Posts

Posted on

When Is The Media Going to Do Their Job?

From Palmer Report:

Last night Donald Trump tried holding a town hall with his own supporters and an on-stage babysitter, but after just a few minutes he announced that he wouldn't be taking any more questions, and instead insisted that he and the audience spend the rest of the event listening to music. For the next thirty minutes Trump stood there on stage, at times frozen, at times directing the music with his arms, before he was finally led away.

It was one of the most mentally incompetent things that has ever happened in the history of U.S. presidential elections. And it's not as if it's something new. Trump's cognitive abilities have been on a downward slope for years, and it's become particularly pronounced over the past few months. He doesn't know who anyone is. He doesn't usually know where he is, and when he does occasionally remember, he lashes out at whatever city he's in. He talks mostly about sharks and batteries and cannibals. And now he's just standing there for half an hour in the middle of what supposed to have been a town hall.

If the major political media outlets aren't willing to cover Donald Trump's obvious senility and worsening dementia symptoms after this, then these media outlets might as well just shut down and give the money back to the shareholders. You can't ignore something like this. Not when it's this severe. And not when it's this important. This isn't some aging rock star trying to hide dementia, where the worst thing that could happen is a bad concert. This is a major party nominee for President of the United States, and a recently convicted felon at that, who's within four points of winning. We're talking about nuclear launch codes here, in the hands of a dementia patient who just spent nearly an entire "town hall" standing there pretending to direct music while a confused crowd looked on.

I'm not saying any of this to try to scare any of you who are reading this. You know the stakes. I'm saying all of this in the hope of shaming the mainstream political media into finally doing their jobs. Donald Trump is so glaringly deep into dementia, the media is not going to look biased by admitting it. If anything the media looks biased for trying to downplay what everyone can see is happening.

I've been saying all year that Trump's worsening dementia would end up being the story of the 2024 election, and now we're seeing that come home to roost. Kamala Harris and her campaign are now making Trump's medical competence, and his refusal to release his medical records, a central issue down the stretch. And there are no doubt persuadable voters who are seeing clips of a senile Trump and deciding to vote for Kamala Harris for reasons of safety. But when is the media going to do its part?

Posted on

Dust

The house we live in was built in 1948. It still has the original drafty, single-pane steel casement windows that it came with.

While I'm not as assiduous a housekeeper as I was in my youth, I still do make an attempt to keep things clean and tidy. But in this house it's a never-ending battle against dust. It seems like I wipe everything down, and two days later everything is covered again. So I get disheartened at this and two days often turns into two weeks. I used to visit my Dad and was aghast at layers of dust covering everything in his house. "I just don't have the energy any more. I start cleaning and give up halfway through." I couldn't understand it then, but now being close to the age he was when he told me that, it's becoming abundantly clear.

And yes, we've discussed hiring someone to come in and clean…

My office is an especially bad dust magnet, although the living room—where the majority of our tchotchkes reside—is a close second.  One of my office doors leads directly into the laundry room and that in turns opens directly to the back yard. Our back yard is basically bare dirt most of the year with a small patch of grass that has somehow managed to survive under the shade of the single elm tree that sits just off the patio.

If the yard alone weren't enough to send clouds wafting in through our even-when-closed drafty windows, when Raffi gets the zoomies, his favorite activity outside is to tear around in all that dirt doing doggy donuts.

Since we moved back in here I've been threatening to hit a home improvement store and buy a few dozen rolls of stick-on foam weatherstrip and line the inside edge of every window in the house…but I still haven't gotten around to it. After going through the place yesterday and wiping everything down yet again, I really need rethink the urgency and get to the task sooner rather than later because spending the better part of a single day dusting is not my idea of a good time. BUT… if I don't get around to it before the end of January, it will be one of my immediate post-retirement projects.