Your Daily Punditry For 05/31/2025

All the Punditry that fits, we print...

Quote of the Day

There is nothing permanent except change - Heraclitus

Something for the militant normies to keep in mind.

Department of Long, Strange Trips

I turned 79 yesterday, a considerably larger number than I ever expected to achieve when I was young, dumb, and spouted crap like “Never trust anybody over thirty,” and “Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse.”

The one advantage of this, if it is such, (opinions differ), is that I have lived just about every minute of the so-called “Boomer Experience.” None of that “I was born in 1960 and remember precisely zero of the decade that actually formed the Boomers, but I am still a Boomer.”

No, Virginia, you ain’t. Get over it. From the now incomprehensibly idyllic period of my midwestern childhood up to 1963, when JFK caught a bullet, a chillingly prescient indicator of what was coming, to other notable bullet backstops like RFK and MLK, to the British Invasion which was fueled by the need of White boys who couldn’t dance (most of them) to have something to dance to without shame, the Moon Landing, the Vietnam war, a meat grinder that chewed up the lives of fifty thousand of my fellows, a large majority of whom were unwilling participants thanks to the generational nightmare of the time known as The Draft, to the Summer of Love (and Sex and Drugs and Rock-n-Roll), with Bob Dylan doing the lyrics and soundtrack of the times in the background, I’ve, as my own grandad used to say, seen a few things.

And that was just the Sixties.

I was in San Francisco in the 1980s, when just about everybody I knew died horribly, and I first became acquainted with the demonic monstrosity masquerading as human otherwise known as Anthony Fauci.

I vividly recall the planes flying into the Twin Towers, and George W. Bush letting the bin Laden family and friends board their jet and flee the country while the skies were officially under a “lockdown” and the smoke was still rising from the rubble of the WTC.

I watched in disgust as that same feckless man tossed another generation of American men onto burning pyres in Iraq while seeming far more concerned about Islamophobia than the Muslims who were the nominal excuse for it. Bechtel? What’s that?

I have been lied to and betrayed by just about every politician I’ve ever known.

I have been lied to and betrayed by just about every religion I’ve ever tried to practice. Today I try to adhere to the prescription of Pascal’s Wager, with half-hearted results, probably because my efforts are somewhat half-hearted.

I watched Japan go from selling us cheap, flimsy trinkets to, at one point, seeming ready to take over the world economy. I’ve seen China go from selling us cheap, flimsy trinkets to now seeming ready to take over a much larger global economy.

I’ve seen American politicians and businessmen lie to and betray us out of simple greed and power-lust, and sell off our industrial patrimony for cheap, flimsy trinkets and a gigantic shitpile of cold, hard cash.

I may be the only member of my generation not to claim to have been at Woodstock, but I was at the first of the two Beatles’ concerts in Indianapolis on their first tour in 1964.

I once sat at a table in a small coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard with William Shatner, who, after an unexpected autograph session finally dissipated, looked at me, sighed, and said, “It’s hell being an American icon.” Bill had a great sense of humor about himself.

So much for the light once-over of my extremely checkered history. It has left me, as I enter my eightieth year, with a bit of scar tissue, both emotional and physical, a deep and abiding cynicism, an ever-growing respects for rationality and reality, a fair amount of fondness for the past and hope for the future, said hope being a triumph over my respect for rationality and reality, and a near-immunity to being gaslighted. No, I didn’t take the damned stabs - any of them. I knew that the results from the Diamond Princess meant that the world was about to undergo the mother of all gaslights.

Be sure to stop in for my report when I enter my 9th decade ten years hence.

ICE to Increase Deportations to 3000 Illegals per Day After Leadership Shake-up

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced sweeping leadership changes Thursday as part of an effort to dramatically ramp up arrests of illegal migrants. New goals for deportations start at 3000 arrests per day at ‘bare minimum’ according to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and this will grow as the agency receives increased funding.

Eh? Increased funding? Why isn’t that already in place? Really, come on. More money, less mouth, please.

The change in quota is nearly double the 1800 arrests per day originally mandated by the Trump Administration in January. If arrests remain static at 3000 per day, the new goal would result in over a million deportations of illegal immigrants per year.

I probably would never have figured out how to multiply 3000 by 365 without this helpful cheat sheet.

Trump administration shakes up leadership at ICE amid frustrations with arrest, deportation levels

Kenneth Genalo will no longer lead Enforcement and Removal Operations, the ICE branch tasked with carrying out arrests and deportations. Genalo, a longtime ICE official, is retiring and plans to advise agency leaders as a special government employee, officials said.

Anytime you see “longtime government official,” just think useless, timeserving roadblock, and you stand about a 95% chance of being right. I hope they reassign him to overseeing the snack machines in ICE cafeterias.

Meanwhile, Robert Hammer, the head of ICE's Homeland Security Investigations office, was reassigned to another post within the agency that officials described as a "critical leadership position."

He’ll be in charge of the soda pop machines.

It’s amazing. Kill two of these snakes, and three more spring up in their place. It’s an open question whether Trump’s time in office runs out before the number of human roadblock crash dummies does.

Trump has the right idea in making life so difficult for the illegals that they self-deport in large numbers. He should apply the same strategy to the lower reaches of his administration, and see how many worthless government drones self-deport from the Deep State.

For my California readers:

Run! Run for your lives!

Here’s all the deets.

Of course it’s a ghost town.

It’s freaking Baltimore, fer chrissakes!

Detroit and Baltimore. What do those two formerly great American cities have in common, I wonder?

It’s a mystery. We’ll probably never figure it out.