Have a happy new year.
Year: 2022
Holiday Letter – 2022
Links to content and items mentioned in our 2022 Holiday Letter are provided below.
2022-09-27 Visit to Mary Stuart
2022-07-26 Anina and Ben’s 50th anniversary celebration week
2022-08-04 Drew’s movies on Rolling Stone rear cover
2022-06-26 50 years of Our Christmas Card Photos
updated to include the 2002 photo saved by Barb and Dick Amacher. Vicki Hall also found the 2002 Christmas Card in her collection.
2022-05-21 Celebrating Robert’s 80th birthday
2022-05-08 Mother’s Day on the Estero River
2022-04-25 Celebrating Ben’s 75th Birthday
2022-03-20 Visiting the Amachers
2022-02-21 Rashmi and Michael Visit
2022-02-26 Launch of Harris Gardner’s newest book of poetry
2022-01-16 Harris Gardner’s 75th Birthday
After the Holiday Letter was mailed, Anina and Ben flew to Los Angeles to help Lee celebrate her 9th birthday. Click here to see some of Anina’s photos.
A Presidential Platform
Would anyone vote for a presidential candidate that runs on the following platform proposed by Jacob Hornberger?
https://jacobhornberger.substack.com/p/a-winning-political-strategy-for
Completely open borders. No pleading with U.S. officials to “let in” more immigrants. No comprehensive immigration reform plan. Dismantle the Border Patrol, ICE, and all restrictions on the free movements of people, goods, and services crossing borders, back and forth. End a major part of the federal government’s massive and vicious killing machine.
Abolish Social Security immediately. No plan for saving, preserving, fixing, reforming, privatizing, or phasing out this socialist program. Freedom and voluntary charity work. They do not need to be feared. Everyone would be fine.
Abolish Medicare and Medicaid, two massive socialist programs that destroyed the finest healthcare system in history. Abolish the Centers for Disease Control, end the Covid mandates and lockdowns, and separate heathcare and the state entirely. No “health-savings accounts,” “Obamacare,” or other healthcare reform measures. Instead, the immediate eradication of healthcare socialism from our midst.
Dismantle the national-security state, the part of the federal government that wields omnipotent, totalitarian-like powers, specifically the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. Restore our founding governmental system of a limited-government republic, with a relatively small military force designed to mobilize the nation in the unlikely event that a foreign nation were ever to invade the United States. Abandon all foreign military bases, including Guantanamo Bay, and bring all U.S. troops home from everywhere and discharge them into the private sector.
Lift all sanctions and embargoes, including against Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and all the rest. They are just part of the federal government’s massive and vicious killing machine. Restore normal and harmonious relations with every foreign regime, including Russia and China.
Jacob Hornberger on Veterans Day
Henry Hazlitt on Gold
The supply of gold is governed by nature; it is not, like the supply of paper money, subject merely to the schemes of demagogues or the whims of politicians. Nobody ever thinks he has quite enough money. Once the idea is accepted that money is something whose supply is determined simply by the printing press, it becomes impossible for the politicians in power to resist the constant demands for further inflation. Gold may not be a theoretically perfect basis for money; but it has the merit of making the money supply, and therefore the value of the monetary unit, independent of governmental manipulation and political pressure.
— Henry Hazlitt, Man vs. The Welfare State [1969]
Babka Channels Gandhi
Recall what Gandhi said: “An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”
According to Jim Babka “In a cancel culture … everyone is dumb”, that is no one has the ability to speak.
Lance Morrow Explains Trump and Biden
Sounds good to me.
from
The Democrats have the “fascist” business wrong.
Donald Trump isn’t a fascist, or even a semi-fascist, in President Biden’s term. Mr. Trump is an opportunist. His ideology is coextensive with his temperament: In both, he is an anarcho-narcissist. He is Elmer Gantry, or the Music Man, if Harold Hill had been trained in the black arts by Roy Cohn. He is what you might get by crossing the Wizard of Oz with Willie Sutton, who explained that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.”
As for Mr. Trump’s followers, they belong to the Church of American Nostalgia. They are Norman Rockwellians, or Eisenhowerites. They regard themselves, not without reason, as the last sane Americans. You might think of them as American masculinity in exile; like James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, living in the forest has made their manners rough.
If there are fascists in America these days, they are apt to be found among the tribes of the left. They are Mr. Biden and his people (including the lion’s share of the media), whose opinions have, since Jan. 6, 2021, hardened into absolute faith that any party or political belief system except their own is illegitimate—impermissible, inhuman, monstrous and (a nice touch) a threat to democracy. The evolution of their overprivileged emotions—their sentimentality gone fanatic—has led them, in 2022, to embrace Mussolini’s formula: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Or against the party. (People forget, if they ever knew it, that both Hitler and Mussolini began as socialists). The state and the Democratic Party must speak and act as one, suppressing all dissent. America must conform to the orthodoxy—to the Chinese finger-traps of diversity-or-else and open borders—and rejoice in mandatory drag shows and all such theater of “gender.” Meantime, their man in the White House invokes emergency powers to forgive student debt and their thinkers wonder whether the Constitution and the separation of powers are all they’re cracked up to be.
Mr. Trump and his followers, believe it or not, are essentially antifascists: They want the state to stand aside, to impose the least possible interference and allow market forces and entrepreneurial energies to work. Freedom isn’t fascism. Mr. Biden and his vast tribe are essentially enemies of freedom, although most of them haven’t thought the matter through. Freedom, the essential American value, isn’t on their minds. They desire maximum—that is, total—state or party control of all aspects of American life, including what people say and think. Seventy-four years after George Orwell wrote “1984,” such control (by way of surveillance cameras, social-media companies and the Internal Revenue Service, now to be shockingly augmented by 87,000 new employees) is entirely feasible. The left yearns for power and authoritarian order. It is Faust’s bargain; freedom is forfeit.
Mr. Trump, the canniest showman in the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt, introduced into 21st-century politics what seemed to be new idioms of hatred, a freestyle candor of the id. Doing so, he provoked his enemies—and finally Mr. Biden—to respond in kind: a big mistake. In the early 1950s, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy was loose in the land, and roughly half the country supported his anticommunist inquisition, President Eisenhower wisely decided, “I will not get into the gutter with this guy.” It took a while for McCarthy to implode.
When Mr. Biden spoke in Philadelphia the other night, he might have been thinking of FDR’s speech at Madison Square Garden on the night of Oct. 31, 1936, at the end of his presidential campaign against Alf Landon—and, by the way, three months before he tried to pack the Supreme Court. That night, Roosevelt boasted that his enemies (Republicans, plutocrats, et al.) “are unanimous in their hate for me.” With a flourish, he added, “I welcome their hatred!”
Americans, lamenting the divisions of 2022 and, some of them, entertaining fantasies of a new civil war, should refresh their historical memories. The country has been bitterly divided against itself any number of times. The hatreds and convulsions of the 1930s (the era of Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin and the Silver Shirts, of homegrown tribes of Trotskyists and Stalinists) culminated in the ferocious battle between isolationists and internationalists that lasted until the Sunday morning of Pearl Harbor.
The motif of political hatred returned to America almost as soon as World War II ended. The Alger Hiss case of 1948 warmed up the enmities, and McCarthy blew on the coals and turned half of the country against the other half. Such hatred seems cyclical. The 1960s (assassinations, civil rights battles, urban riots, the Vietnam War) had Americans at one another’s throats again. Those eruptions of political rage occurred in the years when the baby boomers and Joe Biden (who was a few years older) came of age and acquired their idea of what America is all about.
That night in 1936, Roosevelt, warming to the language of hatred, suggested that his enemies should get out of the country: “Let them emigrate and try their lot under some foreign flag.” Mr. Biden—who, as he spoke in Philadelphia, was bathed in a lurid red light that seemed, as it were, ineptly theological—was content to cast his foes into outer darkness.
Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His latest book is “The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism,” forthcoming in January.
Showtime Originals
The July-August Rolling Stone magazine rear cover featured two films edited by Drew Bachrach
My Room – My Way with Lee
From Peacock Kids and youTube