals that were going to end up being deported, that the threat to evict the millions of them who poured in during the last administration was hollow, that it wouldn’t happen.

So far, the only deportations we’re seeing are the cartel members, the tattooed freaks with their heads shaved being loaded onto airplanes bound for El Salvador. There’s no apparent effort at all to deport all the others who have come in, an estimated 30 million of them.

By pure coincidence, no doubt, I mean, they wouldn’t have planned this all along, would they? Pres. Trump has imposed tariffs globally, big tariffs, that are going to force us to start manufacturing goods here again, and looky there, there’s all those foreign workers.

Many of them are currently living on welfare handouts and their numbers are swelling with the hundreds of thousands of government employees who are joining the unemployed and will be desperately seeking jobs.

So I have my usual predictions based on all this, which are that manufacturing is going to take off like one of Elon’s rockets because of the pressure of all those seeking work and the fact that for awhile, labor is going to be cheap again entirely because so many will be competing for the jobs. A big, eager work force that will work for low wages is any manufacturers dream. Old factory buildings will be quickly refurbished and put to use and new ones will be built in a hurry. We can pre-fab a lot of structures now.

My other prediction, which seems pretty obvious, is that the streets of America are going to be cleaned up and the homeless gone. Vagrant laws will start being enforced again as these people are sent to work farms to produce food for the rest of us. This used to be a common practice with vagrants and minor offenders, and you watch, it will be reinstated. I say this because as America goes back to work making Made In USA products again, local pride and national pride will make a comeback and mayors who won’t clean up their cities will get the boot.

There will be TV and online testimonials from ex-homeless who will sing the praises of the programs that gave them back their lives, cities will compete for Cleanest City. Things are really going to change. Imagine being in San Francisco and it doesn’t smell of open sewage anymore. Won’t that be nice.

Increasing the import duties on foreign cars by 25% will make imported cars cost more. It will not make US made cars cost more. The same is true for everything else made in the USA, cost to consumer stays the same except for inflation, which never stops increasing.

The US imports most hard goods, such as electronics, nails and screws, coffee grinders, etc. and prices will increase because of the added duties, but competition between brands will cause them to absorb some of those duties, and American manufacturing is already stepping up to make these goods here again because now they can compete again in price.

Also, the prices of foreign goods has gone up a lot since our manufacturing went overseas because their worker wages have increased as their own standards of living increased, so their goods are not nearly as competitively priced as they used to be. By the end of Trump’s four years, that have barely started, Made In The USA will be stamped on almost everything we buy again instead of Made In China, and the quality control will be to OUR standards instead of their nearly non-existent ones.

This won’t happen overnight, best estimates I’ve seen are that it will take about two years for our manufacturing to take over again and the marketplace to level off, and until then, things are going to be more difficult economically than they are at present for most Americans.

It’s vital for us to go through this because otherwise our country will never recover from the loss of our manufacturing and the rapidly increasing national debt, and our nation will become bankrupt. Once that happens, every nation that owns a piece of us will take over our assets. If you think the temporary stock market downturn now is important, wait until you see the utter collapse of it if the USA goes bankrupt.

The USA is the backbone of modern civilization. The Dollar is the world’s currency, Made In America was until recently the global standard and needs to be so, once again. It’s the USA that’s upheld the standards of democratic government, personal rights and human freedoms across the globe for others to emulate and our problems now are the result of the degradation of these standards here at home. The reasons are too many to get into for a blog post, but any of us who’ve paid any attention at all don’t need to be reminded why.

If the USA goes bankrupt, so will the world economy. The tariffs are about far more than just saving America’s economy, they are literally about saving human civilization from stepping backward into anarchy as everyone fights each other over our scraps while international trade collapses, and the starvation, diseases and riots spread.

This isn’t an imaginative overreach. If the US fails, China will start attacking those nations no longer supported by us, so will Russia, and the EU will be doing it’s best to suck up all the territory it can. It’s not a big stretch to imagine nuclear weapons being used and maintaining the economic integrity of the United States is the only thing preventing all this.

Why do you think China and other states have been trying so hard for so long to destroy our economy?

The US may have to leave NATO before long. The bloc is “heading south” in terms of their original purpose, which is, or was, to protect each other in the event of a member state being attacked by a non-member. It’s purpose is not to defend non-member states and Ukraine is a non-member.

Any NATO state may sell or otherwise provide munitions to any state but not send in troops unless it’s a NATO state under attack, yet this is being planned under EU auspices. That doesn’t matter, they’re still members of NATO.

Meanwhile, Turkey is moving troops into Syria as a direct threat to Israel, the US’s strongest M.E. ally, and Turkey is a NATO member. The US does not want to find itself in defense of Israel against Turkey, and in defense of member nations under attack by Russia because they invaded Ukraine. The only tenable position is to withdraw from NATO, allowing the US freedom from pressure to engage itself in undesired and harmful involvements.

If the US leaves NATO, that organization may not collapse but it will certainly do some major reorganizing. Germany mostly runs the EU and it’s not hard to imagine them taking over NATO and converting it to a dictatorial military force that brings even more restrictions on the freedoms of Europeans than they’re suffering now. “1984” definitely comes to mind, that scenario has been on the increase in Europe for decades now anyway.

Barack Obama, when he was campaigning for President, said that he was going to “fundamentally transform America”, and he did, he boarded the ship of state, took hold of her helm, swung it far to the Left and held it there for eight years.

In that time, homosexual parades of naked men became common on the main streets of our cities, while the economy cratered, homeless encampments of drug addicts grew, the streets became open toilets, our colleges became centers for Leftist demonstrations and our children were encouraged to have their genitals mutilated.

Purely due to overconfidence in their ability to steal the votes, Donald Trump became President, but his attempts to reverse course were stymied at every turn by not just the openly Left but also his own party and even almost everyone in his cabinet that he himself appointed. Not to be outdone again, the Left made sure that he lost re-election and their puppet Joe Biden was installed as the front man while they swung the helm Left again for another four years.

Now the mystery begins. Donald Trump ran for President again and this time he was easily elected. No doubt there was vote stealing by the Left but the effort was minimal. They could have stolen the election again, but chose instead to let Nature take it’s course and allow an honest, more or less, election.

The assumption is that there was a power shift among those who actually run most of the world because what they had been trying wasn’t working out well and it was time to let the rudder swing back more to the Right and try a different Fundamental Change.

This may be due to the radical shift that Western Europe has taken, with citizen freedoms being radically curtailed, people thrown into prisons for expressing their opinions, teachers fired for refusing to use students “preferred pronouns” and so on. In France, Pres. Macron has had rival candidate Marine Le Pen imprisoned and barred from public office, in a clear move to establish himself as Dictator of France. Crime in Europe is out of hand, with knifings, child rapes and mass murders by fast moving vehicles becoming commonplace along with thefts and assaults.

The European Union, which started out as an economic cooperative bloc, has transformed itself into a de facto government over its member states. Europe is a mess and the USA was following directly in its footsteps.

Not anymore. The fundamental changes now occurring in the US are actually staggering compared to what Obama caused. The entire structure of government is being overhauled, major bureaus are being shut down or drastically reduced in size, government spending is being audited and waste is being almost brutally cut off. The entire bureaucracy is being disassembled. Memberships in international organizations like the WHO and treaties like the Paris Accords have been cancelled, a massive tariff system has been installed, the IRS, FBI, CIA, USAID, all are being audited and fully or partially dismantled and/or defunded.

Our supposed allies and our enemies, both, are being threatened with everything from economic disaster to bombs, to stop their raids on our treasury or their terrorist attacks, depending.

And this time around, the Uniparty is acting like two separate political parties again, Trump’s cabinet so far has not stabbed him in the back, or at least there’s been no reporting of it that I’ve seen, and Congress actually appears to be functioning again in a manner we used to think of as normal and proper, fifty years ago.

This isn’t just another Fundamental Transformation of the USA, not with what’s going on now with Greenland, Canada, Mexico and Ukraine and who knows what other small nations are on the menu. This is a transformation of North and Central American power and beyond. This is a re-alignment of world power. It’s a whole new balancing act.

I remember when Detente was the big global issue, when the number of nuclear armed nations increased and it became a vital issue that we all agree to refrain from attacking each other or else risk nuclear war. Now it’s money and territory instead of A-Bombs, it looks like nations may start consolidating again, absorbing each other into larger economic units if they can’t do it by force. Ukraine is only an exception to this because they don’t have nukes anymore, otherwise Putin wouldn’t be spending so many lives and so much fortune trying to expand Russia’s borders.

The EU tried to become the dominant world power through economic means, and failed. China is still trying to do the same, is failing, so is trying fear and bullying, like Russia. Now the USA is trying economic means along with fear and bullying.

Whatever group is behind these changes, it’s clear that they see the US as being in the best position to win this game, or all this wouldn’t be happening now and Donald Trump would not be at the helm of it. This isn’t cut and dried, there’s internal power struggles and they’re obviously at work against the changes. Personally I would love to see some sort of certain outcome regardless of what it is, and for the turmoil in the world to finally settle down.

No wonder “living in interesting times” is considered a curse.

Considering all the fraud that goes on all over the world all the time, we really don’t need to set a day aside that’s devoted to the commission of more of it, even if it’s just in fun.

Today’s news is a jumble of complaints and injustices that don’t deserve reporting on, so I’ll share a bit about me, instead. What the hell, it is my blog.

I have several hobbies, one of them is collecting, primarily early crystal radios and associated items, and early tube radios. I’m talking 1920’s and prior, and one bedroom is crammed with it. I’ve actually had to stop collecting because there’s no more room for anything in there, not even something the size of a flip phone.

Another hobby is being a lapidarist and rock hound. I’ve collected agates and jaspers from all over the world, and most of it has long since been mined out. These mineral discoveries are always small to begin with and come and go rapidly, with the result that they all become very rare within a matter of a few years, especially the most beautiful and exotic of discoveries.

What I’ve done over the decades is buy a small quantity of each discovery as it happened and the material appeared on the market. I cut and polish a few cabochons of it and save the rest, with the result that I now have well over a thousand cabochons of rare semi-precious stones and several hundred boxes, shoe-box size and smaller, of different material, much of it being no longer available. Along with them are a number of 5 gallon buckets and cardboard boxes full of various agates and jaspers, geodes and thunder eggs.

To work on all these rocks are a variety of diamond saws large and small, several cabbing machines, tumblers, flat laps and a large amount of associated equipment and supplies.

Being a rock hound has found me on many adventures into a lot of pretty remote places, to find and bring home more gemmy new material. I went so far as Coober Pedy, Australia for fire opal but most of my USA collecting was done on the west coast. Most of my collection comes from all over the world, though, from Morocco to Madagascar, Panama to Peru, Mexico to Malawi. Everywhere good stuff is found.

Macular degeneration is causing me to lose my central vision, my right eye is end stage now and my left eye is beginning to darken, so before I can do it no longer, I bought a nice new cabbing machine and I’ve been cutting all those slabs that I’d set aside to do someday, and doing it now. The day has come.

The thing about macular degeneration is while you go legally blind, you can still see. Just not anything in front of you. You keep your peripheral vision, so I’ll be able to find my way around the house just fine but will no longer drive a car, as I’d run into anything right in front of me.

What you have to do is look beside something, then you can see it, but as soon as you do and try to look right at it, it’s gone. It takes some getting used to, so I hope my left eye remains useful for a long time yet. No guarantees there, though.

A lapidarist is a person who cuts and polishes gems.