Brandy Jensen & Jack Reacher

Actor Alan Ritchson as TV character Jack Reacher

You may have heard of Jack Reacher. He is a character is a series of pulp fiction novels. Tom Cruise made a movie about him. The movie was great. I tried reading one of the books but failed.

But who is Brandy Jensen? She writes "essays for the internet for Christ's sake", and she does it very well. Here we have her wonderful take on the Jack Reacher books (she completely disagrees with me):

My Year With Jack Reacher by Brandy Jensen

I particularly liked this paragraph: 

Or maybe it’s something less formal that hooked me. The writer Andy Martin once described Reacher as “a liberal intellectual with arms the size of Popeye’s.” He’s not wrong, exactly. Reacher’s arms are indeed large and he is a liberal in the sense that he will rain down unspeakable violence in service of a cause he deems just. It’s the intellectual bit I quibble with. Reacher certainly thinks a lot—one of the singular joys of the books is following along as he puzzles through various problems. He engages in feats of ratiocination redolent of Sherlock Holmes (a character, in fact, notes that his nickname among some Army personnel is “Sherlock Homeless”) and it’s a good thing these passages are so propulsive because if you stopped for even a moment to ponder what he’s actually saying you would realize he’s completely full of shit. Reacher depends on what I tend to think of as Dad Wisdom: beliefs held dear and delivered with the utmost confidence that are nonetheless entirely baseless. 

Bonus: we got a new word: ratiocination. I've seen it before, don't know that I've ever heard it. Not sure what it means, so I looked it up:

Noun. ratiocination (usually uncountable, plural ratiocinations) Reasoning, conscious deliberate inference; the activity or process of reasoning. Thought or reasoning that is exact, valid and rational. - Wiktionary

Via Defector, which is some kind of sports / news website. 

Tweakers

Fentanyl pills on the streets on Portland, where such doses of the great annihilator cost as little as $1 apiece. (Credit: Tara Faul)

IAman is looking to move to Bingen, Washington. Bingen is about 60 miles east of Portland across the Columbia River from Hood River, Oregon.

The main reason for the move is our neighborhood is the drug / murder epicenter.  3 middle aged good Samaritans murdered in last few months. 

This article captures the bad stuff that I see. 

Oregon’s Drug Apocalypse - Matt Thompson

The linked story is pretty horrofic.

Previous posts about IAman's current residence:

• Witness to the end of Civilization
• The Borg Have Landed

People with Guns

Girl with Gun

Girl with Gun on Bus

Pablo Picasso

Meme Me

All stolen from Tamara.

I've heard of all the terms in the last image, but the connection between Ska and Checkers escaped me. Google knows:

The checkerboard pattern in ska music and fashion represents racial unity and a fight against segregation. The pattern was popularized in the late 1970s during the second wave of ska music, also known as the "two-tone" era. 

I remember Ska music being sort of popular once upon a time, but I didn't know any Ska tunes, so again I asked Google. This one struck me as 'authentic'.

Desmond Dekker & The Aces - 007 (Official Music Video)
Trojan Records Official

YouTube blurb:

In the summer of 1967, Desmond Dekker & the Aces’ rude boy anthem, ‘007’ became one of the first Jamaican-produced recordings to breach the UK’s national Pop Singles charts; its unexpected international success prompting an urgent need for material to promote the 7” single.

 

Consequently, Graeme Goodall, MD of Doctor Bird Records, the company behind its British release, hastily secured the services of respected Jamaican director, Perry Henzell, who wasted little time in filming the group live on stage and in the streets of island’s capital before editing the resultant footage and rushing it to the UK, where on the evening on 3 August, it was aired it on the BBC’s hugely popular ‘Top Of The Pops’ TV show.

 

Notable for being one of the earliest promotional music films ever to be created in Jamaica specifically for a global audience, it now not only provides a truly fascinating glimpse of Desmond & the Aces in action, but also of Kingston street life back in the mid-Sixties.

Here's a couple of tunes that I know that are supposedly Ska, but I never would have thought so:

• Take On Me by Reel Big Fish
• The Impression That I Get by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones

Tariffs Versus Free Trade

U.S. President Donald Trump signs executive orders on the first day of his second term, Jan. 20, 2025. Credit: White House. - Daniel Torok

Lots of fuming and teeth gnashing over tariffs these days. This professor from Missouri argues tariffs can beneficial. Makes sense to me.

Raising Wages and Preserving Social Cohesion: President Trump and the Unseen Benefits of Tariffs - Emir J. Phillips

Though sometimes dismissed as antiquated economic measures, tariffs have great advantages when seen holistically. Critics point out possible rising consumer prices, but a closer look shows that tariffs not only boost wages but also conserve vital skills, support social stability, and help to offset the negative consequences of unemployment. In a close-call cost-benefit study, tariffs are indispensable even if the consumer cost matches wage gains since their long-term social and economic advantages exceed their negatives.

Strategic use of tariffs allows countries to not only attain economic resilience but also achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth—a concept firmly anchored in the background of American economic policy. Under leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, the Whig Party accepted tariffs as a pillar of national progress. Lincoln’s advocacy of protective tariffs served to finance infrastructure, boost industrial development, and guarantee young, aspirational America’s economic independence—not to mention win the Civil War.

Consumer Costs vs. Worker Gains: A Socio-Economic Calculation

A common argument against tariffs is that they raise prices for consumers, eroding disposable income. While this is partially true, research suggests that the wage increases resulting from tariffs often offset the additional consumer costs. A study in The Review of Economics and Statistics (Autor et al., 2020) found that U.S. manufacturing tariffs implemented between 2018 and 2019 resulted in measurable wage increases for domestic workers, even as they marginally increased consumer prices. Crucially, these wage increases helped stabilize industries that might otherwise have collapsed under foreign competition oftentimes where unions are illegal (Communist China and Communist Vietnam) and these workers in “Worker Soviet States” have tawdry labor rights.

In industries protected by tariffs, workers are more likely to retain and hone their skills, which would otherwise atrophy due to job displacement. The loss of employment in skilled trades leads to a deterioration of the workforce’s capabilities, creating long-term structural weaknesses in the economy. A displaced worker may never regain their previous earning potential, as demonstrated in research published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics (Jacobson, LaLonde, & Sullivan, 1993), which found that displaced workers often experience persistent earnings losses, even after re-employment.

Truth is, tariffs effectively act as a counterbalance to the “race to the bottom” in global labor markets, where corporations exploit cheap overseas labor at the expense of domestic workers. By imposing a cost on imported goods, tariffs incentivize companies to invest locally, fostering a virtuous cycle of job creation and wage increases. This dynamic is particularly critical in sectors like manufacturing, where wages have historically supported middle-class stability.

That's just the introduction. You can read the whole thing here.

Note - the photo was included in the linked article, but I couldn't copy it from there, so I asked Google. Google turned up multiple copies, so I copied it from a site that would let me. The story on that site has nothing to do with tariffs, but I linked to it anyway, just to give them credit for posting the image.

P. S. I wonder who the guy standing next to the Donald is. He's not getting enough credit for his role in keeping the mob under control.

Sturgeon

Jay Woiderski (left) presents a trophy to Austin Dreifuerst, who was crowned the 2025 Black Lake Sturgeon Shivaree King. Photo courtesy Jay Woideroski

All I know about sturgeon is that they are big fish, and that's where caviar comes from. Don't think I've ever seen either one, much less eaten any. But I'm old, it could have happened. The fish in the photo weighed 78 pounds, which is a chunk.

I'm posting this because of the weirdness of the sturgeon fishing season at Black Lake in Michigan. The department of fish set the opening time and then closed it by notifying all the registered sturgeon fishermen by text message. Each time someone caught a fish, they had to notify the government that they had done so, also by text message. When the government got their 7th notice, they closed the season. It took 17 minutes.

Gotta keep a tight rein on the planet's apex predators or they will kill everything.

OutdoorLife has the story. Via The Shekel.

Pardon Me

Conflict

I like this idea.

I read somewhere that accepting a pardon means you are admitting guilt for the crime, and a guilty verdict follows you around forever. I am sure a lawyer could find a way around this, but it's an interesting idea. But what crime do you record when no charges have been filed, no court has tried the case, and there is no conviction? Or do you just assume that since the President has pardoned someone, you can assume that someone is guilty?

Both Biden and Trump have pardoned people. Most of the people Biden pardoned have not been convicted of anything. Trump's pardons were for the tourists who got rounded up on January 6th. At least one of those people has refused the pardon and intends to fight to have their conviction overturned.

I only recognized a couple of the people in the image, so I cut the image up into 9 individual images and fed them to Google. Google was only able to identify two of them:

• Adam Schiff - top left - California. Currently U. S. Senator, previous U. S. Representative for 24 years. 
• Zoe Lofgren - top center - California. U. S. Representative for 31 years. 

I think the bottom left image is Liz Cheney, former U. S. Representative from Wyoming.

I know I've seen a few of the others, but I cannot name nor can Google tell me who they are.