Daniel Currell, a management consultant, has a fascinating and depressing op-ed up at the New York Times site [gift link!] about how Disney’s theme parks have become virtually unaffordable for the average American, indeed even the average middle class American. He writes in part,

…We all judge our well-being against something, typically our past and our peers. Through either of those lenses, the Disney parks — and many similar institutions of American culture — may offer a piece of the puzzle. Compared with the past, a Disney trip is more expensive, to be sure, but perhaps more important, it feels much more expensive, because at every turn one is being invited to level up and spend more. Thanks to social media, we can now see the experiences that divide us. Go to Instagram and search for #Club33, the invitation-only clubs hidden within Disney properties. What you see there will not make you feel a kinship with your fellow man, unless you are one of the very few invited in. America’s 20th century was a fortunate moment when we could rely on companies like Disney to deliver rich and unifying elements of our culture. Walt Disney hoped that his audience would have “no racial, national, political, religious or social differences”; he wanted to appeal to everyone, in no small part because appealing to everyone was profitable. It was a time when big institutions were trusted, and the culture they created was shared by nearly all Americans…The market, and increasingly the culture, is dominated by the affluent. And technology is enabling companies to see these previously invisible class divides and act on them. Based on what we earn, we see different ads, stand in different lines, eat different food, stay in different hotels, watch the parade from different sections and on and on. What’s profitable today is not unification. It’s segmentation.

The article explains that a trip to Disneyland or Walt Disney World is now likely to cost a family of four a base cost of $700 on ride tickets alone, plus admission costs. The families who can afford it pay roughly $90 to get front-of-the-line access to a single premier ride, otherwise a less affluent family wait up to an hour waiting to get on. It follows the travails of one middle class family on the dream trip to Disney World it had saved up for over several years. Seven days in Orlando cost about $8,000 for two adults and three children, not counting travel and lodging at an off-site hotel. That was 15% of what the family earned year after taxes, and it was still an inferior experience to what the “elite” could pay for.

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I have never been a loyal member of any party, as my opinions do not depend on group loyalty or ideology, but upon what I try to keep dispassionate, objective, history- and fact-based analysis of issues. However, the rapid ethical rot and totalitarian bent of the Democratic Party is causing me anguish. I am being pulled toward a conclusion that the only rational and patriotic political position now is to be committed to a Beware the Democrats! position. But that is, superficially at least, indistinguishable from the Trump Deranged “Trump is Satan” position that the Machiavellian Axis of Unethical Conduct has been using for almost a decade now, with no sign of changing course.

What’s the difference? Well, call me reductionist, but it’s this: Trump isn’t Satan, though Trump is an infuriatingly flawed individual and leader, but the Democrats are corrupt and untrustworthy. They have intentionally poisoned a critical mass of Americans—yes, the dumb ones, the gullible ones, the badly educated ones and the weenies, but still—against their own system of government using a level of fear-mongering that evokes the McCarthy era here and Hitler’s Final Solution in Germany.

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[Apparently the previous graphic I sued to represent a nuclear bomb explosion either intentionally or by happenstance resembled Bozo the Clown. Amusing, but in this case, a distraction. That’s Hiroshima above. Not funny…]

I don’t know when the United States began its disastrous slide toward weenie-ism, but it’s just got to stop. Unfortunately there are so many cultural pathogens running amuck that the Trump Presidency has to try to solve—multiculturalism, transmania, gun-phobia, censorship, the death of journalism, the corruption of the professions, “the good illegal immigrant,” DEI, and on, and on—getting around to the weenie epidemic will be a long shot at best. But I can dream…

The latest example of the Weenies making trouble is the Israel-Gaza war. Israel’s situation could not be clearer: it has to eliminate Hamas once and for all, or else resign itself to more attacks on citizens in perpetuity. To eliminate Hamas, Israel will have to kill some citizens, destroy some buildings, harm children. Hamas wants to make them do that. But the responsibility for the war lies with Hamas, as does the responsibility for ending it. Hamas can surrender.

Ah, but the Weenies are out in force, condemning Israel for doing what nations that are attacked have to do: strike back decisively, and make certain that the aggressors are never in a position to attack again. The United States understood this in World War II, but a confluence of factors that I have neither the time nor patience to expound on now—though a major one is the ascendancy of women in politics, punditry and the professions—has blurred the clarity of that principle, resulting in such fiascos as the Vietnam War, the first Iraq war, the second Iraq War, and Biden’s Afghanistan debacle.

Arguably, the situation facing Israel is even clearer than any of those, but even in Israel itself, weenie-ism is rotting the moral and ethical core of society. That is another nation, like the U.S., which one would think would have the guts, determination, and courage to do the right thing even when, as the poet said, all about them are losing their heads and blaming it on Israel, and can trust itself when everyone doubts them.

I hope Israel does, but the Weenies are powerful in their weakness, and people will die if they gain the upper hand.

I wrote about Md. Governor Wes Moore’s long-term lie about being a Bronze Star recipient in August, when another Democratic Governor who had lied about his military service, Tim “Knucklehead” Walz, was running to be a heartbeat from the Presidency. Apparently Marylanders—Democrats? Progressives?—don’t care about politicians pretending to be war heroes when they weren’t. Interesting. I know my Dad, who was awarded a genuine Bronze Star for battlefield valor as well as a Silver Star, would have considered Moore’s lie disqualifying for public office, and I’d agree with him.

Now, as Trump feuds with various Democratic governors over his threat to send in the National Guard into their crime-ridden cites represented as otherwise with fake statistics, he’s stooped to his usual ad hominem methods regarding Moore, referencing his stolen valor history. Normally, I would regard such tactics as a cheap shot: Moore’s position on the Baltimore crime rate has nothing to do with his military record.

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…that ridiculous meme, spotted today on social media. The Ethics Alarm’s “Imagine” Award is named after John Lennon’s worst song—well, depending on how you feel about “The Ballad of John and Yoko”—and the absurd utopian fantasy delusions it represents. (John wasn’t even serious about it, but progressives still get misty-eyed when they hear his con-job.)

Ah yes, the perfect society, where everyone succeeds regardless of effort, ability or character! Also where money grows on trees, nobody dies, food and mansions are free, children run and play and never are sad, and pigs fly. Some smart people really think about this crap.

Whoever led them to waste their time, passion and energy bemoaning the fact that up is up, down is down, life is unfair and human beings can never create perfect anythings has a lot to answer for, and yes, I include Jesus and Karl Marx in that group.

Maybe President Trump has read more history than his detractors give him credit for. Trump 2.0 has appeared to take a lot of inspiration from the transformational “If I have the power, why not use it?” Presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, and in his attempt to wrest control over the economy from the Fed (created by The Second Worst President Ever before Biden wandered into the White House, Woodrow Wilson), Trump seems to be emulating another effective and transformational President whom he has previously praised, “King Andy Jackson.”

Jackson famously killed the predecessor to the Federal Reserve, the Second Bank of the United States. The Second Bank of the United States had been chartered for twenty years before Old Hickory took aim at it. It was a hybrid creation, a private institution with exclusive authority to manage the nation’s economy, particularly through the management of currency, without Presidential or Congressional interference. on a national scale. Jackson believed that the decisions of Nicholas Biddle, the president of the Bank, was biased, in league with Republicans, and not worthy of the trust the bank’s dubious authority required. Sound familiar? He also believed that the Bank of the United States was unconstitutional.

In early 1832, Biddle, in open alliance with the Jeffersonian Democratic- Republican Party’s leaders Senators Henry Clay and Daniel Webster submitted an application for a renewal of the Bank’s twenty-year charter four years before the charter was set to expire. This was a partisan political move to force Jackson, leading a new breakaway populist offshoot party into making a contentious decision prior to the 1832 presidential election in which Jackson’s Democrats were likely to have to defeat Clay. Jackson was not the man to back away from a fight. (Sound familiar?) When Congress voted to reauthorize the Bank, President Jackson vetoed the bill with a veto message accusing the Bank of the United States of pitting “the planters, the farmers, the mechanic and the laborer” against the “monied interest” that represented the elite and powerful against the interests of the American public. Guess who had the public behind him, and who won what was called “The Bank War,” the popularly elected President of the United States?

Now we have the War against Lisa Cook. President Trump said on Monday that he was taking the extraordinary step of removing Lisa Cook, a Biden appointee to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve in 2022, in what the always objective New York Times calls “a legally dubious maneuver that could undermine the independence of the nation’s central bank.” Or did they write that in 1832?

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