July 30, 2023 - Yesterday afternoon, for four hours, I discussed Donald Trump with one of his supporters. Needless to say, no minds were changed.
I tried about ten times to explain the difference between what Trump did when he was asked to return classified documents and what Joe Biden and Mike Pence did. Here's a quote from an article about Mike Pence's case:
The Biden and Pence matters have always stood apart, factually and legally, from the Trump investigation because in both of those cases, aides proactively disclosed the discovery of classified documents to the Justice Department and facilitated their return."Trump resisted months of demands to return classified documents taken with him from the White House to his Florida residence after the end of his term." Aides for Pence and Biden voluntarily returned classified documents that had mistakenly been taken home along with other papers.
Trump resisted months of demands to return classified documents taken with him from the White House to his Florida residence after the end of his term. After coming to suspect that more classified documents remained at the property, despite a subpoena and a visit by investigators, the FBI returned last August with a search warrant and recovered about 100 additional documents marked as classified, including at the top-secret level.
Buried in many boxes of documents, Joe Biden mistakenly took home six classified documents when he left the White House after serving as Obama's Vice President, and Mike Pence took home "about a dozen" after serving as Trump's Vice President. When found, the documents were immediately returned to the White House. Donald Trump refused to return the "roughly 300" classified documents he had taken home.
According to the Trump supporter I was arguing with, there is no difference in these cases. Classified documents were improperly taken from the White House by Biden and Trump, but only Trump was being persecuted/prosecuted for it.
Again and again I tried to explain that it was not the act of taking those documents home that was the "crime," it was the act of refusing to give them back. ONLY Trump did that. The crime is "obstruction."
I could never make that point clear enough. Instead, the arguments would switch to being about Hunter Biden taking a job with a Ukrainian energy company while Joe Biden was trying to help develop Barack Obama's policies toward Ukraine. Somehow that was seen as being equal to or greater than any crime ever committed by Donald Trump, and yet Hunter Biden was never prosecuted for whatever crime he may have committed - probably because there is no evidence that Hunter Biden actually committed any crime.
There's a definite possibility that there will be a second round of arguments between me and the Trump supporter in about two months. I look forward to it.
July 26, 2023 - While driving around doing errands this afternoon, I finished listening to CD #15 in the 15-CD audio book version of "The Last Gunfight" by Jeff Guinn.
15 CDs is about 13 hours of listening time, which is a fairly long book. In paperback it is 432 pages. However, it was also a very enjoyable book, even though the actual gunfight at the OK corral probably took less than 10 minutes.
The book gives us a general history of the settling of the American West where gunfights were not as common as movies make them seem. The book also uses the word "cowboys" as a name for men who moved cattle from place to place and were ready to fight anyone who offended them in any way. They were ready to start a fight at any time. The book is also about the Earp brothers, Wyatt, James, Virgil, Morgan and Warren who, from time to time, were all various kinds of lawmen in Tombstone, Arizona, along with a gunfighter dentist and friend, John "Doc" Holliday.
The main "cowboys" in the story are Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury, Ike Clanton, and Billy Clanton who threatened to kill the Earps on several occasions. The conflict escalated, culminating in the shootout at the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881, where the Earps and Doc Holliday killed three Cowboys. During the next five months, Virgil was ambushed and maimed, and Morgan was murdered. Wyatt, Warren Earp, Doc Holliday, and others formed a federal posse that killed three more Cowboys whom they thought responsible. Wyatt was never wounded in any of the gunfights.
The book doesn't end with the gunfights. It also tells the story of what happened to Wyatt Earp after he left Tombstone. He worked various mining claims in California, and lived in Los Angeles during the hot summer months, where he got to know director John Ford and some famous movie stars, like William S. Hart and Tom Mix. He also worked sometimes as a boxing referee. He tried to write an autobiography, but all versions he worked on seemed absurdly unrealistic and unpublishable. Wyatt Earp died on January 13, 1929, mostly unknown. This changed after his death when the extremely flattering biography "Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal" by Stuart N. Lake was published in 1931, becoming a bestseller and creating Wyatt's reputation as a fearless lawman.
"The Last Gunfight" ends with a suggestion by the author that it is definitely possible that Wyatt Earp may have been meaner and more of a criminal than those he killed.
For me, "The Last Gunfight" was a very enjoyable, interesting and informative book, perfect for listening to while driving from place to place.
July 25, 2023 - While eating lunch today, I finished reading another book on my Kindle. The book's title, when censored, is: "Operation Mindf**k: QAnon and the Cult of Donald Trump" by Robert Guffey.
A few weeks ago, I decided I wanted to learn more about QAnon, so I obtained copies of two books on that subject. The shortest of the two was the book I just finished. It was far from satisfying, so I'll start the other book at breakfast tomorrow. The book I just finished says that someone who used the name "Q" began by posting hate-filled, conspiracy theory laden messages on a forum called "4chan." I'd never heard of "4chan." But, even if I had, I would almost certainly never have used it. I never used Twitter because it seemed like a place that angry bigots and idiots like Donald Trump used to start arguments, and the arguments started by "Q" on "4chan" are that and a lot worse. Here's a quote from the book about how the author researched QAnon:
In August and September of 2020, in Salon, I published a five-part series about the origins of QAnon. Over the course of the series, I chronicled the attempts made by an old friend to convince me of an outlandish conspiracy theory being promoted by a teeming mass of rabid online Trump supporters that have grown at an unbelievable rate over the past few years. “Q” is the name of the anonymous poster on 4chan who initiated the phenomenon.Here's another quote from the book that is worth showing here:
According to my friend (based on the information Q and his followers had been posting on the dark byways of the internet), initiates of the Illuminati had teamed up with subterranean demons to torture, rape, and eat kidnapped children in underground military bases ruled by the mortal enemies of Donald Trump. In these bases, the Elites extract Adrenochrome from the children and ingest it like a recreational drug. He insisted that when Trump was re-elected in November 2020 we could all look forward to the abolition of the income tax, the development of “free energy” for all, and the public unveiling of thousands of grateful kidnapped children rescued by Trump’s private army of “white hats” from cages squirreled away in these Satanist-controlled underground dungeons.
And another:
My liberal friends are constantly astounded by how many misogynistic, racist comments can tumble out of Trump’s mouth with no seeming effect on the loyalty of his base. But several of the Trump supporters I spoke to claimed that they were not voting for him because they thought he was a misogynist racist. They insisted that they were voting for him simply because Democrats hate him so much. They may not even like Trump. They may even hate him . . . but they hate him a lot less than those politicians they perceive to be in power, politicians they believe have betrayed them. If pressed, they embrace the label of being “anti-Establishment.”And one last quote:
Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Eric Berthel of Connecticut, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, and Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina (Republicans all) have made no secret of their allegiance to QAnon.I'm going to read the second book about QAnon because I find it next to impossible to believe that people can be so stupid that they would believe someone like Q or someone like Trump. I need to get more insights into how such people think. Hopefully, reading the second book will help.
Added Note: The second book seemed to promote QAnon. I read a few pages and gave up.
July 23, 2023 - I've created a web page advertising my liquor miniature collection as being for sale. Click HERE to go to the page. I have no idea how much the collection may be worth, but I've set an "asking price" of $3,000 plus shipping (or best offer).
I now realize that I should have been paying more attention to date information on the bottles when I was doing the inventory. When I was pondering what information to put in the inventory spreadsheet, I considered including a date, but most bottles did not seem to have any date. So, I didn't include any date information.
After I finished the inventory, and as a result of a discussion on some forum, I did a Google search for "how to date old liquor bottles" and found https://whiskeyid.com/how-to-date-id-your-whiskey/ which includes a lot of good information on the subject, including this:
Most bottle manufacturers molded the year into the glass at the bottom of the bottle in 2-digit format. You’ll often find it in the lower right portion when looking at the bottom (some dates are much easier to distinguish than others). This will usually tell you–within a year or two–when the whiskey was bottled.Perhaps that was true for full-size liquor bottles, but most miniature bottles I have do not have such information. Some do, but most do not. Here's one bottle I have in box #11 that appears to have the date of 1975:
The site also says manufacturers used to print the date on the tax sticker. I looked through about 10 bottles in box #1 of my collection and found two with dates stamped on the tax label. The dates were 1956 and 1966. Here's the bottle dated 1966:
I also checked for dates on all of the 31 bottles in box #11 of my collection. 15 have no dates. The other 16 bottles appear to have these dates: 23, 65, 61, 47, 75, 75, 24, 75, 74, 76, 75, 29, 75, 44, 49, 75. Here's the 1944 bottle bottom:
So, it appears I boxed up my collection in 1974, wrapping many bottles in pieces of the Chicago Today newspapers from March 1974, but later I added a few more bottles in 1975 and 1976. (Research shows that they first started making liquor miniatures in 1889, so it's quite possible I have some bottles from 1923, 1924, 1929, 1944, 1947 and 1949.)
The key point I'm trying to make is that I've completed the inventory and I'm going to try to move on to other things. I've got a book to finish, I've got a backlog of hundreds of podcasts I want to listen to, and I'm anxious to comment on the various Donald Trump cases and criminal trials.
