May 13, 2020

Joan Jett & the Blackhearts - Have You Ever Seen The Rain (CCR cover)

May 12, 2020

Maybe he won't even care about that because he'll be fixated on

trying to salvage the Trump Organization. He'll have so many deals in tatters, so many investigations into his finances, and so many lawsuits that unless there's a lot of money in it he might eschew politics altogether except for the occasional RW interview. Maybe I'm wrong but I expect most of the conservative movement to distance itself immediately from Trump, since he will no longer be of any practical use.

May 10, 2020

About this recently arrested serial killer in Waterloo Iowa

Clark Perry Baldwin is reported to be a 58 year old long haul truck driver who has been tied to a number of murders committed in the 1990s. Whenever detectives discover a killer who has been active for so many years they naturally yearn to know if he's connected to other cases.

Trucker charged in serial killings faces scrutiny across US
https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/trucker-charged-in-serial-killings-faces-scrutiny-across-us-05-07-2020

What caught my eye about this guy is that Waterloo, Iowa is less than five miles from Evansdale, Iowa, the location of a notorious, high profile and still unsolved double murder of two little girls, Lyric Cook and Elizabeth Collins in July 2012. They were cousins and best friends who went to ride their bikes at a park and were abducted or lured away by their killer in broad daylight. It was an awful case that received enormous attention. It took five months to find the bodies and the authorities were extremely tight-lipped about the case thereafter. It was a very shocking case and some of you may recall it.

Map: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Evansdale,+Iowa/Waterloo,+IA/

Iowa Cold Case:
https://iowacoldcases.org/case-summaries/lyric-cook-and-elizabeth-collins/

Some thoughts:

I don't know if this is still considered true, but I remember reading not that long ago that it was extremely rare for a serial killer to stop killing unless he was 1) convicted of some other crime and imprisoned, or 2) was dead from another cause, or burns out and commits suicide. So I'm expecting Clark Baldwin to be connected to other homicides. Has he been active all this time?

Arguing against a connection is that his MO seems to be that he preyed on women who worked around truck stops far from where he lived, and to imagine him preying on children so close to where he resides would be a dramatic change of tactic. But we know so little about this killer; we know of two or three murders committed more than two decades ago so it's too early to say for sure what his patterns might have evolved into. Some serial killers do change their targets and methods as they evade the scrutiny of law enforcement and grow more emboldened.

Of course this may be nothing more than a coincidence. But I sure would like to know what happened to Lyric Cook and Elizabeth Collins. Their day of justice is long past due.

May 9, 2020

I'm leaning towards this too.

He is suppressing testing in the hopes that he can spin lower numbers as a "success" story, and that it's really his second strategy after realizing that he can never provide enough tests to surveil and contain the virus.

The only thing I'd add is that I think there was a pivot at some point where sadism and aggression entered his approach. The outpouring of outrage by the public always puts him on the defensive and he retaliates by either doing nothing or exacerbating a situation, by design, while trying to claim it is a success.

He wants this to just go away and he can't seem to separate his fantasy from the reality. The worse it gets the more he'll detach from reality.

Admitting that he made a mistake that needs to be fixed is an admission of failure he's incapable of.

May 8, 2020

I'm guessing that once he realized for sure that he'd ruined America's

response to the virus, his mind started to deploy its familiar defense mechanisms, one of which is to retroactively justify why the disastrous outcome he's brought into being is actually "right" and "successful" and, though he'd never admit it, he probably thinks we deserve this as punishment for how we've mistreated him (one of his favorite themes) and for our lack of gratitude and appreciation (another of his favorite themes). He's imagining all of his "enemies" and critics getting sick and dying and leaving out the part about his supporters dying too.

May 8, 2020

The next thing this administration will do is to try to incentivize

risk-taking, coming up with vouchers, tax breaks, coupons and all sorts of free deals to prod people into going to events, restaurants, discretionary adventures. The stick won't work very well, so then come the carrots.

May 6, 2020

Waylon Jennings: "It don't make any sense"

Have you ever spent hours trying to figure out the meaning of some work of art (movie, song, piece of writing) only to have the artist come along at some point and say the work of art is either meaningless or is completely superficial and that looking for hidden meaning is pointless?

Here Waylon Jennings sings his great, rather ambiguous (even mysterious) "Waymore Blues" and in the brief exchange that follows says, "..I sang it to him as a joke...because it didn't make no sense. It don't make any sense. I mean, it does, but it don't."

Lyrics

Well, I woke up this mornin' it was drizzlin' rain
Around the curve come a passenger train
Heard somebody yodel and a hobo moan
Jimmy he's dead, he's been a long time gone.
Been a long time gone, a long time gone.
If you want to get to heaven, gotta D-I-E
You gotta put on your coat and T-I-E
want to get the rabbit out of the L-O-G
You gotta make a cold motion like D-O-G
Like D-O-G, like D-O-G, yeah.
Well, I got a good woman, what's the matter with me?
What makes me want to love every woman I see?
I was trifling when I met her now I'm trifling again
And every woman she sees looks like the place I came in.
Looks like the place I came in place I came in.

I got my name painted on my shirt
I ain't no ordinary dude
I don't have to work
I don't have to work


The line that really puzzles me is: And every woman she sees looks like the place I came in.
Looks like the place I came in place I came in. I had a Freudian interpretation of this line but I guess I can toss that in the garbage.



I don't know why I find this song so intriguing; I'm not that much into country music. But I heard this song one night maybe three years ago on local radio and thought, "This sounds deep", so I looked into it and tried to figure out the meaning.

But: "It don't make any sense."

May 6, 2020

That is very interesting.

My theory about what's happening is that he's enraged at the American people for not appreciating what a great president he is and that this, in combination with the fact he botched the coronavirus pandemic and knows it, is causing him to retroactively construct a justification for why the American people actually deserve this as punishment for our lack of appreciating that he's as great as Abraham Lincoln.

Because his pattern is to fail and then justify why it's okay he failed and why the end result worked out okay anyway, and that it was secretly his plan all along to fail, because he's a genius whose failures are secretly brilliant successes that we just are incapable of perceiving because we're so inferior to him.

May 5, 2020

I don't think you're a kook at all.

It's tricky when two such powerful ideas co-exist in the mind at the same time.

It seems to me that there's a decisive letting go that has to occur at some point that's hard to achieve. It's like being stuck between two rooms, one foot in one room and one foot in the other, and committing to the room you're talking about is hard because it's hard to let go of all the excitement going on in the other room.

If that makes sense.

But I love and understand the truth of what you're saying. The irony is, because of what's unfolding before us, it's probably actually never been easier to let go in the history of our species. Yet there are still "all the interesting things."

Now, I actually think a person can do both things: Let go completely (of attachments) and yet be engaged completely in the reality right in front of us.

May 5, 2020

I'm beginning to worry that the screenplay is written by

Cormac McCarthy and that it ends like Blood Meridian, with an epilogue of somebody far in the future wandering through the dust of a lost civilization wondering what the hell happened here.