Palntiranny

One of the most disturbing things to emerge from the current era is the ascendancy of the tech broligarchs. Or whatever they're called these days. Elon Musk. Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg. Peter Thiel. Marc Andreessen. Larry Ellison. Alex Karp.

Maybe they've always been awful, but most of them used to at least give some lipservice to making the world a better place for someone other then themselves. Alas, somewhere along the line they all figured out that the bucks don't stop here. The bucks, in fact, never stop. And the thing about the bucks is, once you accrue a goodly enough of them, you realize you never have enough. And you never, ever, ever in a kabillion years want them to stop pouring into your coffers.

Being a millionaire used to be a big deal. Then it was being a one-digit billionaire. Of course, that soon became nothing much. And two-digit billionaire was an equal yawner. Three-digit billionaire-ing - $100B and above - and now you're talking. And all of a sudden we're in the countdown for when Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire. Which will no doubt set off a what's he got that I don't? rapacity spree among those left behind, nursing their $100's of billions and their grievances. 

These guys aren't stupid, and they naturally realized that money isn't just homes everywhere, private submarines, super yachts with helipads, $5M engagement rings, $50M weddings, $100M bunkers, et every bit of cetera the mind can imagine. Money, they all recognized, is also power. And while once it may have been fine to use that power for some sort of benefit for humankind (c.f., Bill Gates' efforts to eradicate malaria), do-gooding is really nothing more than a sort of an amuse bouche for the real meal. Which is expanding and defending your unimaginable (to us plebs, anyway) wealth. And what better way to defend that wealth than to make sure that the government gets to take as small a bite out of it as possible.

So let's make sure our tax rates approach as near to zero as possible, that none of "our" loopholes are closed, that regulations that might actually help the little guy but may come at a cost to the poor little old big guys are eliminated. (C.f., decimation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.) 

No wonder they're all so gungho on AI. After all, if you can replace all those pesky, squawky humans with AI and robotics, there's more money to be made. (That is, I guess, until there are very few human beings left who can afford to buy any of the goods and services that the tech bros are producing.)

Sigh.

Yes, AI promises (promises, promises) to be the great distruptor. And, scarily enough, it probably will be. 

Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp sees a real upside to all the coming disruption. And that upside will benefit the Republican party. Not coincidentally, the party with all the power and the one most likely to enable a full hands-off-the-money policy when it comes to taxing the tech broligarchs and their companies. 

Last month, in a CNBC interview to discuss how Palantir's AI system is being used by the military for target selection  - and we've seen just how foolproof AI technology is when it comes to say, selecting an Iranian girls' school for destruction - Alex Karp opined on how AI's disruption will target women's work:

“The one thing that I think that even now is underestimated by all actors in industry … is how disruptive these technologies are,” Karp said. “If you are going to disrupt the economic and therefore political power significantly of one party’s base – highly educated, often female voters who vote mostly Democrat, and military and working-class people who do not feel supported – and you believe that that’s going to work out politically, you’re in an insane asylum.” 

He added: “Like … this technology disrupts humanities-trained – largely Democratic – voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters. These disruptions are going to disrupt every aspect of our society.” (Source: NY Times)

Swell. All those girly-girl history majors who know how to think, write, analyze, and other white-collarly things. And who support reproductive rights, social justice, diversity and equity, gay marriage, environmental concerns, universal healthcare - and vote accordingly. They'll see their economic, social, and political power eclipsed by swing-a-hammer white guys driving F150s to the voting booth to cast their voter-ID'd ballot for Barron Trump. And maybe even for an initiative to repeal the 19th amendment and send us latter-day suffragettes packing. 

But, but, but, what happens next? Having gutted the ranks of those we used to call "knowledge workers," isn't AI going to go after the blue collar guys, too? After all, AI/robotics has done away with millions of manufacturing jobs, and it's going to be gunning for everything else humans used to do as well. Who'll  be calling a plumber when your really smart toilet can unclog itself? Who'll need a roofer when the prefab new roof is dropped into place via drown, and secured via robots?

It's not clear that Karp is advocating for all this disruption. He's just saying it's going to happen. But it's certainly no secret that many of the tech broligarchs don't believe in democracy at all, at all. They view it as an encroachment on their freedom, i.e., the ability to endlessly accumulate.

One of my big questions about AI is just what do the broligarchs and their political henchmen think that people are going to do for work if there are no jobs? 

Easy enough to see a return to a medieval society: nobles at the top, small class of supporting professionals and artisans, and a mass of peasants living in hovels. One shirt to last a lifetime, a diet of cheap foods designed to put us out of our misery young. And unlike our ancestors, who had to rely on storytelling and a flute made out of a dried reed for entertainment, we'll get 24/7 infotainment and rot piped in to our hovels to keep us from noticing that those damned rich just keep getting richer. 

Maybe it won't happen. Maybe things will slow down. Maybe we'll come to our collective senses and decide just how, as a society and an economy, we want to ride the AI wave. Maybe we'll figure out how to have an economy that works for the many, not just the few. Maybe. 

I hope so.

But it sure makes me nervous that so many of these kabillionaire tech gods are using their vast economic power to become more economically and politically powerful. Which seems to be leading inexorably to autocracy and the tyranny of the super-rich.

Sigh, sigh, sigh.

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Image Source: Octopus Intelligence

Yes, chef? Maybe not for much longer

When I was young, I logged a lot of hours as a waitress.

None of those hours were logged in any place fancy: no executive chefs, no sous chefs, no tall white toques. 

My first waitressing gig was at the neighborhood Big Boy, where at any given time there were two or three guys manning the line, grilling up the burgers, frying up the onion rings. John. Danny. Timmy. Bob. Don. Mel. The other John, who worked in the basement prepping items for the line. I seem to remember him breading the onion rings.

I don't remember all the fellows - and they were all men (or boys-to-men) - who I met during my two summers and one Christmas vacation working there, but they were a combo of blue collar, hardworking guys and hippies, who weren't quite as hardworking as the blue collars, but tended to be pretty interesting. John (upstairs John), Danny, and Timmy were brothers, and genuinely nice men. (And cute.) Bob was a nasty a-hole. Don was okay, but a bit rough around the edges. (I think he'd just gotten out of jail.) Mel talked about writing a novel called 86 that Dream. John (downstairs John) was a very handsome Jamaican guy who loved Tom Jones, and blared his music.

Sometimes the cooks fought with each other. Sometimes they yelled at the waitresses. But the only violence I ever witnessed at Big Boy was when a busboy had a bit of a breakdown and started beating his head against the cement block wall in the basement.

Union Oyster House, my next waitressing stop, was far fancier and more upscale than Big Boy. It was a big tourist destination, had a full bar, some fancy - or what counted for fancy 50+ years ago - menu items (Oysters Rockefeller, Lobster Thermidor), and had supposedly been a haunt of pre-Jackie JFK when he was a young Congressman representing Boston. (Amazing to think of it now, but when I waitressed at Union Oyster, JFK had been dead less than 10 years.) All that, but no head chef toque-wearing nonsense.

We had cooks, mostly Jamaicans, a couple of Greeks who mostly handled the raw shelfish and steamers, and a salad maker named Willie who made salads and shrimp cocktails with a perpetual stogie hanging out of his mouth. His big line to all the waitresses, which he must have repeated dozens of times each day was, "I had a dream about you last night. We was making love." The Greek guys spoke very little English, but were always inviting the young waitresses out to the Club Plaka. (One night we actually went and had fun slurping down retsina shots and doing some sort of circle dance with a scarf.) 

The Jamaican guys were riotously funny, if you consider occasionally frying up cockroaches in the Fisherman's Platter mix riotously funny. The funniest thing they did happened on a night the power went out. They had a small generator that could keep some lights on, but the AC was gone, and this was a hot August night, and for some reason the busiest night of the summer. The managers put candles out in the dining room and we carried on. The kitchen - as you can imagine - became unbearable, and the Jamaican fellows running the giant gas stoves and fryolators were bearing the brunt of it. 

Their complaints fell on deaf management ears - The house was full! The show must go on! - until the cooks figured out how to shut the place down. They took off all their clothing, and the half of the waitressing staff composed of little old first gen Irish ladies from South Boston weren't going to go into any kitchen where there were a bunch of naked men. Bonus points that these men were all Black.

At the Oyster House, everyone yelled at each other all the time, but most of it was wisecracking, bitching, trashtalking. The only time I saw anyone berated was when I forgot to leave a chit in at the bar for a drink called a Golden Dream. Louie, the bartender, hunted me down in the dining room, grabbed my arm, and screamed at me, "Give me the dupe for that Golden Dream."

To finance a cross-country wander and a four month hitchhiking trek through Europe, I worked after I dropped out of grad school at Durgin Park for a year. Durgin, now closed, was - along with the still-surviving Oyster House - a venerable Boston tourist trap. 

The owner during my time there was a temperamental maniac who put on a daily screaming and yelling performance, with the waitresses being his favorite targets. (His second favorite target: the customers.) It would take a book - or at least a long chapter - to describe just what an insane environment Durgin was. But I don't remember insanity among the cooks. There was Billy B. (Billy B. couldn't read, so couldn't tell what was on the order slips we submitted. But we had to call out the order when we hung the slips, and Billy B. flawlessly took care of everything from memory.) Henry-the-Elder. (Short and rugged, and a truly nice and kind man.) Henry-the-Younger. (Who looked like Ichabod Crane and was a good kid.) Glenn, the maniac owner's son-in-law who sometimes worked the line, was an object of our sympathy and pity. 

Durgin was hectic and loud, and the owner was as nasty as they get. But he was so over the top, and the old gal waitresses, which Durgin was famous for, so knew how to play him like a fiddle (which they regularly did on behalf of the young gal waitresses he went after), that the craziness was pretty much a laughing matter. And I never saw abuse to or from the cooks.

My waitressing career ended over a half century ago, and wasn't at any high-end restaurants to begin with, but things seemed to have changed. The advent of the celebrity chef, the emergence of the international culinary scene, the world of the "must be seen there scene" restaurant, the extreme and extremely fussy food innovations. All this has turned many of the big deal restaurants into wildly intensive environments that are brutal to work in. 

I read all about it in a NY Times article from March that focused on René Redzepi, a world renowned chef I had never heard of, who stepped down from Noma, a world renowned restaurant I had never heard of. Days before Redzepi had announced his down-steping:

The New York Times [had] reported allegations that Mr. Redzepi had punched, slammed and inflicted other physical punishments on cooks from 2009 to 2017. (Source: NY Times)

Yikes!

Okay, yikes!, but something that's a lot more widespread than one chef at Noma.  

The situation at Noma has apparently:

...lent new urgency to a conversation in the global restaurant industry about how to fix professional kitchens once and for all. Although past scandals and the #MeToo movement have resulted in better conditions at many restaurants, chefs said bullying and abuse still persist at too many others.

Dominique Crenn, the first woman in the United States to head a restaurant with three Michelin stars, said it is well past time to change the notion that performing at the highest level in the world’s top kitchens requires humiliation, intimidation or violence.

“We have been talking about this forever,” she said.

The up and coming chefs, it seems, just aren't going to take it any longer. 

A growing cohort of chefs — people who are young, who are not men and who are very online — say they want to hold the industry to account for the abuse and discrimination that have persisted in restaurant kitchens.

...Tiffani Faison, a chef in Boston, said that public awareness of abuse in restaurants has risen since 2017, when celebrity chefs like Mario Batali were accused of sexual misconduct and dethroned, but the reckoning didn’t go far enough.

“We changed the curtains, but we didn’t remodel the house,” she said. “And we still haven’t cleaned out the basement where we hid the skeletons.”

Whether you're working in the unglamorous sorts of restaurants I worked in, or some $1,000 a plate glam spot with an eleven month waiting list to sup on the likes of vaporized truffle gnat eye, restaurant kitchens are going to be hot, tense, noisy, and hectic. Plus dangerous: boiling oil, hot stoves, knives. Comes with the territory. But they don't need to be toxic and abusive. No workplace does. 

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Image Source: Etsy

AI Strikes Again? You betcha!

Tennessee grandmother Angela Lipps had lived a pretty uneventful life. At 50, most of that life had been spent in North Central Tennessee. She'd never been to North Dakota. Heck, she'd never been on an airplane. That is until the the city of Fargo, North Dakota - yes, that Fargo - extradited her to face bank fraud charges, and flew her to Fargo free of charge, but not free of charges. And under lock and key (including those nifty waist restraints that seem to be all the rage among the ragers). 

In July, US marshals arrested Lipps at her Tennessee home while she was babysitting four children. She said she was taken away at gunpoint and booked into a county jail as a fugitive from justice from North Dakota.

“I’ve never been to North Dakota, I don’t know anyone from North Dakota,” Lipps told WDAY News.

She remained in a Tennessee jail for nearly four months without bail while awaiting extradition. She was charged with four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft. (Source: The Guardian)

Fargo police had used facial recognition software which analyzed bank "surveillance video of a woman using a fake US army military ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars." With that AI assist, the crackerjack Fargo sleuths determined that the woman in the video seemed a pretty darned good match to Angela Lipps.

No word on why they left poor Ms. Lipps, bail-less, languishing in a Tennessee jail for nearly four months - which I'm sure was no picnic - before flying her out to Fargo in late October. Or why she was denied bail. I know that tens of thousands of dollars is a lot of loot, but Angela Lipps hardly looked like a hardened criminal. But I guess she did look enough like the Fargo grand thief to keep her locked up.

And I suspect that being poor and having few resources didn't help. Just spitballing here, but if a middle class woman with the ability to hire a lawyer had been nabbed for this crime of the century, she likely wouldn't have been kept in the stir for 108 days waiting for Fargo to get its extradition act together. Even in Tennessee.

Once in Fargo, Angela Lipps fortunately got the help of a court appointed defender, Jay Greenwood, who did his job. He found records that proved that Ms. Lipps was nowhere near Fargo when the fraud occurred. And on Christmas Eve, she was released.

Opening the cell doors was about all that Fargo PD did for her.

...Lipps said Fargo police did not pay for her trip home, leaving her stranded. Local defense attorneys helped cover a hotel room and food on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and a local non-profit, the F5 Project, was able to help her return to Tennessee.

Well, that must have been one swell Christmas for Angela Lipps. Lets hear it for those local defense attorneys who made sure she didn't have to spend the holiday in a homeless shelter. Sheesh. 

Meanwhile, Ms. Lipps returned home, and it was no Tennessee Waltz. While income-less in the hoosegow, she "lost her home, her car and her dog." 

A fellow from West Fargo, ND, set up a GoFundMe for her, which contains some very telling details about her situation and the criminal justice system. 

When the U.S. Marshalls picked up her up in Tennessee, they would not let her retrieve her dentures. So for nearly six months in jail, she was toothless. That home she lost was a rental in a trailer park. Her family put her things in storage for her, but couldn't keep up the storage payments. Among the lost possessions Angela Lipps itemized in the GFM were a Chrysler Sebring convertible and a tire inflator. When Fargo PD released her, she was wearing the summer clothing she'd first been arrested in. Which aren't exactly appropriate for Christmas Eve in Fargo, ND. (This is not particular to Fargo, btw. Not sure if it's still the case, but I know that it used to be that when someone was released from county jail in Massachusetts, they were sprung in the same duds they had on when they were arrested. So, if you were arrested in July and did a six-month "bid," they let you out in January in the cutoffs and tee-shirt you were wearing upon entry.)

If you're wondering whether I made a donation to Angela Lipps' GoFundMe. Well, duh!

And if you're wondering whether I think Angea Lipps should sue the Fargo Police Department. As they'd say in Fargo, you betcha!

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Image Source: City of Fargo

Who says there's no honor among thieves

Well, this is Holy Week, the days leading up to Easter, and the week is full of special observances. At least as I recall from my 24/7, ultra-Catholic upbringing. Yesterday was Spy Wednesday, the "anniversary" of Judas' betrayal of Jesus Christ. It was best known among parochial school kids as a half-day, and the day we got out for Easter break.

Today is Holy Thursday, which commemorates the Last Supper, and tomorrow is Good Friday, the day of Christ's crucifixion.

On Good Friday, during my childhood, my family drove around the Diocese of Worcester to pay visits to three churches, which entitled you to a plenary indulgence. (Don't ask.) I think it was mainly an excuse for my 24/7, ultra-Catholic mother to check out three churches she hadn't been into before - bonus points (but not a more plenary indulgence granted) if the church was a new build - so we got in the car, found the churches my mother had plotted, and traipsed around the church for a few. To achieve the indulgence, I believe you had to say a couple of prayers, but it doesn't take all that much effort to rattle off a Hail Mary or two.  

As an ultra 24/7 ex-Catholic, I don't spend a ton of time thinking about Holy Week and Easter. As long as my sister Trish gives me a Peep or two, I'm good.

But a Boston Globe article I saw brought to mind the legend of Dismas, the Good Thief. The Globe story was about a fellow who was busted for drug possession/trafficking after a wannabe car thief discovered cocaine in the trunk of the car he was trying to thieve. The OG article was from January, but things resurfaced when, a couple of weeks ago, there were some follow-on arrests.

The strange sequence of events began on the evening of Jan. 6, when a man notified police that he had found a package of drugs on the side of the road.

But when detectives interviewed the man, he changed his story. According to a police report, he acknowledged that he had found the drugs inside the trunk of a Kia he had broken into.

The car, which police said belongs to Gillespie, was parked at a private commuter parking lot in Hyannis, police said.

The man, whom police did not identify, said he initially planned to steal the car and used a screwdriver to pry open the steering column, but he couldn’t get the car to start, police said.

He opened the trunk to check for valuables and in the tire well found a Target bag containing a duct-taped package that turned out to contain cocaine.

When he realized what it was, he “got scared” and wasn’t sure what to do, so he contacted the police, the report stated.

The owner of the car, Edward Gillespie, 62, of Nantucket, was arrested and charged with trafficking more than 200 grams of cocaine, police in Barnstable said in a statement.

Gillespie was preparing to bring the cocaine from Hyannis to Nantucket when he was arrested on Jan. 8, police said. (Source: Boston Globe)

The bust proved bigger than the initial measly 200 grams.  After a search of Gillespie's home:

In all, police said they seized approximately 1,141 grams of cocaine, 68 grams of amphetamine pills, and approximately $10,000 in cash. 

Like Dismas, the car thief was a criminal. Although death by crucifixion seems a bit harsh for stealing something, there is that "Thou Shall Not Steal" commandment out there. But Dismas had the fortune to be crucified next to Jesus and the two men were said to have struck up a conversation that ended with Christ assuring Dismas that on the day of his death he would be ushered into paradise. 

There is no info on the Hyannis car thief's motives for calling the police. (It is doubtful that he struck up a convo with a Christ figure. Not on a January night in a Cape Cod parking lot.) Was he afraid that he would be tied to the drugs through fingerprint evidence or crime-watch cameras? Did he just say to himself "hey, stealing a car and petty theft from a trunk is one thing, but this looks like some serious criming?" And was he at all concerned that the Cape Cod drug lords would figure out who dimed them and come after him? (C.f., snitches get stitches.) Did his good-thief/good citizen conscience outweigh his fear? The car thief's identity was not revealed, but I suspect that bad guys have a way of finding these things out.

Anyway, I hope that the Hyannis Dismas is okay. I hope that he has seen the error of his ways and is on the path of righteousness. This is, after all, the season of redemption, no?

Meanwhile, Happy Easter to all and to all a good night. And please do enjoy biting the head off of a Peep.

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Image Source: Freepik

Wanna bet?

It's no secret that you can bet on pretty much anything. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket provide a forum for wagering on the outcomes of "traditional" events and occurrences, like golf matches and basketball games, elections and Oscar winners. But you can also bet on what the temperature in LA is going to be tomorrow, where Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift will tie the knot, and when and if the Straits of Hormuz will reopen.

Sports betting sites like FanDuel and DraftKings are sucking folks - mostly young men - into addictive always-on wagering on every nuance of pretty much every sporting event known to man, including darts, chess and ping pong. (The general purpose sites cover sports betting as well.) A lot of the eyes on sports are not those of fans, but of gamblers, riveted on whether the next pitch will be a called strike or not - and whether they've won $200 on that bet.

While the sports betting is not good for the particular or general soul - gambling's always been addictive, but when you're holding your own personal bookie in your hand 24/7, well, truly awful things can happen. And more athletes themselves will be sucked into the easy money of a point here, a point there, which will end up corrupting sports more than they're already corrupted.

But the truly nefarious stuff goes on when insiders on the economic or geopolitical front, those who have knowledge of and/or control over potential outcomes, decide they want to make a bit of coin. Reputedly, there were White House insiders who cashed in on bets on when Iran's Ayatollah would be taken out. (Would any be surprised that members of the Merrily Grifting Trump family wagered an easy-money bet or two. On second thought, maybe not, when there are far larger grifts to grift.)

Then there are the smaller scale betting pools, the kind that a lot of us have been involved with. How many pounds will you your colleague's baby weigh? What team will be left standing in the March Madness bracket? A few bucks thrown in at work or the gym. It can be fun. And pretty harmless

But it's pretty odious when the pool at work is making life-and-death wagers, as is reportedly the case at Camp East Montana, and ICE detention center in Texas that's the nation's largest. (Everything really is bigger in Texas.) At Camp East Montana, guards allegedly have betting pools on who among the detainees under their "care" will be the next to commit suicide. I mean, it's not as if the guards have the power to make someone's life worse, to deprive them of care, to encourage them to kill themselves. Even to report a homicide as a suicide. Nah, ICE guys wouldn't do anything like that, would they?

Predictably, the DHS - an organizational just full to the brim of those of sterling character and moral rectitude - denies that there's any betting going on.

Look, not everyone who works for ICE or Border Patrol is an evil, violent, ill-trained thug. But enough of them are to reinforce such a sordid reputation. And with the decline in recruitment standards and training, the administration's encouragement of maltreatment of those rounded up and detained, out of control thug does appear in many cases to be the profile that the government is looking for and rewarding.

Factor in the amoral/immoral/money-grubbing malaise plaguing our society, and it seems entirely plausible that detention facility guards would try to make some bank betting on which detainee - whether a down and dirty member of Tren de Aragua who deserves deportation (but not maltreatment and torture) or some poor brown-skinned schnook who's been working under the table as a gardner for thirty years - is next for the coroner's wagon.

You don't think it could happen? You think DHS is telling the truth?

I say, wanna bet? 

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Info source: Mother Jones

Image Source: Amazon

I got shoes, you got shoes. All Trump's minions got shoes.

It's certainly no secret that Trump is a bully, a mean-spirited louse who extracts a goodly portion of the little joy he ekes out of life by humiliating others. Sometimes the humiliation is passive, as in the nauseating Cabinet meetings where his minions shamelessly fall all over themselves to praise Dear Leader - performances that wouldn't be out of place at a table headed by Vladimir Putin, Kim Jon Un, or Idi Amin. 

(Decades ago, I saw a documentary on Amin that featured a meeting of his underlings. There was also a scene in which Amin "won" a swimming race in which he walked across the waist-high part of a swimming pool using his arms to mimic taking strokes. When he got to the pool's edge, he looked up at the camera grinning and declared "I won." Sounds a lot like all those golf tournaments - and peace prizes - that Trump brags about.)

One of Trump's latest forays into the wonderful world of underling humiliation was gifting shoes to his Cabinet members and expecting them to wear them. Even if, because Trump ordered whatever sizes he thought would be best, the shoes don't fit.

The shoes that were the biggest misfits seemed to be those of the feet of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Whatever size Lil Marco - a pet name bestowed by Trump during the 2016 Republican primary season - wears in real life, it's apparently not the "big shoes to fill" Trump gave him.

“Trump has been buying $145 Florsheim dress shoes for allies, using the gifts as a lighthearted way to encourage loyalty and unity within his circle,” posted media X account Clash Report, citing The Times as a source. (Source: MSN)

These are the same shiny black dress shoes that Trump himself wears. 

It's certainly no surprise that Trump favors shoes made in China (or somewhere non-US-y). But it's a bit shocking that his shoe of choice is from Florsheim, a rather pedestrian brand. (On a side note, my father wore Florsheim's - black or brown wingtips. He sometimes converted old ones to golf shoes by having spikes put on them.)

After all, Trump is fabulously wealthy, with his wealth having increased over the past year - the first year of his second presidency - by a cool $1.4B. Surely, he could afford whatever shoes he wants. So why not look into Allen Edmonds? Sure, they're more than double the price of Florsheim's, but they're actually made in the US of A. Or he could have a bespoke cobbler hand make him his shoes. 

Of course, what he probably really wants is to be carried around on a sedan chair while wearing dem golden slippers.

Given that Trump's notoriously cheap when it comes to reaching into his own pocket, perhaps he just didn't want to spend a lot of gifts for his cabinet. At the same time, he didn't want them to think he was gifting them second best by giving them shoes that he himself doesn't wear. (On second thought, there's no reason to believe the cost of the shoes was personally borne by Trump.)

“All the boys have them,” said one unnamed White House official, while another told the WSJ, “It’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them.”

“Recipients have taken to wearing their Florsheims around Trump, some apparently begrudgingly,” the WSJ reported. “One cabinet secretary has grumbled that he had to shelve his Louis Vuittons, according to people who heard the complaint.”

As you can see in the photo of Marco sporting his new Florsheim's, they appear to be too big by about half an inch. Not quite clown shoes, but not exactly comfy. And what a win for Trump that Rubio has been "ruthlessly mocked" for clomping around in them. Social media. Late night comedians. Marco Rubio, ha, ha, ha. 

Who among us hasn't worn (at least once, in the gift-givers presence) something we're not wild about - the color, the cut - because it was given to us by someone we cared aout. But that ain't what's happening here.

Nope. Ain't no one wearing those shoes out of fondness for their boss. And to think that no one has the guts to say, "Thanks for the nifty gift, boss, but I'd like to exchange them for something that fits." Because that would be suggesting that Trump had made a mistake, gotten something wrong. Talk about that ain't happening. Not with King Infallible on the throne.

Others who have been beneficiaries of Trump's shoe largesse include Cabinet members Pete Hegseth, Howard Lutnick, and Sean Duffy. (No word on whether Scott Bessent was on the gift list, but I can't see that insufferable imperious snob voluntarily wearing Florsheim's.) Which means it would be delicious if Trump decided to do it. Steven Cheung, Lindsey Graham, and Sean Hannity have also been giftees. 

In terms of everything else Trump is doing to destroy the country and the world, forcing someone to wear unwanted, ill-fitting shoes is pretty small potatoes. But it does provide us with yet another example of Trump's rancid personality. 

Meanwhile, I can draw some comfort from learning that Florsheim's parent company, Weyco, is suing Trump over tariffs. 

Duck and cover

I remember plenty of school fire drills. Back in the day, kids were actually killed in school fires - as happened to 92 kiddos (and 3 nuns) at Our Lady of the Angels (same name as my school!) in Chicago in 1958. This was before there was such a thing as a mass school shootings, so there was no such thing as active shooter drills. Just fire drills.

If there were any Civil Defense "Duck and Cover" drills at my OLA, I don't recall any. But this was the 1950's-1960's, so there must have been a time or two when the fire alarm went off and the nuns told us to stick our heads under our desks and make a perfect Act of Contrition. I just don't remember any. 

I think there was a black and yellow Fallout Shelter sign somewhere in the vestibule of our church, indicating that we could hide from an A-bomb in the church's basement. The nuns may have walked us down the hill, in a patrol line, to the church to point it out to us, but I don't think they went so far as to take us into the basement. 

Not that we weren't being constantly warned about an impending attack by Russian or Chinese Communists. This was the Cold War we're talking. But mostly the nuns were preparing us for a ground war, not bombs dropping from the heavens skies. What would we do, we were asked, if Commies stormed into our classroom, pointed Kalishnikovs at us, and asked us to deny our faith? Who among us would stand and declare "I am a Catholic" and join the ranks of martydom? 

It didn't occur to us to wonder why they'd bother asking, given that they had marauded their way into a classroom to find 50 or so parochial school uniformed kiddos jammed in. A classroom presided over by a nun with giant rosary beads swinging from her waist. A classroom with a prominently displayed crucifix and other religious paraphernalia all over the walls. Even the dullest Commie soldier could probably figure out we were all Catholics. 

This was also the era of backyard bomb shelters, but I didn't know anyone who had one. Bomb shelters were middle-class suburban, not blue-collar urban I guess. Maybe it was an economic thing, maybe it was philosophical, with us working stiff types deciding that if A-bombs and, later, nukes were being rained down on our heads, the world just might not be worth surviving.

At least that's how I like to think of it, because that's my philosophical stance on surviving a nuclear apolcalypse. Maybe it's because I don't have kids or grandkids, but when it comes to creating a survival shelter - and, in truth, where would I put one in my 1240 square foot downtown condo - I'm Team What, Me Worry? If the end of the world as we know it is upon us, I want to be at Ground Zero wearing a propeller beanie that says "me first."

Anyway, despite the threats heading our way from Iran, I haven't given a ton of thought to just how much terror we're in for, and whether Trump and/or the Ayatollah are actually capable of unleashing nukes. 

Apparently not so for those closer to the know.  As I saw in the news a couple of weeks back: 

...at least two top Trump administration officials have raced to purchase their own survival shelters designed to withstand an apocalyptic nuclear war scenario, The Telegraph reported on Sunday.

The revelation comes from Texas resident Ron Hubbard, who owns Atlas, a company that manufactures survival bunkers designed to withstand "biological [or] nuclear fallout, EMP attacks” and other catastrophic scenarios. Hubbard spoke with The Telegraph and revealed that since the U.S. attack on Iran, inquiries had gone up “tenfold,” including inquiries from two senior Trump administration Cabinet members.

“One of them texted me yesterday, asking me: ‘When will my bunker be ready?’” Hubbard told The Telegraph, referring to one of the officials. (Source: Raw Story)

Maybe they know something we don't know. After all, plenty of politicos and politico-adjacent swells have been making bank on insider info through both "savvy" stock market trading and making moves in betting-on-anything markets. Didn't I read that a couple of White House-ers made bank by betting on when the old Ayatollah was going to be taken out?

It's not just administration officials, of course. Hubbard has stated "that his recent clients were almost all “Christian, conservative CEOs,” which included “several of the wealthiest men on the planet,” though he declined to identify them."

Hmmmm. Thought these folks were looking forward to The Rapture.

Me? If the doomsday scenarios play out, I hope to rapturously (or not) enter the Big Sleep and call it a day.  

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Image Source: New Hope Free Press