San Diego Local Order of Bloggers

Maybe Trump is putting the immigration issue in the Democrats court

Silvio Canto, Jr.
11/10/2026 6:13:58 AM

            Maybe Trump is putting the immigration issue in the Democrats court: Trumps remarks on immigration raise questions about enforcement, legalization, and whether Democrats can agree on a plan.------------------------------President Trump was on 60 Minutes on Sunday night and everyone has a reaction. One side is saying that he wants amnesty. The other side is saying that Trump is licking his wounds after Tuesday.    What did he say? Here it goes:Mr. Trump said his immigration crackdown both helped and hurt him at the polls. He believes he got an A+ for closing up the border, and got very high marks for getting the bad ones out.    But I get hurt because we also took[...]

1775: Happy # 251 to the US Marines

Silvio Canto, Jr.
11/9/2026 10:09:00 PM

          It started on this day in 1775:During the American Revolution, the Continental Congress passes a resolution stating that two Battalions of Marines be raised for service as landing forces for the recently formed Continental Navy. The resolution, drafted by future U.S. president John Adams and adopted in Philadelphia, created the Continental Marines and is now observed as the birth date of the United States Marine Corps.There are over 200,000 men and women serving as US Marines.  We congratulate and thank them for this service.                                           [...]

A Few Thoughts On The Midterms

K T Cat
11/5/2026 5:49:32 AM

 ... whose results didn't surprise me in the slightest. While I voted straight R, I completely understood the mood that drove the slaughter. Allow me to use a single example to illustrate.I fully support the Iran War. You can't have a nation chanting, "Death to America" by governmental direction while furiously pursuing nukes and ICBMs. I don't care what your calculations are about the odds they'd actually use The Bomb on us, you can't take that chance. The downside risk is cataclysmic. It was an act of wisdom and bravery to smash the Ayatollahs.Once we started, we needed to just finish it, regardless of the cost. The problem is that Americans haven't had direct experience with large scale military actions since the War[...]

Building Another Battleship

K T Cat
11/1/2026 3:21:05 PM

Here in San Diego, I have built two wooden workbenches in my garage. They are identical in size, each with a 8' x 2.5' top. They were designed on the fly and there are small differences in their construction, but by and large, they are almost the same. I named them after battleships, specifically battleships named for states in Dixie. The first is BB-60, the USS Alabama and the second is BB-41, the USS Mississippi.I recently spent a week at our river house in Alabama. This time, I didn't have much maintenance to do on the place so I finally had a chance to outfit the storage room below the house. As we're right on the river and this is the Gulf Coast, the house is designed to withstand substantial flooding. The living[...]

Why does America keep winning?

W.C. Varones
12/12/2025 8:48:00 AM

X:          Yes. But also, America's abundance of natural resources and history of fortuitous developments kinda seems like God shed His grace on thee.        Capitalism and divine providence are like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. 

Inflation is always and everywhere a progressive phenomenon

W.C. Varones
11/13/2025 9:31:17 AM
Excerpt from a text conversation with a young "democratic socialist":DS: Every time the US has become progressive, the right wing and the centrists said the policies were too unrealistic, but the civil rights movement still passed, and FDR is currently looked at as one of the best presidents of the past hundred yearsWC: Some times the right wing and the centrists are right. LBJ's Great Society has trapped millions in multigenerational welfare dependency. Obamacare has made health care unaffordable and is bankrupting both families and the US governmentLBJ's Great Society (and the Vietnam War) was what forced the US government to break the gold standard under Nixon, leading to all subsequent inflation crises. Inflation and all[...]

What Ails Us - But First Some Background

B-Daddy
4/6/2025 5:10:10 PM
Someone close to me asked me to give an overall take on the current state of politics and the prospects for our future. I thought to answer, but first want to explain how I analyze the political landscape.Here are some key principles that are worth repeating because we seem to forget them.1. A chicken is an eggs way of making another egg.      To influence the the size and numbers of your chickens, manage egg production and consumption. Demographics are destiny.2. Eggs are rare, sperm is plentiful.      Combined with 1 above, the most important variable component of demographic destiny is female reproductive behavior and strategies.3. Testosterone confers greater strength and aggression[...]

Bezos vs Burnham - Robber Baron vs Managers

B-Daddy
1/26/2022 8:32:44 PM
 Well not really; and not just because Burnham isn't a household name. James Burnham authored key insights on "managerialism" and predicted its eventual triumph over capitalism in his 1941 book "The Managerial Revolution," summarized here, but skip ahead 5 minutes (this is a great podcast). George Orwell provided this summary in 1943.Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers,[...]

And Where a Salon Scribe Gets a Tad Out of His Swim Lane

Dean
11/11/2015 9:22:09 AM
Over the weekend, Salon writer, DAVID MASCIOTRA, caused quite a dust-up on social media with his own salute to the troops ahead of Veterans Day . Here is the headline, followed by the sub-headline and then followed by the first paragraph of the piece:You dont protect my freedom: Our childish insistence on calling soldiers heroes deadens real democracyIt's been 70 years since we fought a war about freedom. Forced troop worship and compulsory patriotism must endPut a man in uniform, preferably a white man, give him a gun, and Americans will worship him. It is a particularly childish trait, of a childlike culture, that insists on anointing all active military members and police officers as heroes.If you desire, you can read it[...]

Football rules changes...? You've come to the right place

Dean
1/31/2015 2:04:56 PM

    Theres no denying that over the last few decades most all on-field rules changes made by the NFL have been exercises in increasing offense and scoring. This has created an arms race in a sense where the pendulum swings back and forth between the NFL offenses and NFL defenses whereby the offenses get aided by rules changes and the defenses counter with a combination of innovative schemes and superior athletes. To wit, for years, its been conventional wisdom that the best athletes in the world were in the NBA. Now days, we would add NFL defensive backs and possibly outside linebackers/rush ends into that mix (you dont think dudes like Richard Sherman, Darrelle Revis and J.J. Watt can ball a little?).But[...]