Dispatches from Vilnius

It brought a smile to my face seeing one of my religious conservative friends question Trump's latest venture.  He simply stated, "A politician selling Bibles is very disturbing on many levels." As my friend further elaborated in his comments, "it's wrong for anyone to manipulate people for money by using their faith," especially one that has such a xenophobic message as "God Bless the USA" stamped on the cheap leather cover.   Most of us had a Bible given to us in our youth.  I still have the black King James Bible my mother gave to me when I started Sunday School.  Of course some of us preferred simplified texts like the New American Standard edition so that we don't have to wrestle with all that Olde English, but my mother didn't feel the language had to be diluted and sat with me to help decipher the anachronistic text.  I never did read the Bible from front to back but I have read large sections of it, including all of the Books of Mos

For the past two weeks I got an inordinate number of hits from Hong Kong.  They seem to be trailing off now.  No idea why as whoever or whatever it is generating these hits wasn't looking at any posts.  When I get hits from Singapore, which also seems a bit suspect, I see a number of corresponding hits on my posts.  Maybe this is a legacy of the time my cousin taught at the American International School in Singapore?  Blogger doesn't provide much in the way of analytics and I really don't want to spend time dissecting this.  At least it is not coming from Russia or some Central Asian country, which had been the case a few years ago. This blog has morphed over the years.  It went from an American history reading group in the wake of the collapse the NY Times reading groups, around 2010, to what is now a personal blog.  The only person that still hangs around from that time is Trippler.  The others have either moved on or passed away, like Chartres and Robert Whelan.  We had

I imagine there will be a mad scramble going on in Mar-a-Lago this weekend as Trump tries to come up with half a billion dollars to post bond on his fraud appeal in New York.  Turns out the faux billionaire doesn't have that kind of cash on hand and is now banking on his Truth Social Network to bail him out.  There's been  all kinds of chatter that if he takes TSN public, he stands to net billions but this is just another one of Trump's many chimeras.  It is very doubtful his social network company will be valued in the billions when it has only generated $5 million in revenue over the last three years, but in a digital world built on chimeras, who knows?  I'm not sure Judge Engoron is going to buy it though. Playing with the idea of being a billionaire has been Trump's calling card for decades but he owns very few if any of his properties outright and would have to pay off the mortgages first before collecting any cash of his own.  This could potentially bankrupt

You have to hand it to the artless dodger.  Trump managed to get an insurance company to put up a bond for the 83 million he owes E. Jean Carroll in a defamation settlement so that he can appeal the decision.  Now for someone to come up with the 435 million he owes New York in the fraud settlement.  He already has been trying to move assets out of the state so that New York officials can't seize them but Trump Tower is pretty hard to move.   Meanwhile, the list of infamous persons who feel that Trump has been wronged grew this week to include conspiracy theory emeritus Oliver Stone .  It's rather ironic as just four short years ago, Stone described Trump as a " mad King Lear ," noting that there is something "vastly wrong with his ego."  Sounds like a movie is starting to swirl around in Stone's addled mind. The list of distractions doesn't stop there.  RFK Jr. announced to the world that he will be presenting his Vice-Presidential nominee on March

I nearly spit my coffee on my laptop when I read Musk was suing OpenAI for abandoning its original mission of using artificial intelligence to benefit humanity and now churning out ChatGPT in the name of profit.  At the same time, he jumped all over MacKenzie Bezos for "virtue signaling" in that she has given so much of her divorce settlement to charity.  He thinks independent rich women will destroy Western civilization as we know it.  What's with this guy? Kara Swisher is supposed to elucidate us on the inner workings of Elon's addled mind and those of other Silicon Valley tech barons in her new Burn Book .  She apparently admired most of these guys at one time but has since become repulsed by them in their search for virtual Valhalla.  Seems like every week you learn about some new drug Musk has dipped into on Joe Rogan or some other chat show.  There's a story that he got all the Tesla board members high before getting them to agree on a $55 billion pay pac

So Trump stays on the ballot in Colorado.  Not that it really matters as the only primary he has lost so far is DC, which in his addled mind he lost on purpose .  More interesting is that Nikki Haley withdrew her pledge to support the Republican nominee, leaving pundits to speculate what that means.  Will she run as an independent if she loses the nomination and try to pull of the "Murkowski maneuver?"  If you aren't familiar with this rare fete, I will elucidate you.   In 2010, Lisa Murkowski, the incumbent Republican senator from Alaska, found herself "teabagged" in the primaries.  She had run afoul of the movement that sprung up in the wake of John McCain's 2008 loss.  Sarah Palin became the de-facto leader of the Tea Party after that failed bid, or "Mama Grizzly" as she liked to be called.  She and Lisa hated each other.  The animosity stemmed from Sarah's rather limited understanding of what it meant to be governor of Alaska. Sarah pushed

There's been a lot of consternation in the polling and rightly so.  It is hard to imagine Trump consistently polling ahead of Biden given the performances he has given on the campaign trail, let alone the pending trials which keep getting deferred as his legal eagles argue for "presidential immunity."  The Supreme Court voted to hear the case despite a unanimous 57-page opinion from a federal appeals court that made it explicitly clear he had no such immunity after leaving the Oval Office.  With so many red flags Trump should be lagging far behind in the polls, but as Sarah Jones and Jason Easley point out , the media (in this case the New York Times) is determined to make this election a "horse race." It reminds me a lot of the past midterm elections when most news outlets and prognosticators were predicting a red wave.  538, which bills itself as an objective analysis of the polls, projected that the Republicans would not only take the House by an overwhelmin